The Haunted Trunk

Before the advent of television, there was the great art of storytelling, and nothing incites the imagination and heightens the heartbeat like stories of the paranormal. Picture if you will, three or four children of sundry ages huddled in a corner and hanging on to every word, as old men sit around the kitchen table, “spinning” their tales of ghastly encounters, each told with the sincerity of the parson’s Sunday morning sermon. Is it any wonder than that children were often afraid of going to sleep in a darkened room, or even one with the flickering light of a small Kerosene oil lamp casting its eerie shadows.

It was bedtime and the mother had closed the lid on the old trunk that lay in a corner of the bedroom, and carefully laid the small lamp on its cover. Ascending the stairs to his bedroom always brought back memories of these stories of grisly confrontations, so after kneeling to say his prayers, the almost nine year old boy, was soon under the covers and trying very hard to think of something besides the perhaps headless apparition that might be just outside his bedroom door. On this night however, the monster was not outside the door, but in the bedroom itself!

He had been in bed for less than five minutes when he first heard it, a sort of bumping noise that he knew was coming from there in the room. Startled, he glanced around and suddenly let out a horrifying scream. The lamp on the trunk cover was in great danger of toppling over as some mysterious creature that had been entombed in the trunk, or so his childlike mind imagined, had awakened from its slumber, and was now attempting to make its escape. The almost bloodcurdling scream had so startled the mother that she stood motionless, and it remained for the father, taking the stairs in quick strides, to pick up the lamp and allow the equally terrified cat to escape from its prison.