It was Halloween night. I was on my way home from a friend's party. The fog was as thick as pea soup. I soon approached the old, abandoned railroad track. A new track had been built some twenty years earlier, and since that time, this track had served as a place for younger kids to play or just hand out, until the night of the murders. Only a few years after the new track was built, two young teenage boys who were always seen playing by the track, disappeared. Shortly after the disappearance, one of the boys was found dead near the track, and his friend was never found.
My brother told me stories he had heard about other kids driving over the railroad tracks and then mysteriously disappearing. One story involved a teenage boy and girl. The boy had to drive his girlfriend home after a date, and he decided to take a shortcut. The next morning his car was found in the bushes about a half mile from the track. The boy and girl were never found, however they found the young girl's golden locket along the tracks.
Another story was told of a boy who lived in the area. He walked along the track every day after school, and he thought nothing of walking along the tracks with his friends at night. It was exactly one year after the young couple disappeared, Halloween night. The boy told his mother that he was going to a friend's house, but he never returned. The only trace left behind was the boy's red baseball cap.
As I thought of all these stories, I began to wonder, "What am I doing here? After all, it is Halloween night. This isn't the best night to take a shortcut." I locked the car doors and slowly drove over the old track. I then excellerated quickly. My heart raced. My hands shook with fright. At this point, whether the stories were truth or fiction, didn't really matter to me. I was getting out of there either way.
Everything was dark. There were no street lights in sight, only trees. It was difficult to try and see the road for the extremelthick fog. But everything, so far, seemed okay. I was almost out of the area. Then suddenly I gasped for air and felt my heart skip a beat as I slammed on the brakes. A girl in a white dress with blond hair stood there in the middle of the road. Then suddenly, as I slammed on the brakes, she just seemed to disappear. "Oh no! I've hit her!" I said aloud to myself. I unbuckled my seat belt, unlocked the car doors, and got out of the car, but when I came to the frong of the car nobody was there. Was I seeing things? Had my fear struck me with so much grief that my mind was now playing tricks on my? No, she was there. I saw her.
I turned around to get back in my car and gasped when I found myself face to face with the blond girl. I was so startled that once again my hear was racing. I felt a cold, chilling breeze on my neck. I felt a pain in my side, and my throat was so dry, I couldn't even speak.
"Can you help me?" The girl asked. "I have to get home."
I took a deep breath to compose myself and asked her, "What are you doing out here?"
The girl explained that she was waiting for her boyfriend. They'd had car trouble, and he had gone for help. At first I wondered why her boyfriend would leave her out here alone in the middle of nowhere. I then wondered why she needed my help.
"I just live up the," she said. "Could you take me home?"
Well, normally I would never give a ride to someone whom I had never met, but she looked very harmless, not to mention scared. I also considered the fact that if I were her, I would hate to be left out here alone, so I told her to hop in.
She walked over to the other side of the car and got in. I opened my car door. I cranked up the car and looked over to my right only to find an empty seat. I turned to look in the backseat. I wasn't really looking for anything, just really confirming the fact that I was now alone in the car. The situation was eerie, but I saw point in sitting around in the dark, so I left.
I got about half a mile up the road and saw police cars and an ambulance. The road was blocked, so I got out of my car and went to see what was going on. It seemed that a boy and girl had run off the road. I hear a man saying that the girl was dead, as they placed a young girl in a body bag. Before they completely closed the bag, I looked over and realized she was the girl I was just talking to, or the girl I thought I was talking to.
Suddenly I heard a boy's voice behind me. "It could have been you," a young boy, about my age, said. "If you'd gotten here ten minutes earlier."
"What are you talking about?" I asked suspiciously.
"It always happens to someone at eleven-thirty on Halloween night."
"It?" I asked.
"The Conductor's ghost," he answered. "It killed my friend. It got other people too. It got that girl. This old train conductor died in a train wreck, and since then, he's the the track and the area around it."
"Yeah right," I said, "And the I was just talking to is also a ghost, right?"
"Who are you talking to?" One of the policeman suddenly asked me.
"I'm talking to this guy," I answered. I turned back around to face the "person" I was talking to, only to find no one there.
That was a year ago. To this day I haven't been in that area at night, and when I pass by in the day, I can't help but think about that night. Were the boy and girl simply figments of my imagination, or were they ghost? And if they were ghosts, why were they talking to me? It will probably be something that I'll just never know, but I honestly hope that I never find out.