When I was a child, I lived on a street with a haunted house. A large and happy family had lived in the house until a night when one of the children was playing with matches. The youngest boy of the family dropped a lit match on his bed but was too scared to call out for help.
The boy was burned alive under his covers. His parents and two sisters died with him in the flames.
One evening during a sleepover, my friends and I took turns trying to scare each other with ghost stories. It was approaching midnight and, unable to scare each other, we thought it would be fun to go to the haunted house in the dark.
We walked through the gate together and up to what remained of the door, still set in its stone doorframe.
The smell of smoke hung in the air, and thin clouds of ash were being blown in the breeze. But then we realized there was no breeze.
Shapes began to form in the clouds of ash and gray hands reached out from the shapes. As we turned to run, screams rose up out of the ashes. “Help us, we’re burning!” they cried.
We started to run, thinking that as soon as we were clear of the house we would be safe. But the ash shapes and screams followed us. As we neared my home, the smell of burning was almost overwhelming, and as we reached my door, I glanced over my shoulder to see a hand reaching for me.
We piled through my front door, slamming it behind us and ran up the stairs to my room, slamming that door tight, too. None of us expected to sleep, but the fear had exhausted us and we fell into a deep slumber.
The next morning, in the daylight, we were all much braver. During breakfast, we talked about what happened and came to the conclusion our imaginations had taken over. We decided to walk back to the house in the daylight.
I opened my front door and my mouth dropped in a silent scream. There, on the door, were two large round scorches high on the door, like someone had pounded on it with burning hands. Lower down, there were two smaller sets of handprints, as if children with burning hands had pushed against it.
Finally, near the bottom of the door was a tiny set of burnt handprints, as if the youngest little boy had tried in vain to push open the door and get help for his family.
