APPLE DEMON I was peeling some apples for a sweet casserole recently when I remembered something that happened to my friend's little sister once. When I was thirteen, I heard that if you peel an apple at midnight and stare directly into a mirror, the face of your future husband would appear. The story went that if you kept on staring into the mirror the face of you're future husband would be eventually replaced by the face of the devil. My friend's little sister decided to try it and she was found by my friend and her mother staring into the mirror in a trance-like state. They couldn't see the Devil, but my friend's sister couldn't take her eyes off the mirror and they could at least see that she was terrified. They had to take hold of her and use all there strength to drag her away from the mirror. She was hysterical at the time, babbling about an evil face she had seen staring back at her for a few minutes, and then after that she couldn't remember a thing about what the face looked like, not even today. After hearing about what happened to her I didn't dare try it myself but we have never forgotten this story. MY NIECE'S MONSTER My older sister is a single parent who has a five-year old daughter and has never believed in ghosts as far as I know. She lives in a very old redbrick council house with only two large rooms downstairs, two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. The smallest bedroom belongs to her daughter and it's quite small, with a ceiling that slopes down on one side and a narrow window at the far end. Her bed is in the far corner, directly under the sloping part of the ceiling. For some time after they first moved in, my niece was woken up every night by what she described as a 'monster'. My niece couldn't get to sleep properly and was to frightened to go to bed some nights. My family and I thought it was just her imagination at first, but my niece was getting more and more frightened as time went on so we had to do something. We tried several things-night lights, leaving the door open with the landing light on outside, etc. But none of that worked and in the end we called in a priest to bless the house with holy water. After that, my niece was not disturbed in the night any more and began sleeping properly for the first time in ages. My Mom did some research into the houses history and found out that a girl my niece's age had burned to death in that house over fifty years ago. The girl died in my niece's room and woke her up at night to play with her, but my niece was too young to understand and just got frightened instead. We believe the girls spirit has found peace at last and now so has our niece. TOBY Until I was thirteen we had a Chihuahua called Toby. He had always been a healthy dog until I was thirteen and never suffered from anything like the way he did around the time of his death. Toby became listless, lost his appetite, and even began throwing up water. He was fourteen years old (in human years) and we all knew he might not recover properly from being so ill at his age. For nearly two weeks Toby suffered in this way although the vet couldn't find out what was wrong with him. One night, over a week after he became ill, it was late at night when I saw him sitting on the lawn, looking strangely peaceful and almost healthy instead of listless and ill. I ran to fetch him back inside again ad he just fell asleep like nothing had happened. The next day I got home from school only to find my Mom and my sisters crying over him because he had died in the morning when nobody was home. I told my Mom about the night before as I held him one last time. We both agreed that Toby had known he was near death, and he had felt ready for it. We buried him that night wrapped in a towel under a tree in our garden. From the day after that onwards, we had some disturbances around the house-we could all still hear him barking if the doorbell rang, hear his feet walking over the kitchen tiles. The night we buried him, we had sat in the living room together crying over him when we all saw him appear to us in the doorway for a second. Everybody agreed that Toby had appeared to say goodbye, and we all felt the disturbances meant his spirit wasn't at peace yet. The corner where his basket and food and water bowls were kept had been cleared out after he was buried, and we all wondered if our actions had disturbed Toby's spirit from rest. The disturbances continued to happen frequently-almost everyday-for about a year after Toby's death. My parents decided to dig up and remove his remains from our garden in the hope it would end the disturbances. He had rotted away to a skeleton by then, but once they were taken away the disturbances never happened again. I never knew exactly what happened to his skeleton in the end, but we are all sure that Toby's spirit has found peace at last. Contact me here: elliemaszuchin@hotmail.com Submitted From: Ellie Maszuchin, UK