Childhood

When I was a kid I would lay in bed waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark. We lived out in the country so there wasn't any streetlights or illumination, other than the nights when the moon was out. It was also very quiet. In the silence I would imagine I could hear things moving around in the dark, shuffling around on the carpet and talking in quiet whispers, barley audible. Then when my eyes did adjust I thought I could see them, that I could make out shapes moving in the darkness. I don't know how I ever fell asleep at night.
We lived in an old schoolhouse that was always being fixed up. It wasn't too creepy but there was an old cabin near it, full of junk, that used to scare me for some reason. According to my dad there was an old woman in town who was born and raised in the old cabin as well as several living and dead people that had attended classes in the one room schoolhouse we lived in. This made me feel very strange.
I don't remember seeing any ghosts (how many people died in school in those days?) but I used to think I could see things in the corners of my eyes, mostly going up and down the stairs.
It sounds like I'm making this up, but I'm not. I lived in that old school house till my folks split up when I was about eight. Then I mostly lived in town in an apartment and then a succession of crappy rented houses. My dad still owns the house and land but currently lives in a city pretty far away.

So stems my fascination with decaying old houses. Also cemeteries, like how cool would it be to stumble onto an over-grown graveyard in the middle of a woods? Maybe not cool for you but I think it would be pretty sweet. I'm not a goth type person either. I don't really want to be dead or any of that crap, but I've always been fascinated with the darker side of things. I used to read books of scary stories all the time, you could check out some pretty nasty ones (for kids!) from the library. I remember one that had a woman on the cover holding her head in her hands, blood seeping out of her neck stump. I never knew why I kept reading them, some of them scared me so bad I couldn't sleep, but they were my favorite books. Do you remember Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark? The stories were pretty lame but the drawings still creep me out.

Yes, this is an actual picture from a book for kids!

Basically all I really wanted to do was give a shout out to one of my favorite sites and I kinda got off track, please go to Grave Addiction. There's so many cool pictures and stories on this site, I've spent hours going through them. Thats all I really wanted to say. I'll post some more poetry tomorrow, I've been neglecting those.
Peace and love,
Kurdt.