Scary Story
Oct. 22nd, 2021 08:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingThe winners of Jezebel's Scary Story Contest have been posted. There's nothing particularly interesting or spooky this year. There's also no "my landlord was living in my crawlspace" real-life trauma, which is a shame.
I love horror, but nothing spooky has ever happened to me or anyone I know. This is probably the closest I can get to a Jezebel-style scary story...
My parents got divorced when I was fourteen. They filed for bankruptcy in the process, and both of them had to scramble to find someplace to live. A friend of the family who lived in Los Angeles was trying to get rid of his recently deceased mother's house, which was once large and beautiful but had fallen into disrepair. He sold it to my father for practically nothing, as his main goal was to avoid the burden of property and inheritance taxes.
The house wasn't particularly scary or anything; it had just fallen into ruin after not being maintained for two decades, and the electricity and water weren't hooked up. My dad wanted nothing to do with this, so he basically left me there while he moved into his girlfriend's house. I therefore had to camp out alone in this giant house for a few months. And I mean, like, I seriously camped out - I had a sleeping bag and a Coleman stove and everything.
I commuted to an international school in Atlanta, and I was busy with that, so I didn't mind being left in an abandoned house as much as you'd think. I also had a lot of friends from wealthy families who were happy to let me stay in their guest bedrooms over the weekends. With some help from one friend's lawyer parents, I was able to file the paperwork to declare myself an emancipated minor and rent an apartment, so I didn't actually have to spend that much time in the house, thankfully.
The house hadn't been cleaned out before it was sold. Mostly I left everything as I found it instead of poking around into closets and so on, but one night I got bored and tried to move a stack of cardboard boxes from one room to another. None of the boxes were taped shut, so I couldn't help but see what was inside them:
Hundreds of paperback copies of the smutty cavepeople romance novel The Clan of the Cave Bear, all very clearly read from cover to cover. Which raises questions I don't want to ask and don't want answered.
Anyway, my dad eventually moved into the house after he married and divorced his girlfriend. He now lives there with his most recent wife, who is a hoarder. Not only does her stuff fill all of the rooms of the house (and the porch!) from floor to ceiling, but I doubt anyone ever got rid of the stuff that was in the house to begin with. So magic has not faded entirely from Middle Earth - all the boxes of The Clan of the Cave Bear are still out there being weird and mysterious.
I love horror, but nothing spooky has ever happened to me or anyone I know. This is probably the closest I can get to a Jezebel-style scary story...
My parents got divorced when I was fourteen. They filed for bankruptcy in the process, and both of them had to scramble to find someplace to live. A friend of the family who lived in Los Angeles was trying to get rid of his recently deceased mother's house, which was once large and beautiful but had fallen into disrepair. He sold it to my father for practically nothing, as his main goal was to avoid the burden of property and inheritance taxes.
The house wasn't particularly scary or anything; it had just fallen into ruin after not being maintained for two decades, and the electricity and water weren't hooked up. My dad wanted nothing to do with this, so he basically left me there while he moved into his girlfriend's house. I therefore had to camp out alone in this giant house for a few months. And I mean, like, I seriously camped out - I had a sleeping bag and a Coleman stove and everything.
I commuted to an international school in Atlanta, and I was busy with that, so I didn't mind being left in an abandoned house as much as you'd think. I also had a lot of friends from wealthy families who were happy to let me stay in their guest bedrooms over the weekends. With some help from one friend's lawyer parents, I was able to file the paperwork to declare myself an emancipated minor and rent an apartment, so I didn't actually have to spend that much time in the house, thankfully.
The house hadn't been cleaned out before it was sold. Mostly I left everything as I found it instead of poking around into closets and so on, but one night I got bored and tried to move a stack of cardboard boxes from one room to another. None of the boxes were taped shut, so I couldn't help but see what was inside them:
Hundreds of paperback copies of the smutty cavepeople romance novel The Clan of the Cave Bear, all very clearly read from cover to cover. Which raises questions I don't want to ask and don't want answered.
Anyway, my dad eventually moved into the house after he married and divorced his girlfriend. He now lives there with his most recent wife, who is a hoarder. Not only does her stuff fill all of the rooms of the house (and the porch!) from floor to ceiling, but I doubt anyone ever got rid of the stuff that was in the house to begin with. So magic has not faded entirely from Middle Earth - all the boxes of The Clan of the Cave Bear are still out there being weird and mysterious.
