At The End of The Alley

A close friend of mine growing up was a kid that lived a few blocks away from my house. We clicked the second we met because we both shared the same name - Ricky. Well, he would always walk to my house and vice-versa during the summer time and we would always hang out until late in the evening - usually to the point where we stayed the night at the house we were at.

I remember back one night he and I were hanging out at my house (I think we were around 11 or 12 at the time). Our neighborhood is a fairly quiet neighborhood and nothing really ever happens and most of the people that live in the area are elderly, so there's hardly any trouble. Well, it got to be around 8:00 or 9:00 in the evening and we decided we wanted to walk back to his house and watch a boxing fight with his dad on Pay-Per-View. We packed up our things and began walking down my street.

As we got about twenty or thirty feet from my house, we began hearing these foot-steps coming up behind us - they were loud footsteps, not just tennis shoes on concrete but these sounded like cowboy boots on concrete. We turned around to see if maybe my little sister or someone were taking the stroll with us, and as most ghost stories go, there was nothing there. Thinking it to be odd, we shrugged it off and continued walking. Again, footsteps behind us and again, as we turned around we saw nothing. We began walking a little faster because we knew something was following us because there was no way we both had heard the footsteps and weren't able to see anyone.

The way the neighborhood was laid out was my street being a dead-end, when you made a right there was one block of houses, then a street intersecting, and then another block of houses, then an alleyway and then finally the block he lived on.

We were on the third and final block as these footsteps continuously got louder and louder as we made our way to his house. Our mid-jog was immediately interrupted as we looked through the corner of our eye's and saw a dark figure standing right at the end of the alleyway, watching both of us. The only thing we were able to see is that the figure was wearing some sort of cowboy hat and we could see his eyes were partially lit-up to the point of casting a small beam of light around the area of his eyes.

We immediately shut down; our bodies froze and the chills overtook us as we stared at the somewhat awkward figure in the alley. I'm assuming that his dad was watching for us to see if we'd make it okay because the only thing I really remember after that was his dad calling to us from the door asking why we were standing in the middle of the road. As we turned to look at him, we pointed to the alley to which he responded, "What? Why are you pointing?"

We turned around and saw nothing in the alley. No figure, no glowing eyes, no cowboy hats...nothing.

We both took a glance at each other and gave a small nod to reassure each other that no, we were not crazy and yes, something was there. Shaking off the disbelief that we had possibly just seen the first ghost of our lives, we made the final jog into the house to watch the fight with his dad.

I still live in this neighborhood today but my buddy has long-since moved away. I refuse to walk anywhere around here, although I'm incredibly interested in the paranormal, I can't quite build up the courage to seek any information about it nor even attempt to come into contact with something that could potentially never leave.