I live a strange life. Want proof? This actually happened, last June. Everyone I know believes that this place in Carburn Park has troubled spirits, and they seem to be more active around me than anyone else. *gulp*

Here we go.

The hushed silence
amidst the lightning-shattered trees.
Held hands in the late spring night,
ducking down back paths
eroded with age.

All the familiar
apprehension
is rising once again.
Don’t look over your shoulder.
Don’t look into the darkness.
Don’t look at the path you’ve crossed,
for fear that there’s something there.

Emerging from the trees
and standing closer still.
“It’s near”;
a whispered voice
taut with urgency.
Still compelled to go on.

The thought, the place, obsesses.
Once you have gone
you must go again.
An empty lot
where the house still remains
in shadowed borders
of things that will not grow.
Images that move
only when you look away,
crows that will not fly overhead;
instead just land
on wavering branches
outskirting the emptiness.

Was it death? Fire? Tragedy?
Were the spirits, in life, cruel?
What leaves this place
so empty now,
the trees bare and growing
in awkward reaching limbs;
stooped and knotted
and trembling
in an unfelt wind.

Stare into the shadows,
the black path behind the lot.
The one that induces nightmares,
even after years.
There was a time
when the house remained,
and faces were seen in boarded up windows,
silhouettes recorded on film
in the doorway of a rotting shed.
Did it set them free,
the demolition?
Free to whisper
and follow in the night.

Hand in hand,
quieter now,
hurrying down the path.
The intent simply
to get away from the darkness
now behind.
Fleeting images stand
behind a fallen fence;
peek around the edges
of overgrown lilac bushes.
Ahead, a dark gazebo
with shadows roiling inside.
Everything in the night is moving.
Nothing in the night is alive.

Closer still,
feeling the fear,
passing a bridge and compelled
to look underneath,
in case something lurks.
Something that’s waiting
to drag the living away.
In a night like this,
it seems all too possible.
In a night like this,
everything is real.

A concrete image finally spotted;
a figure at the river,
stooped to drink.
Looking up once,
dead eyes in the night,
then gone without another thought.

Gasping near hysteria,
wanting only out of this place
where the night is too alive.
The path should turn here.
Why doesn’t it turn here?
The path should branch here,
back to the city lights.

Only darkness ahead
and only darkness behind,
and the path is gone;
a casualty of the night.
There is no choice no
but to go back,
to pass the property
and walk through its lurking ghosts.
There is no choice
but to look behind,
to face all the things
that were run from.

“It scares me, Mikhail.”
She held his hand tighter.

“I’m scared too.”

Still, they turned around.