It was a warm fall evening. There I was, standing in a field that was once a battleground and before that, probably an ancient burial ground. But that day, in that moment I was a girl, in another state, in the dark and I was scared shitless.
I was at Gettysburg and I was not alone. It was a three-woman adventure. My compatriots struggled to find evidence. They asked questions and they recorded the empty air. We all took pictures.
I didn’t need any technology to tell me something was there. I could see it. In the dark. The misshapen black things ducking into the fields. The encroaching horde of darkness that surrounded us.
At the end of the night my best friend looked over at me and said the very thing I knew all too well, “You’re a chicken.”
I am.
Let me explain.
You see, I have this belief that people who have been subjected to the super/preternatural are not the bravest people you would ever meet. It’s very hard to walk head first into a maelstrom of monsters when you’ve spent your life subjected to all the games the dark side can play.
After spending most of my life being haunted, the last thing I wanted was for something to follow me home from Gettysburg. It has taken me a long time to get to this quiet, boring and safe existence.
A woman with no face no longer hovers over my bed. I don’t wake up on a cold metal slab anymore. I haven’t had missing time in some… well, time. Nothing is pounding my bed, whispering into my ears, zapping me on the neck, surrounding my bed or having conversations in my room, anymore.
The things that plagued me no longer bother with me. I like it that way. I have spent far too many years afraid of my own shadow. I slept with the lights out for the first time, as an adult, when I was twenty-eight.
I have come a long way and I’ll be damned if I wake up one night to find the man who isn’t there, standing by my bed, staring. So yeah, I am a chicken. With good reason. Nothing has followed me to the apartment I currently reside at.
The only incidents I can recall concern two guardian angels checking up on me after I had Lung Surgery for the first time. They didn’t scare me and they never came to see me again after that. I am cool with it.
