Thank you to everyone that participated in the September writing challenge. But, a new month means a new challenge, and this month is October! As we all know, October 31 is Halloween, so it didn't take me long to come up with this theme.

This month's challenge theme: Haunted

This challenge is open to both prose and poetry entries based on the above theme, and don't be afraid to interpret the theme in an out-of-the-box way. Simply submit your entry to this thread! I look forward to reading what everyone comes up with. And as always, be creative!

David L.
Writer's Forum Moderator

You said to think outside the box.... well here it is... A short freestyle poem... (The only style I can cope with right now.. lol)

Hugs all!

Haunted

Those blasted words.
I know they are there.
Deep inside the slimy grey depths
And electrical impulses
Of my mental capacity.

The images keep me awake at night.
Tossing and writhing in agony
From the need to generate
To pour out and become
The written word.

My speech is staccato
My writing -
White words on white background.
Yet I know they are there,
Syllables strung together.

I open a picture
And know the words would flow
Were I not haunted
By thoughts of the pressure
The power of the deadline.....

I like that Susi ... clever and witty ....

Not all hauntings are unpleasant or even unwelcome - my dead father was 'resurrected' nightly by my mother's wistful reminiscences.

  **REMEMBERING A MAN

I remember my mother
Remembering a man
who hullaballooed down hairpin-riddled hills
amid the war-free carefree days
in a red and rollicking rooster of a car
to the singing swaggering inns of peacetime Wales

Reminiscing … ah, yes:
Good night, God bless

I remember my mother
remembering a man
who framed a kiss-me face in miner’s hands
while fear-strained peace hopes upped and fled
and, tough and tender, wooed and wed his willing lass
in cool and calm cathedral mountain ferns

Reminiscing … Mmm, yes:
Good night, God bless.

I remember my mother
remembering a man
who, smiling, shoulder slung a sailor’s sack of hope
in the proud and patriotic duty days
to test his pit-man’s mettle on the sour and sullen seas,
and save his wife, his Wales****, his world.

Reminiscing … oh, yes:
Good night, God bless

I remember my mother
Remembering a man
who woke fear-slimed and shrieking from convoy dreams
in pitiful shore-leaves meant to heal
and in the screams of his sick and once-seen son
heard echoes of shipmates bright ablaze in icy seas.

Reminiscing … hell, yes:
Good night, God bless

I remember my mother
Remembering a man
who eased his guard in safe and sheltered sunlit seas
Caribbean cradled close by the shore;
who, laughing, failed to spot the lethal sharking shape
which smashed and shattered peace and skin and bone.**

**Reminiscing … finally, yes:
Good night, God bless.

I remember my mother
remembering a man:**

And I shall learn to love this man

Though speaking ‘father’ snags my tongue

And all his substance but a mother’s memory gift

Seeking a son’s echoes among the post-war prayers:

** **

Her imagery is my legacy, nevertheless:
Good night, God bless.

.........................................................

.... my father was one 'ghost' worth remembering, as is my late mother now....

Mike

** **

Both decidedly different takes on the theme, and both very good. I think we've all been haunted by that ghost, SusiQ, and you described it perfectly. Your's, meico, is a very stirring piece. A touching tribute indeed.

~jon

I lied awake, hidden under the blankets, my head stuffed between the pillows to drown out the noise. I thought he was gone. Three days, we hadn’t seen him. I wasn’t surprised, we couldn’t have been so fortunate as to have lost him for good.  And now they were at it again, I didn’t really get my hopes up anymore.

In the old house, when they would fight, my sisters and I would migrate to my bedroom and stay there. We were safer when we stayed together, it wasn’t so easy for him to get one of us alone. In the new house, my sister’s room was on the opposite end of the house. Through the living room. Where they were.

I heard my mother’s bedroom door slam, I heard the shoving, the cursing, the crying. I heard the door open again, running back into the living room. Why won’t he leave? Why wouldn’t he just die somewhere? If I wasn’t ten years old, I could kill him myself and we would be safe. Did she call the police again? Why did they always take so long?

‘Steve!’ I heard my mother cry. It was the call I’d been dreading. Always, I was dragged into this. Didn’t she know I was terrified of him? Did she know he beat me more than he beat her, harder than he beat her? I’m powerless, why do I always have to stand between them?

I got out of bed, trembling not from the bitter January air in a house with one gas heater.

The tree limbs outside of my door scratched the windows in the wind, we’re coming to get you, too. I shuffled out of the door slowly, nearly petrified, but after six years I no longer felt a beating, not on the inside.

‘Call the police!’ My mother told me. She hadn’t called the police. I’m was ten, and I knew how to call the police, I knew what to say. I knew ‘breaking and entering’ I knew ‘domestic dispute’.

The window was broken. How did I not hear that? The front door was unlocked, still open, the window next to it shattered from the outside.  Ernesto sat in the middle of our living floor-ours-not his- in the leather jacket we bought him for Christmas. ‘We love you, daddy.’, we wrote on the package. Please, believe us. Whatever it takes. We will call you daddy, we will skip our own gifts to afford yours. We will say we love you.

‘Your momma, why she do this to me? Look what she make me do.’ Then he showed me the knife. Bloodstained, his own, I was quickly assured, as he held up his  gashed and bleeding hand. ‘Why she fight with me? She say she don’t love me no more. Why she lie, what I’m supposed to do?’.  He continued carving something indecipherable into our floors in our new house. Ours-not his.

