Note: If you live in Columbia, you may know what house I'm talking about. Please be aware that while the house exists, and the story is inspired by a real fear and a real tract and a real childhood belief, the story itself is fiction. As far as I know, there are no witches in Columbia, and all our old ladies, even those from away, are nice people.
Halloween
The Halloween when I was seven years old, I finally
understood why I wasn't allowed to trick-or-treat.
Our church gave all of us copies of a Jack Chick tracts
about the dangers of Halloween, and I read it quite credulously, and learned
that witches were real, not make-believe, as I had previously thought, and were
in direct and constant connection with Satan.
On Halloween, witches used the evil of the night to draw
children into their clutches, feeding them apples with glass shard, candy with
needles, and, if they were lucky, drawing them into their covens, adding to
Satan’s army.
The tract included a picture of the house where some of
these witches lived, and in the way of children, who believe their own little
lives are the whole world, I understood it to be a house in my town.
After some study, I worked out which house it was. The house didn't look exactly like the one in the tract, but it was close enough for drawings, and naturally, I developed a healthy terror of the house.
I never saw anyone come or go from it, but it must contain
witches, because my church had said so, or at least, I’d understood my church
to say so.
The house was at the corner of Martha Street and Road
Street, and I did not have to pass it in my daily walk from my grandmother’s
house to my own home, but I usually did walk that way (unless it was getting
dark out) so that I could look at it and shudder in the amount of terror that
comes from knowing, on one level, that a scary story is absolutely true, while
knowing on another level that it mustn’t be.
There was never anyone there – not that I saw then, anyway.
[Photo Credit: Jack Chick]
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