Scary Stories to Keep You Awake

The Face: Cold July

In the month of July, 1998, a string of murders hit the town of Goshen in Northern Indiana. The police investigated for three years, but never found the perpetrator. No more similar murders happened, so the whole incident was eventually swept under the rug. Few people are willing to talk about it with each other, let alone with complete strangers. Only a select few know what actually happened that month. I am one of those unfortunate few, and I’m willing to talk.

The whole incident started in December 1997. A group of my friends and I had started a club that met after school. Most of them went to Concord High School, and I was one of the only members that were homeschooled. As a result, I was often the guy held responsible for preparing the clubhouse for their arrival.

The clubhouse wasn’t much; just an old shed in Harvey’s back field. It was the optimal location for our meetings, however, thanks to the fact that it was almost the same distance between all of our homes and the shed. Nobody was using it other than us. The shed was empty when we found it, and Harvey didn’t even know it was there until we asked him if we could use it for our meetings. “Just don’t knock it down,” was his only condition. We never did knock it down. Almost set it on fire once, but we never knocked it down.

Right away we found an old table and some lawn chairs. Jimmy hitched a wagon to his ATV and drove them out there for us, and we spent a whole afternoon making sure everything was perfect. We had everything set up and ready when Mac got the idea of “testing” the chairs. Mac is a rather heavyset guy, so much so that we liked to call him “Big-Mac.”

He sat down hard in two of those chairs without the slightest hint of trouble. This got him so confident that he practically jumped onto the third chair. CRACK! The two rear legs fell through the floor, and so did Mac. After he got the fifteen stitches out of his head, we continuously joked about the Mac-shaped hole that’s still in the clubhouse floor.

We never did name our club. Every name we came up with stunk like a mountain of limburger. We took to calling ourselves, “the guys,” and would meet every day after school. Kevin took to bringing a pair of video cameras that he had gotten from his dad (I still think he stole them), and we would occasionally record our meetings. Let me tell you, by the end of the day we usually had one part good footage against ten parts crap. The best moments we got on tape were the ones where we would bring guests to the clubhouse and allow them to choose the subject to discuss that day. This became a weekly endeavor, and our best moment we have on tape is when we interviewed Lisa, Matt’s crush. Soon, everyone at school was clamoring for an interview with “the guys.”

I think Mac was the first to suggest making a movie with our two precious cameras. “It’s better than sitting here every afternoon doing nothing,” he insisted. “We have almost everyone in the school willing to participate.” Everyone liked the idea, but then we all had a new problem. What kind of movie could we make? We obviously didn’t have a budget that allowed for impressive special effects and such.

Mac came through once again when he brought us a videotape of Scream and let us watch it. That’s when we decided that a horror/slasher movie was not only probable for us, but was also within our budget. The trick, Matt decided, was making it something people would watch. We put him in charge of scriptwriting as a result.

Jimmy and Colin volunteered to search for our actors. It wasn’t hard, considering nearly everyone in school knew about our filmmaking and wanted to be a part. Kevin ended up working on costumes (not that we needed any) and special effects. And me? I somehow ended up with no job at all, which I still find odd.

Everyone pulled together and did their part, and eventually we actually had something reasonable going. Jimmy and Colin had the most success, by far, since they had half the school lining up to audition. And we only had bits of script to work with at any given time, since Matt insisted on making the script absolutely perfect. He would continuously write, erase and rewrite chunks of the script.