One of the universal truths of this world is that almost every kid goes through that phase where they're all about scary stories. Growing up, I was no exception. My friends and I took great pleasure in spooking each other with tales of ghostly hitchhikers and hook-wielding murderers. However, there is one story that will probably always stand above the rest for me, and that is the one about Creak. In case you haven't heard it before, it goes like this:
A long time ago, there lived a man named Alan McCready. His farmstead lay on the outskirts of town, and nobody visited there without a good reason, as he wasn't one to be hospitable to guests. On the contrary - McCready's reputation sold him as a large, mean brute of a man, with a sadistic streak. One late summer night, he caught some local kids sneaking onto his land to steal apples. As you can probably imagine, there was no end to his fury.
He locked them up in a barn, all five of them. They were just little kids, the oldest no more than ten. When they cried and begged for forgiveness. McCready simply told them that they would pay for what they had done.
In the end, not a single child left that farm alive. It was told that McCready would lock himself in the barn with them, challenging them to games of hide and seek. The unlucky child who was the first to be found, would be the next to die. The story is often flavoured with horrific torture scenes, each version a little different, but always gruesome enough to give us kids nightmares. The one I remember the best is the one where McCready cut fingers or toes off of his victim, one at a time, and then feeding the digits to his hogs as the child watched.
Of course, it didn't take long before McCready was pointed out as a suspect. When authorities sought him out at his farm to take him in and search the property, they found that he had hung himself by the neck from a large tree. The wire had cut so deep that his head was nearly severed. The remains of the five missing children were recovered from food troughs and waste piles.
However, this is just the first part.
Every year, on the day of his death, Alan McCready comes back from the dead. Now dubbed Creak, due to the only noises his severed throat can produce, he seeks out children to play with again. Us kids knew that if you were out alone on that particular night, you might spot a tall, pale man in a dark cul-de-sac or on a lonely back road, covering his face with his hands as if he was playing peekaboo. You'd better be careful that you didn't make a sound, and just ran home as quickly as you could - because you were safe from Creak as long as he didn't open his eyes. Once Creak sees you, he will never forget your face, and sooner or later he will find you again.
Alan McCready may have existed, and he may even have done all those terrible things attributed to him, but I never believed in the legend of Creak any more than I believed in Bloody Mary. However, one evening many years ago I had a strange experience that sometimes makes me wonder.
When I was a kid, before my parents divorced, we lived in a house on the outskirts of a smaller city. One of my best friends lived only a few minutes away, and my parents would let me walk or bike to and from her house alone. Walking during the day was fine, but I always found going home in the evening a little eerie. There was no traffic, and never a single person out in the yards or on the street. It made me feel melancholy, like I was the last person alive in the world.
My route was nothing but winding narrow streets of middle class suburbia, a car or two parked in each driveway. In the dark, I always found the cars spookier than the gaping empty windows of the houses that I passed, or the dark swaths of trees along a certain part of the road. A couple of years earlier, one of my friends had shown me a book with a collection of classic ghost photographs - one of them supposedly depicting someone driving a car heading to a funeral, and sitting in the backseat is the deceased person, a dark figure with what looks like white glowing eyes. I played it cool in front of my friend, of course, but that picture haunted me for years. Whenever I walked home after dark I kept my eyes fixed on the ground, to avoid seeing those white eyes looking back at me from one of the empty cars.
On this particular evening, I was walking home from my friends house. I was wearing my beige windbreaker and it was already dark out, meaning it must have been early fall. As I passed the familiar, quiet buildings, I heard what sounded like someone walking on gravel somewhere behind me. Hoping it wasn't one of the mean boys in my class, I looked back, and to my surprise I saw a grownup standing in the middle of the road. The streetlamps above our heads didn't offer much light, but I could see that he was dressed in dark clothes, and seemed to be facing away from me.
I quickened my pace, and was thankful to round a bend and lose sight of the strange person. Everything was quiet. Right as I came up on the last intersection before the little bus loop that connected to my street, a car door slammed on the other side of the narrow road, less than twenty feet away from me. I jumped, forgot my rule to never look into cars at night, and saw the man with dark clothes sitting in the backseat of a small red car. I felt like someone had poured cold water down my back. Contrary to any survival instincts my ancestors may have passed on to me, my legs refused to keep moving. Instead, I just stared.
In the glow of the streetlamps, and the porch lights of the houses around us, his skin looked a sickly pale yellow. His face was turned down, but he looked like he was covering his eyes with one hand, like he was crying, or nursing a bad headache. Thankfully, a few seconds later I snapped out of my trance, and I walked as fast as I could towards the safety and warmth of home.
I heard rhythmical tapping against the car window, as if someone was knocking to catch my attention. Why I looked back, I'll never know. The man in the car turned his face up towards me. His fingers playfully separated in front of one eye, as if he was peeking at me, and I swear to this day that I saw something glowing white behind his hand.
I ran. I don't know if you've ever experienced pure panic, but it only gets worse when you run. By the time I slammed our front door behind me, I could hardly breathe and my face was wet from tears and snot. I crumpled into a heap, because my legs would no longer hold me up. It took me several minutes to relay what I had just experienced to my parents. They looked at each other over my head as I sobbed and gasped for breath, but I don't think they believed me; I wasn't prone to lying but I had a very creative imagination, and I was plagued with nightmares about almost everything imaginable. Nevertheless, my dad walked around the neighbourhood with a flashlight, just in case there was indeed a strange man stalking the kids in the area, but he didn't find anything, nor did anybody else claim to have seen the strange man.
A couple of years later, my parents divorced, and me and my mom moved into an apartment in a different area of town. I never saw the man again, and I doubt I ever will. But ever since that evening, I refuse to walk alone after dark.
AN: I did not make up this story it is just one of my favs and I felt I needed to share it.
