Creepypasta Stories

A game of flashlight tag

-don't own-

When I was ten, I played a late night game of flashlight tag with a bunch of neighborhood kids. If you don't know what flashlight tag is, it's the same as tag, but you play it in the dark, the person who's "it" gets a flashlight, and they have to yell the name of the person they see with it in order to "tag" them. It was really cloudy that night, and most people had their curtains drawn, so it was the perfect level of darkness for hiding in.

The side of the street my house was on was skirted by a broad length of woods. That was basically the boundary for our side of the game. You could run through any yard, even go across the street and run through their yards, but you weren't allowed to hide in the woods, because it was too difficult to find anyone in there, and it was very easy to trip over tree limbs or end up with poison oak. Of course, this rule was frequently and flagrantly ignored when people got too close to being caught. They'd duck off into the bushes for a few seconds, or run behind a group of trees to evade capture.

I don't remember who was it at the time, but I was hiding in a backyard two houses down from my house. The family that lived there had a little playhouse for their daughter, a swing set and a doghouse but no dog. I would periodically duck into the doghouse whenever I saw the flashlight's searching beam approaching. Those of us trying to hide from the "it" person liked to spook each other in the dark by jumping out of nowhere and making each other scream, giving away our positions.

I thought I knew where the "it" guy was, but I got comfortable hanging out on the swing set. Suddenly, a person with a flashlight came around the corner of the house and angled it almost directly at me. I jumped and ran for the edge of the woods. When I got there, I hovered in case they saw me and were going to yell at me for cheating. The beam of light seemed to explore the swing set where I was, then came in my direction, but there was no sense of hurry at all to it, and I wondered for a second if maybe I'd attracted the attention of the homeowner. Most people on the block knew we were out playing flashlight tag, but you never can be sure that someone won't get nervous if you stay in their yard too long. So I crouched down in the grass and waited to see who it was.

They shined the light right in my face and I tried to cover it with my hand to avoid identification. The creepy thing was, they never said anything, just shined that light on me.

"You got me!" I exclaimed, hoping that if it was a homeowner, they'd realize I thought they were the flashlight tagger. Then I realized that two houses down, people were yelling and there was the "it" guy's flashlight beam chasing them around.

I stood up and tried to see who was shining the light on me. They just stood there, not moving, not saying anything. I felt a little freaked out.

"If you don't want us playin' in your yard, I'll go tell them it's off limits, okay?"

The person started walking toward me. I didn't feel right, so I started walking toward the edge of the yard. The person just kept shining the light on me and coming toward me.

So I ran.

When I looked back, the person with the flashlight was running too, and they were an adult, much bigger and much faster than me. I felt scared now, not sure why this person was chasing me. I was running toward where the other kids had been, but they were gone now. It just seemed to be me and the person with the flashlight. So I turned right and ducked into the woods. I dropped to the ground, shaking bushes and stuff to try to confuse the person, then shimmied under a ring of thick bushes and curled up. I could see the flashlight in the woods with me, looking around. I could hear the person's footsteps breaking sticks and crunching on pine needles. I didn't know what the fuck was going on, and I just wanted to get back to all the other kids. Eventually, the flashlight wandered deeper into the woods and I crawled quiet as a mouse back to the edge of the trees and then got up and ran toward the street.