One scary night long ago… How would you finish that story? One scary night, I saw the closet monster. Or, one scary night while sitting on the toilet, I heard the roar of a tornado. How about this one: One scary night, it was just me and the toaster. (see the story Strange Dreams )

Like all of you, I’ve faced scary situations on many occasions. I’ve watched a black snake weave across the rafters over the heads of 120 camp kids in my care. I’ve driven in blackout, whiteout, wet-out invisible conditions. I’ve waited long hours through life-threatening surgeries for those I dearly love. As a child, I frequently faced long car rides home to ponder the consequences for my rowdy church service antics. Sometimes, we have valid reasons to be terrified.

It’s Scary Story Season

Fear sometimes binds me in knots, turning my stomach into a male rhino wrestling match. Stephen King said, “If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered.” The master of horror stories, King suggests we delight in scary movies not only for entertainment but because they force us to face and overcome the worst possibilities.

So today, I’ll give you a horror story. This was a moment of intense fear, and it happened almost forty years ago. One of the characters in these events will read this story for the first time. I doubt if she even remembers it. I, on the other hand, will never forget.

It took place sometime in the mid-1980s in the little town of East Salem in south-central Pennsylvania. (That’s not a place for witch trials, by the way, just where I lived at the time.) It didn’t help that I had recently watched the final MASH episode where Hawkeye spurs the death of an innocent person.

One Scary Night in East Salem…

I lived with my first husband and two little children in an old four-apartment complex. Our apartment had no ceiling lights, and by late autumn, it got rather dark and creepy in the evenings. Our scattered floor lamps served only to cast faint shadows in odd places. The wooden floors didn’t connect to the walls, so we sometimes had visiting critters from the dusty, semi-finished basement. When the wind blew across the covered porch, the front door shook as though someone on the other side were demanding entrance.

The person who owned the building was a lovely soul, but she was quite a talker. One day, shortly after my son was born and my daughter was a kindergartner, the landlady came by for a late afternoon visit.

I had been cleaning the house for a change and had failed to feed my always-hungry little guy at his scheduled time. I was in the process of preparing to feed him when the knock came on the front door.

Mrs. Apartment Owner asked if I could take a few minutes to identify items that belonged to our family. She was cleaning the building’s shared areas to prepare for new tenants and wanted to know what previous tenants had left behind.

I explained that I needed to feed the little guy, but I could give her five minutes.

Did I say, little guy? Ronnie was never little. He entered the world at over nine pounds. The nurses at the hospital nicknamed him “Horse” because he seemed to have no off-switch on his hunger mechanism, a problem that followed him through the rest of his life. I knew I couldn’t hold him and help move furniture, so, I placed him in a cheap, plastic baby carrier on the living room floor.

I told his sister to keep an eye on him; I’d be right back.

But I Didn’t Go right back.

In those days, I was mild, meek, and polite. I’ve outgrown those traits with age. When the landlady asked if I could go from the hallway between apartments to the basement, I reminded her that I had a hungry baby back in the apartment. She said it wouldn’t take long.

I compliantly followed her to the basement as the sun began to go down and the shadows crawled across the living room floor.

I begged to be dismissed when I heard crying from upstairs, knowing my son was starving again. She said there were a few things piled outside the basement entryway that needed to be considered.

I reminded her as she led me from basement room to room to explain all the clutter—most of which wasn’t mine—and asked where I thought it came from. How should I know? The crying overhead got louder. 

And then it stopped.

Finally, after ninety minutes…

I returned to my apartment and heard a soft whimpering.

I hurried through the side kitchen door from the shared hallway near the cellar door, rudely closing the door on the parting words of my landlady. As I rounded the corner to the dark and chilly living room, I saw five-year-old Katie, a tiny little girl, on the couch by the front window, the only place that still had a fragment of light. Katie was sobbing.

I froze in the kitchen doorway and tried to figure out what took place during the last ninety minutes in my living room.

In Katie’s arms lay her baby brother. My son didn’t move. There were no tears. No deep “my mother has abandoned me” sighs. No quivering. He was deathly still. I pictured the dreadful scene from MASH where a weeping mother held her unmoving baby in her arms.

I don’t remember if I swore or prayed. Sometimes, in the most panicked moments, they sound somewhat alike. My frantic mind said, She tried to get him to stop crying and accidentally killed him!

Ronnie had to be nearly starving, yet he wasn’t moving.

When you think your world has changed most dreadfully, time stands still. Walking across the narrow floor from the kitchen to the couch took at least four hours. My heart stopped as I sat beside my daughter on the rust-colored floral sofa.

I looked into Ronnie’s chubby round face, and I heard a whimper.

Big sister

My baby was alive and well and sleeping. Momma Katie had lifted him from the car seat, cradled him in her arms, crawled onto the couch, and rocked her little brother into a deep, peaceful sleep.

To this day, I cannot fathom how she managed to get him off the floor and onto the couch. He weighed almost as much as she did.

But this is Katie we’re talking about. Never before or since has Katie allowed the impossible to get in her way of accomplishing the task before her.

The memory of that terrifying moment still gives me stomach twinges. My children have scared me to no end on numerous occasions since then, but no Stephen King story or Halloween horror flick will ever compare to that one scary night in East Salem.