10 Scary Stories (#Wattys2017)

7 - Backyard

His parents had just moved to a new house in the suburbs. Billy was eager to move in and get his own room. He picked the bedroom with the big window that looked out onto the backyard.

The family quickly got their stuff moved in and then went to bed. The first night that Billy slept in that room, something very strange happened. In the middle of the night, Billy was awoken by strange moans and screams. They seemed to be coming from outside. Billy shouted for his parents and a few seconds later, they burst into his room.

"What's wrong?" asked his father, anxiously.

"There's something in the backyard!" Billy exclaimed.

His parents checked and found nothing. They reassured Billy that there was nothing there and sent him back to bed.

The next night, Billy heard the noises again. This time they were louder. Billy got the courage to look outside. As he peeked through the curtains, he saw three shadowy figures standing in the backyard. They were glaring back at him with glowing red eyes. The figures seemed to point at him as they moved closer to his window.

Billy rushed into his parents' room and woke them up. He told them about the figures outside, but when they got up to look, the figures were nowhere to be seen. His parents told him that he must have been dreaming and he reluctantly went back to bed.

The next night, he heard the noises outside his window again. When he turned over in bed, he was horrified to see a bony, skeletal face staring in at him through the window. In one hand, it held a long sharp knife. It was scratching at the window with its other hand.

Trembling with fear, Billy quickly put his head under the covers. When the scratching finally stopped, Billy jumped out of bed and cautiously peeked out through the curtains. The three figures had disappeared. Instead, there appeared to be three freshly-dug holes in the backyard.

The next morning, Billy's parents decided to call the police to try to make sense of what had happened the night before.

The police informed them that, years before, three psychopaths had escaped from the local insane asylum. They had gone on a rampage, killing anyone they came across and terrorizing the whole town. The previous owner of the house had caught the crazed psychopaths trying to break into his house through the bedroom window. He killed the psychopaths and buried their bodies in the backyard. The police said that the three bodies were still buried there.