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What Scares You?
My Vocal Media Campfire Ghost Story might
Vocal Media has some very lucrative writing contests. Each month they send out a prompt and challenge writers to submit our best work. A couple of months ago the challenge was to make a scary story to tell around the campfire. The only catch was that it had to begin with the line “The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window.”
I have some experience making up scary stories. One night at a school event around a campfire at the farm, I was asked to tell a scary story. I did a stream of consciousness improvisation. I told my audience that this had actually happened. The story started with me talking about how an elderly neighbor had come up on his tractor and bawled us out for building the school building where we did.
Then I told the story of why he was so surprised we were building on that site. It involved early settlers and an evil twin girl who was locked up by her parents. The conceit of the story was that the evil twin escaped and locked her sister up in the cellar and took her place in the family. The “good twin” tried to make noise, but a gag meant that all she could do was whine a high-pitched “mmm, mmm.” I told the group around the fire that we can still hear a whine like that on certain nights because we ignored the warning of our neighbor. I had plenty of…
