My (anti)ghost story

Some of my friends and I were talking about brushes we've had with the supernatural. While I've seen some things I don't know the precise cause of, I can't say I've ever seen anything the least bit supernatural.

This is the story, as best as I can remember it: two of my buddies and I were in an old house in the early evening. It was abandoned and condemned - I mean, it had actual "Condemned" signs on it and everything - but we went in anyway because it looked haunted and, honestly, we kind of wondered if there was any cool stuff in there.

Looking back now, I'm reasonably certain that whoever did the art for the first sections of Silent Hill must've been in the same place because it was a special kind of creepy. On the first floor, there was a bedroom that has been completely trashed. Wallpaper torn off in strips and ribbons, drywall with great long gashes in it, and a mattress in the middle of the floor stained rust-red.

The next room was, if anything, worse. It reeked of mold and decay and there were piles of rat feces all over the place. We moved through the rest of the horror-show in silence until we got to the upstairs floor. One of my buddies began to tell the story he'd heard about how a woman had been murdered by her husband in the room downstairs. As the shadows grew longer, he kept up the story, filling in gruesome details by the dozen.

Then we came to the bathroom. The boards were cracked and up at angles. The walls were thick with mildew. The roof overhead had a great gash in it and through it piss-yellow water poured into the tub, rolling out and over the floor. Here's where I saw something the other guys didn't that changed the way we saw what happened afterwards. I booked it downstairs, a shrieking scream behind me.

One of the guys yelled, "It's the ghost! It's the ghost!", and they were both running for the door. When we ran past the bedroom, the shadows about to turn to twilight, we risked a glimpse inside. My buddies later swore that they saw the outline of a woman, arm outstretched, standing in the middle of the room.

The experience was terrifying for all three of us. My two buddies spread the story of the time we ran away from a poltergeist across town. When I returned from college, I went to an event at the town high school and overheard kids talking about a haunted house on same road as this abandoned house. I'm pretty sure it was the same one.

Here's what I saw. I lagged behind the others, and I saw when the bathtub broke through the floor and lurched to the side, sending a crack from wall to wall. It had been a very rainy spring and the floor gave way, the sound of the wood cracking making a loud, high-pitched noise like a scream. When I ran past the bedroom, I saw a giant piece of plaster, about the height of a woman, falling to the ground.

It might not have been a ghost, but to this day I hate it when I step on a creak step.