My final offering for Creepy Tales month is a true story of a haunted house and the crazy people who lived in it:  my family.

When I was young my family spent some time sharing a quaint old house with an elderly lady. She was cantankerous at first, but turned out to be nice enough once we got acquainted. The only problem with her was that she was dead.

Throughout my childhood my family moved constantly and, like a troupe of gypsies we dragged our house around behind us. Well, actually a big truck came and dragged our house away, we drove on ahead in the family car to prepare a place for it to be set up again in the new location. Continue reading “Things That Go Bump”

For the month of October I’ve been posting true life tales of adventure,  daring and creepiness. This one goes in a different direction from the last three: while a serpent is mentioned, it is not the main character.  It’s a true-life story I first published in 1987.

Fate is like an overly long serpent, twisting and coiling back upon itself until it seems certain to tie itself into knots. Somehow, it never does. I found myself snared in a bight of this serpent a few years ago. I was late for work. I took a short cut past the old airport and pushed the accelerator closer to the floor.

I drove a 1969 Thunderbird–then only five years old–with a 429 Thunderjet engine, high performance cams, valves and pistons. The car was too heavy to be any good at street drag racing but on a long haul it was one of the fastest cars around. I could make the long run to Chicago at 115 miles per hour with the engine just purring along. Twice–that I know of–I had flashed past a highway patrol car which was hiding off on the roadside. Neither time did they try to pursue. Continue reading “Twist of Fate”

It’s late October; the mountains are splashed with autumn red, gold, yellow and russet as the hardwood trees settle in for a long nap.  There is a bite of winter to the crisp nighttime air.

Most of the garden is slowing to a crawl if not wilting up entirely.  But not everything in the garden is going dormant. I have a fresh crop of lettuce, beets, squash, chard, Brussels sprouts and onions that have sprouted and will continue to grow and provide us with fresh vegetables well into the winter.  Winter gardening?  Outdoors?  Yes!  Continue reading “Autumn Arrives”

About this time three weeks ago I was dealing with a copperhead that came a-calling. Yesterday evening, Marie was out working in her flower gardens. I was inside reading. She stuck her head in the front door and said, “Snake!”

“Where?”

“Right here by the front steps.”

“Can you tell what kind it is?” By now I was up and heading for the door. Continue reading “The Second Snake”

Here’s another creepy tail of adventure for Halloween month.

I had completed my morning gardening chores, made my mail run, had lunch, gotten the riding mower out and was starting my mowing when I spotted a snake crawling out of a hole in the underpinning (skirting) of my workshop – a mobile home that was on the property when we bought it and served as our home until we were able to build a house. It looked a lot like a copperhead. Or at least what I remembered a copperhead to look like. But before I went into snake eradication mode I decided to do some fact checking: sometimes good snakes have coloring very similar to the bad snakes, and I don’t want to kill a King Snake because I mistook it for a viper. Continue reading “Encounter at Copperhead”