ghost stories are alarmingly easy to spread tbh
when I was like ten I was walking back from the chip shop near my gran’s house with a neighbour and we took a short cut down an alley which was enclosed by garages except for one part which was wire fenced and led to the electricity shack
and while I was walking I chucked a chip over the fence. the girl walking with me, C, reasonably asks why I did that
“oh, don’t you know?” I say, as if I’m not equally out of my own loop
she shakes her head. the enclosed alleyway has no streetlights. it’s after dark. the shack is isolated in the distance.
“a little girl who lived up on the court climbed the fence once on a dare. she went up to the shack and touched it, but there was a wire sticking out, and when she touched it, she got electrocuted and died, right there. if you come back in the daylight, you can still see the black mark.”
[editor’s note: the court was the smaller road off the side of the crescent, which was the one C’s family and my gran lived on. the houses there were slightly more expensive and newer, almost all occupied by wealthy commuters to the city, where most of the crescent houses were occupied by retirees and locals who worked on the trading estate. naturally, crescent kids hated the court. houses there got bricked about once a month.]
“no she didn’t,” C says
I made up this story for absolutely no reason and with no plan, but I’m not gonna back down now. “sure she did. and if you go past on your way back from the shops and you don’t leave her an offering, she’ll follow you home through the streetlights. one flickers behind you, then the next, then the next, until you get home. and then the lights start to flicker inside the house. even if you turn out all the electrics before bed, it’ll be too late. she’s inside. and you’ll wake up on the night and see her, and she’ll be so awful to see it’ll stop your heart.”
[editor’s note: the streetlights always flickered. this was because our neighbour monkey george kept setting the junction boxes on fire]
“I never did before and she never followed me home!”
“do you come down the alley after dark? or do you take the main road with the streetlights?” I knew she didn’t use the shortcut, because I’d been the one to talk her into it that night. she was three years younger than me and scared of the dark.
C claims not to believe me, but she throws a chip over the fence too, and walks the rest of the way looking over her shoulder. I get to pride myself for the night on being good at scary stories, and don’t think much more about it.
fast forward six or seven years. I’m back in town. I’m on my way back from the chip shop, taking the same shortcut home. ahead of me on the road are a couple of kids I vaguely recognise as old playmates’ younger siblings.
they stop, and I watch one fish out three sweeties from the pack they’re sharing. they take one each and throw them over the fence. they carry on walking.
I realise that this is probably my fault, as are any resulting pest control issues around the old electricity shack.
when I get to the fence, I throw a chip over.