Don’t worry, little man. It will take her another two years to leave you. She will continue to turn a blind eye, working nights while you stay home to beat us and molest us. You’ll continue to tell us you’ll kill us if she leaves you, if she finds out what you do. We thinks she knows. She will call Sarah a liar when Sarah tells her, a few months later she will pack up everything, send five kids in five different directions, and disappear for two years.

But you’ll never leave us, will you? You will be here, and we’ll remember you and what you taught us, always.

Ernesto now lives in a ratty, dilapidated inn in Port Arthur, Texas. He trades rent for labor and maintenance around the place. My sisters (two of them his daughters) say he is living in a little hell of his own. I had to respectfully disagree, adding that he is alive at all is more an example of God’s grace than he deserves and submit that there is no hell deep enough for a child molester.

Mike, that is so sad. Looking back and being haunted by the past and living in memories. Really sad. Yet when the memories are so beautiful, how can one help but look back? Haunted by the past.

Haunted by the present and the living, OEDave - That is indeed a very horrific senario. To be so helpless when learning the mistakes and decisions made by others. Hugs!

A Girl Named Alice
J. M. Strother

“Every word of it is true,” Jack insisted.

“Stop it. You're creeping me out. Besides, there's no such thing as ghosts,” Alice insisted.

“Then how am I creeping you out?”

“It's not the haunted part. That's just nonsense. It's what he did when he was alive. What a monster.”

Jack Hampton had just told Alice O'Neal the background story of the house she had bought. It was neighborhood legend, ask anyone. Old man Riley abducted not one, but two teenage girls at different times, murdered them, and buried them in the basement. “He hung himself in the attic years later, and left a note telling the police what he had done. It was in all the papers. You can check it out at the library if you want,” he claimed. According to Jack, old man Riley still haunted the place, waiting to catch another young woman at unawares.

Alice now regretted calling Jack. He had seemed nice enough when she moved in. Of all the new neighbors he had been the most friendly. He helped her unload her car and when the movers arrived with the heavy stuff he graciously took his leave so as not to get in the way, but not before telling her that she could give him a call anytime if she needed anything. It was the fastest pick-up line anyone had ever used on her, but not altogether unwelcome. Jack was kind of cute. And single. Instead of throwing away his phone number she had placed it on the refrigerator, and promptly forgotten it. Until tonight.

Weird things had happened in her new house right from the start. She had shrugged them off. Until tonight. Tonight she needed comfort.

On the very first night in her new house her cat had suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, arched her back, and hissed viciously down the hallway. Alice flicked on the hallway light only to find an empty corridor, yet Mia stood there hissing like crazy. When she stooped to sooth her, Mia bolted at her touch and disappeared. She remained hidden for two days before finally making an appearance.

A few days later Mia let out a yowl, came dashing into the bedroom, and shot under the bed. Alice tried to coax her out, but Mia remained dug in, eyes wide, claws firmly sunk into the carpeting. About an hour later Mia finally came out and jumped up into bed, as if nothing had happened, while Alice lay there reading. Both incidents, while unsettling, were easily attributable to the foibles of cats.

Then the strangest thing of all happened. She woke up to the sound of breaking glass. Mia stood on the bed, back arched, staring at the closed bedroom door. Without hesitation Alice called the police and reported the sound of breaking glass. She then went to the closed bedroom door and braced herself against it, least someone out in the hall try to get in. She only opened it when she heard the police knock at the front door.

They found a broken glass on the kitchen floor. “Cat probably knocked it over,” one of the cops said.

“No. Mia was in bed with me. My door was closed. She couldn't have done it. Besides, I put all the dishes away after dinner. I always do.” She pointed to the glass faced cabinetry behind which seven sparkling glasses from an set of eight dutifully stood. “Someone had to be in the house.”

The cop shook his head. “Well, no sign of a forced entry,” he said. “And you had both the doors firmly locked. Did you change the locks when you moved in?”

She had.

Again, the cop shrugged, but he and his partner carefully inspected the house before declaring the all clear. “Sorry, ma'am. Must have been the cat. Either that or ghosts.” They both gave sort of half laughs at that and told her not to hesitate to call if anything else unusual happened. With that, they took their leave.

So she had called Jack.

Now she looked at the clock on the DVD player and saw it was ten past three. “Oh, God. I'm sorry. It's so late. We both have to go to work tomorrow.”

“I can stay,” he offered. “On the couch!” he quickly added at her shocked look. “If you're scared.”

“No, that's okay,” Alice answered. She was starting to get a little scared, but not of ghosts. Now she just wanted Jack to leave.

“Okay. But call me if you need anything.” He rose, hesitated at the door a moment, and then left without another word. She closed the door and bolted it behind him, then went into the kitchen and threw his phone number in the trash.

When she was doing the laundry the next day she noticed two rectangular patches of newer concrete in one corner of the basement floor. She shuddered, then cursed Jack softly under her breath. “He was just trying to scare me,” she told herself. But that afternoon she went to the library.

She was horrified to find that everything Jack said was the truth. BASEMENT OF DEATH, read one headline. LOCAL MAN KILLS TWO – HIMSELF, read another. There were two weeks of grisly stories detailing the suicide of Bertram Riley, aged 57, and the discovery of the remains of two females, estimated to be between the ages of 12 and 20 years of age.

Within a week one of the bodies was identified from dental records. RILEY VICTIM LOCAL GIRL. The story identified the girl as twelve year old Alice Bailey, who had disappeared on her way home from school 20 years before. Alice shuddered when she read the name.

Then, several months later there was a follow up article – REMAINS IDENTFIED. The other victim was a 15 year old runaway from nearby St. Clemens.

A girl named Alice.