Jaci Dawn

It is October, the month when we draw closer to the veil. That makes it a good time to tell a good ghost story, don’t you think?

My best friend lived two blocks from my house. We met on Saturdays, as soon as my chores were done, and went on adventures, played pretend, lip-synced to The Monkees, or played dress up. We wrote crazy plays and forced our parents to watch them as we acted them out. We build elaborate stories around our model horses or the little plastic farm animals one could buy at the Five-and-Dime or the toy aisle in the supermarket. We rode her pony or pretended we were horses.

Matilda was the youngest child of a Catholic family. They owned a rambling ranch-style home overlooking the city golf course. I was the middle child of a Protestant/agnotsic family. We lived in a rambling concrete monster of a house that had been hand-poured by the previous owner, mostly without permits or much attention to detail. My parents painted it pink. Very pink.

One of the oddities of Matilda’s home was the front entry: it was a long hall that was usually dark. The only time anyone used the front door was if someone actually rang the doorbell there, or if we kids hauled out the dress-up box. The doors everyone used were the car port entry door and the patio door (but only to leave). They had a TV room, which was wonderfully novel to me, plus a color television. We had a black and white TV that sat in the living room. Their living room, it seemed to me, was mostly unused, except when we played dress-up and listened to old records of Johnny Horton and other old western albums. They had dinner at 6:00PM, promptly, and they always bowed their heads and blessed the food.

Bless us, O Lord, and these, Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty. Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.

The house I lived in had concrete stairs that were of differing heights. There was an addition of an old barber shop that my dad converted into a guest room. A huge shop was attached to that. It was a ranch-style home, as well, with massive concrete blocks off the front porch that seemed to have no purpose other than we could climb them. A hallway separated living quarters from the shop, and there was a dank, unfinished basement under the house part where my mother set up her laundry room. Dad remodeled the house to have three bedrooms. The front door opened into the living room, where we watched out black and white TV, or my sister and I danced to 45’s of old 1960’s rock-n-roll.

Out back was an orchard, flower beds, and a large strawberry patch. We found evidence the former owner practiced some sort of witchcraft back there: she sprinkled egg shells among the plants. (I know: horrors! To this day, I add egg shells to my compost.) She had a cupboard of exotic herbs and spices, all old. Mom used the general ones: cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, pepper, salt. But this woman had everything under the sun in her herb and spice tins: turmeric, allspice, alum, ginger, rosemary, oregano, basil – well, my spice cupboard looks a lot like old Vera’s did back when we labeled her a witch.

We had dinner whenever my parents got around to it, often after nine at night in the summer months. There was no grace spoken over the meal.

There was a dog skull buried under the strawberry patch.

Both houses had secrets. Things that went bump! in the night. Things that moved of their own free will. The attic window of our house broke out every time my dad had it replaced. We kids heard footsteps in the hall way. My mom’s dog retreated from the hallway to cower under the covers in my brother’s bedroom. Going to the bathroom in the night was a test of courage (and was usually lost).

One day, we discovered this long indigo blue scarf in the dress up box at mat’s house. It was 4×8′ and a beautiful blue. It was the perfect wrap for any dress up outfit we could think of. We even hauled it to my house to play with it, and then we stuffed it into my dress up box at the end of the day. We called it The Blue Cape.

Of course, the next time we pulled the dress ups out of the box at my house, we couldn’t find the scarf. It was just gone.

And the next time we pulled the dress ups out of Mat’s box, it was right on top, folded neatly.

Then it was at my house, without any of us having carried it there.

The nightmares began shortly after that. My sister woke up, screaming and crying. When my parents asked her about her dream, the blue scarf had been hovering over her head, sucking the air out of her lungs. Nor was she the only one of us to have that same experience: Mat did. I did. The scarf moved from here to there, never where we were certain we’d left it last. We made notes about where we left it.

Soon, we didn’t play with it at all. There was something terrifying about that 4×8′ of nylon cloth. None of us could explain it to our parents, who, being adults, didn’t believe a bit of what we swore was true.

In 1970, my father relocated and the family followed. We were past dress-up by then, but we did one last thing: Mat send The Blue Cape (now referred to in capitols) to live with us, in our dress up box (because, Hallowe’en).

The scarf never made it to our new home in another town. My sister and I opened the box, expectant to see it where we had packed it – and it was gone. It never showed up at Mat’s. It simply disappeared – just like it had appeared.

No parent figure ever claimed to know where it came from. It just appeared. And now it was gone.

Just gone. And, of course, no parent figure would admit to throwing it away.

And 47 years later, I still get the heebie-jeebies writing about it. In retrospect, I don’t recall that it ever snagged or had a run in the material. It was always perfect.

I also find it very, very odd that I cannot find a single image on the internet that resembles The Thing. It was evil.