Lighthouse Freak Out

Okay, I've always been a little skeptical of the supernatural. I have the tendency not to believe a lot of the stories I hear and read about someone having a close encounter with the unknown. I used to like to try and prove most ghost stories aren't true, that they're just made up to make people believe in the supernatural. Well, let's just say, I don't do that anymore. Not since I had a close encounter of my own with the unknown.

It happened last year, on Halloween to be exact. There wasn't going to be any school the next day since it was a Teacher Workshop Day or something to that effect. Anyway, a couple of my friends and I had been planning to prove one of our town's most famous ghost stories wrong.

You see we live in a small land-locked town in Maine that even the townspeople call Hickville. There isn't a heck of a lot to do in our town, considering the fact that we only have one store in the entire town, so us kids have to think up things to do to amuse ourselves.

For my friends and I, that thing was proving that some ghost stories are true, and others are just works of fiction. Since most of the ghost stories we heard were just works of fiction, we figured the one we were out to prove that Halloween wouldn't be any different, although we'd find out that it was.

That Halloween night, my friends Kasey and Liz were accompanying me while I spent the night in the lighthouse that was supposedly haunted. (Well, the lighthouse isn't really a lighthouse; it just looks like one. Why it was built in the middle of a land-locked small town is a completely different story, one that is a lot less creepy.) We'd heard stories ranging from strange lights being on in the top floor of the lighthouse when it was supposedly empty to actual encounters with the spirit of a teenage girl who had fallen off one of the balconies during a party. Frankly, we didn't believe a word of it, but we had to find out if the stories were true or not. So, that Halloween, Kasey, Liz, and I walked up the road to the lighthouse. (I live right down the road from the place.)

We opened the door and just walked in because the door to the lighthouse is never locked unless someone in living there. We decided to spend the night on the third floor out of the five floors in the building. We made sure to all stick together just in case someone thought it would be funny to play a joke on the other two people.

We stuck together and after touring the entire house, we all settled down in the same room and went to sleep. I was woken around midnight by a noise that sounded faintly like music. I turned to my right to see if Kasey was awake as well, and she was. I heard Liz whisper only loud enough for us to hear, "Do you guys...um...do you guys hear music?" Kasey and I nodded our heads yes and we decided to investigate the sound. The music was coming from the fourth floor, where the first balcony was located. The three of us held hands as we shakily climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. As we ascended the stairs, the music grew louder. When we finally reached the fourth floor (it took us a while because we were so frightened.) we opened the door to the balcony and stepped out onto it.

There we saw what appeared to be the ghostly re-enactment of the party the teenage girl had died at. We saw the girl come out from around the other side of the house and step over to the railing of the balcony. She appeared to be drunk. She began to lean over the railing, and she seemed to be laughing. The girl was wearing a gray button-up sweater, which was unbuttoned. "So this is how it happened!" Kasey gasped. The ghostly girl turned to look in our direction, but the expression on her face had changed from laughter to pure terror. Suddenly, I felt a cold presence shove its way between Liz and I, making us lose grip on each other's hands for a second. I turned to Liz.

"What was THAT?!" I asked her. She shrugged at first, but suddenly her eyes grew wide with fear and she grabbed my hand. She pointed in the direction of the ghost girl. I turned and noted that now there was a male spirit standing beside her on the balcony. The expression on his face was that of pure rage. He was waving his hands and appeared to be yelling at the girl. Then, all of a sudden, he shoved the girl over the rail of the balcony. We heard the thud of her body as she hit the ground. The male ghost looked over the rail at the spot where the girl had landed. Then he vanished into thin air! I looked out over the rail, and saw the girl lying on the ground near the lighthouse. She'd lost her gray sweater, which she is rumored to come back looking for. I took one look at my friends and we booked it back inside the building and down the stairs to the third floor.

As we were gathering our things, I heard footsteps on the floor above us. We were not about to go back upstairs to see what was making that noise. We didn't want to find out what was making the noise! We'd already witnessed a ghostly re-enactment of the girl's murder. We got out of there as fast as we could, and ran down the road to my house where we stayed for the rest of the night.

In the morning we told my mother what we'd really done the night before. (I'd told her that Kasey and I were spending the night at Liz's house after we went Trick-or-Treating. Hey, the older people still give you candy when you're thirteen in my town!) She told me that a girl had been killed at the lighthouse, but it was ruled a suicide by the police investigating. They even found her boyfriend hanging from the rafters on the fourth floor where he'd hung himself. That was what was making the footsteps on the floor above us, the girl's boyfriend was hanging himself, just as we were fleeing the house.

Remembering that night still scares me. It creeps me out to know that I'm living down the road from the scene of a murder. Even though it happened, like, twenty years ago. I never thought I'd see what I saw that night, but now I believe what my friend had told me. She used to live in that lighthouse when we were in the third grade. She moved halfway through the year with no explanation. Although, she did tell me about seeing the girl in her room, looking for her sweater. I never believed her until I saw the girl with my own two eyes. Now I know why no one ever lives in that house for more than six months.