A Stereotypical Grandmother: A Short Story Of Halloween

The _____ We all know of that stereotypical grandmother. You know, the grandmother that always has a fresh batch of delicious cookies waiting for you on the kitchen table. However, I have a grandmother who would always try to scare us around Halloween. She would perform all sorts of tricks in order to scare us. One time she dressed up in a black cloak with a horrifying skull mask and waited in the musty smelling basement for an hour and a half just to jump out at one of us when we walked down the creaking old stairs. She not only scared us physically, but she would tell us scary stories every Halloween night as well. There was just something about this story she told us one year. Something about it that seemed all too realistic to be made up. It was the first Halloween after her husband had passed away. He was a hard-working man, a handyman, who also enjoyed scaring us around this time of year. Thus, she decided to tell us about all the weird things that had been happening around the house since he’s been gone. We all gathered around her and waited for the story to begin, when all of a sudden my cousin jumped out of his chair to go dim the lights. I hated it when she would tell her stories in the dark, but it was
tradition so we had to do it. As she began the story we perked up ready to get the living wits scared out of us, but something just felt different. “The night after your pap died I was filled with great sorrow, but I also had a strange feeling that he would always be with me.
As I lie in bed that night I found myself twisting and turning unable to fall asleep, when I heard the loud screech of the screen door opening. I quickly sat up in bed listening to see if somebody was in the house when I heard what sounded like light footsteps walking towards my room. I pretended to be asleep just waiting for the potential intruder to come creeping into my room. I watched the doorway, but nobody ever entered. That is when I felt a light press on the bed beside me as if someone had just lied in my bed. I quickly rolled over to see that nobody was there and fell asleep thinking that I was just going
crazy. “Tuesday, the following day, while I was washing dishes a pipe from the water heater broke and water started squirting all throughout the basement. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, so when the sink stopped working I decided to go check it out. The leak had already covered the basement with a thin layer of water. I ran to grab a wrench to tighten the pipes and stop the leak, but when I came back there was no leak or water anywhere. It was almost as if my husband had been here to fix it himself. “The week went on with nothing else weird happening until Friday rolled around that is. I was watching one of my favorite shows on television, Scrubs, when all of a sudden all the lights in the house started to flicker. They flickered in a manner such that it seemed like Morse code. I don’t know Morse code, so I couldn’t tell what it meant. However, there was one thing I could tell. With the footsteps, the water leak, and the lights flickering it seemed as if the handyman of a husband was trying to tell me he was still with me. “I thought about my husband the entire weekend until work came Monday. I worked at a factory that made different types of mannequins and dummies, mostly crash test and fight training dummies. I had to stay late that night and count inventory when I found that one of our crash test dummies was missing. I didn’t think much of it and wrote it off as an error in the system, but made a note of it for my superior. I couldn’t explain in too much detail because I wanted to get home and go to bed after such a long day. However, as I entered my house I saw the crash test dummy that was missing standing up etching some words into the wall. I started to slowly back out when it turned around and stared at me with its lifeless eyes. The door slammed shut, so I read the words on the wall which said ‘I AM NOT YOUR HUSBAND.’ Before I could freak out even more the crash test dummy collapsed to the ground as if some sort of spirit had just left its lifeless corpse behind. I immediately called the cops and went to a friend’s house to sleep for the night. “When I woke up in the morning I really didn’t want to go to work, but I had no choice. I found a note on my car that read ‘I’ve been watching you’ written in a mysterious red substance much like blood. I ran back inside with the note to show my friend that somebody or something was out to get me, but she didn’t believe me. She didn’t even see the note in my hand. In fact, she thought that I was crazy. She reported me to a mental institute and that is where we are now, but you guys don’t think I’m crazy do you…well do you?” We looked at each other clearly thinking that after our grandfather died she was driven to insanity. That is when a large arc flash from one of the outlets shot sparks across the entire room causing a blackout in the entire wing on the institute. So was she crazy we weren’t sure, but by now we were beginning to think that maybe it all was real after all.