Scary Stories 1

Manassas

When I moved to the East Coast, I lived in northern Virginia — just up the road from Manassas. One night, my boyfriend and I were driving through the Manassas Battlefield after spending the day down south. It was a misty evening, and through the fog (sooo cliche, I know), I saw a group of men crossing in front of our car. They were wearing tri-corn hats and blue coats, marching as though they were completely unaware of the cars coming from both directions. When I told my boyfriend, he scoffed. Tri-corn hats were common during the Revolutionary War but not at the time of Manassas, and he looked me as though I had just imagined something in the fog.

When he researched what I saw, however, he learned that there had been a company of soldiers who had worn exactly what I had seen in the First Battle of Manassas, and that many had died in the battle. They had worn the very detailed blue coats I had seen, and they had been the only company to wear that uniform with tri-corn hats. Despite popular belief, tri-corn hats had been worn in the Civil War, but the combination of the blue uniform AND the hat was something that I couldn't have possibly known or guessed.

The eeriest experience was when I dreamed of two children who lived with their father in an old house surrounded by fields. In the dream, I saw everything from the oldest girl's point of view. Her father was an alcoholic, and the only person who was kind to her was the woman who came in to cook and clean a couple days a week. One day, her father grew incredibly violent after the girl dropped an old family heirloom. He took a knife from a drawer in the kitchen and stabbed the girl's younger brother. He made her watch her brother bleed out, and then stabbed her in the stomach. He took both bodies and hid them in the crawlspace underneath the house. The girl was still alive, and she watched as her father put up the boards that hid the crawlspace from view.

When I woke up, I knew that I had seen that house somewhere. My boyfriend and I loved to take long drives in the countryside, and I was sure that we'd passed that house before. I researched murders that had taken place in the county, and found an article from the 30s that briefly discussed a father killing his two young children. I saw where the newspaper was from and knew exactly where that house was — almost obscured from view thanks to the large trees that had grown up around it, on an old dusty road just miles from where we lived. The smell of whiskey on the father's breath haunted me, and I can still feel the knife plunging into the girls stomach. I prayed for the girl and her brother, but knew that I couldn't do anything to relieve their suffering. They didn't completely understand that they'd been dead for almost 80 years, and were still terrified that their father would come back. Nothing I said reassured her, and soon she stopped visiting me.