Scary stories to tell

The Limping Woman

You hear the uneven footsteps first.

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That's how you know she's behind you. The heel is broken off of her left shoe and she drags it across the ground with every step, a sharp contrast to the steady click of her still-intact pump.

"Help me," she whispers.
It's an urgent, anguished plea.
"Please, I'm hurt; help me!"

Don't turn around. That's when she gets you.
Don't run. She still gets you, but this time, she's going to make it hurt.

At least that's the rumor, anyway.

Every small town had at least one; a local urban legend that everyone knows and swears is true because their sisters best friend's cousin's neighbor's grandson knew a fella who actually encountered it!

Ours was the limping woman, so named for her aforementioned distinct gait.

It was said that she was a teacher at the elementary school some decades before. Young, beautiful, and the victim of a terrible murder. She had been walking home to the house she shared with her parents one night after school when she realized she was being followed. She sped up and so did her pursuer, until both were running down this dark country lane with only open farmland on either side.

Her heel broke and her ankle snapped and she fell and her pursuer became her murder.

It was a slow, torturous affair that left her beaten and covered in stab wounds and, when the killer was done, he just left her to bleed out beside the road. She wasn't found until the next morning and, by then, all anyone could do was was search for the person responsible. While some believe the man was caught and dealt with not long after, others think they are still a large limping woman, as the victim came to be known, won't rest until her killer is caught.

I was always skeptical at best of the story. I'd passed the spot where she was supposed to appear a hundred times without incident, as did everyone else I knew. If a murderous ghost lived there, I was pretty sure I'd have seen her.

I said as much to my friend Stefi when she brought up that a friend of a friend of a friend had met the Limping Woman during lunch at school one day.

"It's true! She was out on the old highway a couple nights ago and saw her!" Stefi insisted stubbornly over our sandwiches.

"If she actually saw her, wouldn't she be dead?" I asked. "I thought you weren't supposed to turn around."

"Heard her, whatever, you know what I mean, Rina."

"Sure," I said with a roll of my eyes. It always frustrated Stefi that I didn't share her willingness to believe the unbelievable. "So how'd she get away?"

"She said the words, duh!"

"Oh, right, the woman's last words. Last words we all somehow know without ever having caught the one person who would have heard them."

"We know them because the real killer was never caught. He told people who told other people-"

"And we all just magically knew to use them to ward off being killed," I finished for her.

Stefi frowned. She loved all things spooky and supernatural and had spent a lot of time researching our local legends, especially the Limping Woman.

"It's not magic, it just reminds her of her own mother and she gets distracted by her grief and leaves you alone."

"Ok, ok," I said, hoping that that would be enough to put an end to the topic. It was an argument neither of us would win and I didn't feel like getting into it (again) over whether or not a ghost was real.