Midwestern Ghosts

This week's prompt is "Midwestern Ghosts".  And I hate it.  I didn't even pretend not to hate it when I got it.  Which is why it's a day late.  But here you go!





Chad Milton is an asshole.

I know that’s not really any way to begin a story, but I’m saying it first because if you take just one thing away from all of this, I want it to be that.  Chad Milton is a complete asshole and no one should feel sorry for him.  I guess if you don’t know Chad, you might need a little more context, so we’ll get to the actual story now.  There were just three of us to start with.  Me, Robbie Butler, and Chad.  We both knew Chad was kind of a piece of shit, but he was the only one with a video camera, and it was mostly better to have him in the group where he had to at least be halfway decent.  Besides, you had to feel sorry for the guy if you knew anything about his home life.

The thing was we lived in this little bullshit town that had maybe a hundred people, rural North Dakota, middle of nowhere with nothing to do.  A place like this with more space than people really know what to do with, you end up with a lot of abandoned buildings and creepy little cemeteries on little dirt roads.  Plenty of kids drive out to these places to drink and tell creepy stories or whatever.  You get a little creeped out and you laugh it off and it sounds fucking lame but it beats sitting at home or wandering around the bullshit mall, right?  So Robbie got the brilliant idea to film it, like one of those Ghost Hunters shows.  Maybe it’s not your thing, but you know what I’m talking about.  Shitty lighting, shakey camera work, some bro going, “DID YOU HEAR THAT?!” every few minutes.

The thing is, the “professional” version of this shit is so bad that our crap was pretty on par.   Robbie would upload it to YouTube, and we’d actually get all sorts of hits.  We started getting kind of a fan base.  We were internet-famous.  So we kept doing it, going out and finding new places.

The other thing is that no matter what you believe, it is hard not to get freaked out when you’re out in some rickety old farmhouse in the middle of the night talking about ghosts and shit.  Sometimes you really do feel like something’s touching you, or you hear something that’s maybe totally legit and explainable but in the context, it’s fucking scary.  It’s a fun kind of scary though.  It’s the Shasta version of a roller coaster.  And, being a bunch of teenagers, obviously we would up the ante.  It was a perfect opportunity for practical jokes.  Everybody’s already all tuned up, so you play all play it up a little more.  Mostly it’s just sneaking up on each other or jumping out when someone rounds a corner.

But one night, Chad Milton (the asshole), decides he can do better.  He says he’s found a place for us to film, so we all drive out, we do our thing.  We’re in this drafty old church by a little cemetery where all the graves are too worn to make out.  You can make out a letter or a number here and there and that’s it.  The place hasn’t been touched in years but whoever was here last locked the front doors.  We try around back, and that’s locked too, but the wood is rotting apart so Robbie starts kicking at the boards.  He’s making some good progress when all of a sudden this guy in a hoodie just comes busting out, shouting and waving a bat.  Robbie falls on his ass.  Badass that I am, I freak out and take off.  It doesn’t even really process at the time that Chad is laughing his ass off.  Not until a long time later.

It feels like a long time, anyway.  I run through this little shelter belt, and afterward there’s just this drop.  North Dakota doesn’t boast much in the way of terrain, you know?  But there are plenty of little streams and I happen to fall into one.  It's not very far down and it's not very deep, but you don't really need to fall very far to really hurt yourself.  You just have to fall right.  People break legs on trampolines all the time.  I don't know if my leg is broken when I fall, but it sure isn't working anymore.  Eventually the water is cold enough to numb even that, but being numb isn't a good sign either.  By the time it's getting light out, no one's come to drag me out of here and that means no one knows where I am, right?  I mean, it's not like I ran very far.  Robbie's an okay guy, but he's not bright and he's scared of Chad, so I'm betting that Chad would rather let me die out here than risk getting in trouble.  That's what makes him such an asshole.  Not his shitty joke, but the fact that he never, ever has your back.

Chad Milton is an asshole and that's why I'm haunting him.