I’m young. Well, too young to witness the things that I have seen in my lifetime. I live in a small typical neighborhood in the suburbs surrounding the city. Brown Avenue…is the street I live on and the place where I saw something that will haunt me for the rest of my life. Let me tell you a little more about the world around me before I share the details of my life-changing event. Growing up in my house it is my mom, my dad, and I. My best friend Jenny lives next door. Our houses are at the end of a road, so we don’t have any other neighbors except for the small house across the street. A man named Steven Paul lived in the house across the street. I have always found it weird when people have two first names. Steven Paul was no exception. He was weird.
Steven Paul mostly kept to himself. The only time we ever saw him was when he was quickly walking to his car or shoveling his driveway in the winter, but even then you couldn’t really see him under all of his hats, hoods and baggy clothing. His house was pretty close to the road. You could see him sitting inside watching his television, but I never really looked inside. Although the one time I did, I regretted it. It was October 16th. I watched Steven Paul die. I saw a hooded and masked man strangling him in his living room. To this day, the identity of the strangler is unknown. I have always felt that it must not have been his first time killing someone, that he is some sort of mastermind. He was clever and quick, and the police detectives didn’t find any leads, although I told them everything I had seen and what little I knew of Steven Paul. In fact, for all I know, 6 years later he could still be lurking around my neighborhood.
My best friend Jenny and I talk about this frequently. In fact, we have made a plan. Last week we hit all the local Wal-Mart’s and stores that would have anything spy related. We know it might seem tacky, and it wasn’t cheap, but we were sick of living in fear and decided to monitor the neighborhood. We are now 15 years old, and we want some answers. We set video cameras up on the street and are doing a little detective work.
Yesterday, we asked other people living in the area what they remember about Steven Paul and the night he was killed. No one really seems to remember anything. No one in town seems to care who killed Steven Paul. Maybe it was because no one really cared about him, or maybe there is something else to this story that we do not know. Jenny and I have decided that we will solve this case by ourselves.
Today we began reviewing the tapes from our video camera. No one is living at Steven Paul’s house. In fact, no one has lived there since he died. But, Jenny and I both notice that during the night, dim lights seem to be on inside the house, and it appears that there are shadows moving inside.
That’s when things got weird. Today, several people in town tried to stop our snooping, and everyone seems to have stopped talking to us. No one is helping us in any way at all. We have decided to take a route that we have not thought of before. We are going to find out about his past. We are at the library searching for information. We figured the library is our best bet. We learn that the Paul family had been living in that house for as long as anyone can remember. But, when we search for books about his family, we can’t find much. We do find a book about a man who must have been Steven Paul’s great great grandpa. His name was also Steven Paul. He lived in the early 1900’s. There is a picture of him in the book when he was a young man. He had blue eyes and a crooked smile. He had a faint, light red mustache and bushy red eyebrows. As we continued down the page, we learned that he was killed in 1920 in his home. The same house that his great great grandson was killed in six years ago. We can’t believe it. Maybe there is some type of family curse. We don’t know what to think. Jenny and I quickly run home from the library to her house. We get on her laptop as quickly as we can and type in Steven Paul’s name. We get the same picture and the same information, except for one more piece of information. At the bottom of the page there is a picture of the house, and it says that no one has lived in it since his death in 1920. Jenny and I are freaking out. The book has to be wrong because I saw Steven Paul die six years ago. My mind was now riddled with questions I didn’t know what to think. Jenny suggests that we go into the house and explore and see if we can find some answers. When night comes and Jenny’s mother is asleep. We slowly creep outside and run across the street. We stop short at the end of the driveway. I replay the day when I watched him die over and over again in my head. I’m not sure I can do this. I don’t know if I can make it to the front door and go inside. Thank goodness Jenny is with me, she is much more adventurous and daring then I am. She heads to the door. There was no way I was going to stand outside alone so I follow her inside.
I was not prepared for what happens next. The house is empty. The house has nothing in it besides the hardwood floors, ceiling lights and an occasional cobweb in the corner. It is deserted. Jenny is talking about how they must have cleared out all Steven Paul’s belongs after his death. But, for some reason, this doesn’t sound right to me. There is something very weird about this house. I want to get out. I can’t take being in here anymore. I run to the front door and then hear a quick, sharp scream behind me. I turn around as quickly as I can to see Jenny hovering in the corner. The man from the book in the library is standing in the center of the room, as clear as day. The man, Steven Paul, that was said to have died almost one hundred years ago.
I ask him why he is into the hooded figure that I watched kill the quiet man from across the street. I don’t know what to do. I begin to run full speed through the house, when I enter the kitchen I find Steven Paul’s dead body laying on the floor. I am now terrified, I feel like I have just entered a horror movie. Jenny runs out of the back door screaming and I realize I am now on my own. I scream at the hooded figure as he comes closer. I flail and yelled at the top of my lungs. He just stands there and chuckles at me. Then I realize that he isn’t real. He is a ghost, haunting the house. I can’t decide if this makes me more or less terrified of the situation.
He begins to speak calmly and quietly. His voice is soothing. He explains that he is Steven’s great great grandfather. He killed his son, who was also named Steven Paul, in this same house. I hear his say that killing gives him strength and power. That it delays his time on earth before going to hell. He tells me that he is going to kill me. I close my eyes and let out the loudest blood-curdling scream I can muster. Suddenly I feel all the air get sucked out of my body and everything goes black.
I open my eyes and look down on my own body. I am dead. I am writing this story from the afterlife. I hope someone reads this. I want to make sure no one else goes into that house and suffers the same fate I did. If you are reading this, please take caution and stay away from the house on the corner of Brown Avenue.