October is (almost) upon us, and that can mean only one thing…
HALLOWEEN!
Don’t get me wrong, Thanksgiving is great since I get to eat my body weight in unhealthy food. And Christmas is fantastic since I get to spend a lot of time with my family back home. But Halloween just gets me on a whole different scale of excited. Candy out the wazoo, the best parties, scary shows like Are You Afraid of the Dark and Celebrity Ghost Stories, decorating my parents’ house and leaving it for them to clean up, grown men dressing up like Princess Leia, etc. I simply cannot get enough of it.
I figured a good way to kick off the season would be by sharing my own personal spooky experiences. Though I’ve never seen a ghost, been probed by an alien, or been fondled by a demon, I’ve encountered some peculiar things in my 30 years on this earth.
Here’s part 1:
The summer after 8th grade, my friends and I decided to visit the supposedly haunted statues of “The Heads of Lakepoint” [Insert spooky sounds].
As the story goes, a wealthy set of parents left their children – a boy and a girl – with a babysitter one night while they went out for dinner. But instead of a fun-filled night of movies and popcorn, the kids and the sitter were terrorized by a murderous maniac. The evil man tied up the babysitter and tortured her while the kids watched in grim horror. Deciding to make a run for it, the children bolted out the back door and made a break for the large brick fence surrounding the property. Unfortunately, the killer was in close pursuit and shot them both in the back as they tried to hop the fence. As would any parent in that situation, the father did not handle it well. He went partially crazy and built statues of his deceased children climbing the brick wall. The statues heads/faces could be seen from the other side of the fence. Pretty crazy right!
Truth be told, I never read or saw a single credible source that proves that story is true. But, those statues do, in fact, exist. And you can see their heads peaking over the giant brick fence.
It was pretty common practice for a young man to take his girlfriend to “The Heads” to trick her into clinging on to him for dear life out of fear of the unknown – naturally a young girl’s father wouldn’t be very approving of some dumbass kid taking his daughter to a place nicknamed “The Heads.” It was also pretty typical for groups of teenaged boys to pay the statues a visit and show off how tough they were. My story falls in the latter category.
I can’t recall who all was exactly there, but I believe our group consisted of my friends Kyle, Ronnie, Behnam, Luke, other Mark, and me. We were having a sleepover at Kyle’s house, and since he lived pretty close to “The Heads,” we decided we’d take a nice little summer stroll on over. As we traveled to our destination, we acted as if we had balls as big as boulders. We weren’t scared of nothin’! But as we neared our objective, our boisterous confidence shrunk big time (along with our boulder-sized anatomy).
Finally, the spot where the heads loomed was in sight. The closer we got, the slower our steps became. We inched forward until we could see the outline of heads. And that’s when it became really scary. All the stories and rumors we’d heard attacked our brains and made each of us think we heard things that weren’t really there.
The group stopped about twenty or so yards from the fence, but we could now all clearly see the faces in the statues. The longer we stayed there and let our eyes adjust to the darkness, the clearer we could see them.
A couple of brave souls in our group ventured right on up to the fence. They gave it a good pat and looked back at us as if to mock our cowardice. To throw things in our wussy faces even harder, the two climbed their way on up and sat on the thick brick structure separating us from the property. And they didn’t stop there. They scooted right on over to those statues and stared them right in their cold, dead(ish) statue eyes.
The nerds in the group (i.e. the ones who didn’t climb the fence) stood back in anxious horror. Until of course we realized that nothing was going to happen. The longer we stood there and the longer our brave pals remained up near the statues, the less scared we became. Heck, I even managed to convince myself to go up to the fence and get a better look. Our confidence was returning to a bolder state after several minutes, and we were back to laughing about and even mocking the stories behind the statues.
But then something very peculiar happened. I let out a breath. And realized I could see that breath. And I remembered that this was not normal. This was the beginning of summer mind you, and even when it “cooled off” in the evenings, the temperature was still in the low 80s. Why the hell am I seeing my breath and why the hell does it feel a lot colder?
“Guys! Look at this.” But it was too late. Most of the other guys had already noticed their own visible breath too.
Then, in one single unified motion, we turned our heads to look up at the statues. I kid you not, we all – every single one of us – saw a green glow in the eyes of the statues. We paused for a second that seemed like an eternity.
And then we ran. We ran faster than we’d ever run before! In fact, I’m pretty sure I was going so fast that my feet never even touched the pavement.
After several hundred yards of fear-filled fleeing, we slowed down to catch our breath. And then we just laughed. We were all so relived to be away from “The Heads”, but I think we were also elated to have been through such a rush of an experience.
We compared our recollections of what happened, and we couldn’t come up with a rational explanation for what had happened. We could all see our breath and we could all see the creepy green glow in the statues’ eyes. I’m sure there is a reasonable rationalization for what happened, but to this day, I still don’t have clue as to what it could be.
But if you think you can solve the mystery behind these spooky heads, you should visit them for yourself.
…I dare you!