Tell Me Something Strange

Thanks to my dear friend Tess, who finally motivated me to tell this creepy tale.

There was a period of about a year, when I worked at a restaurant. I used to eat my lunch with two women who worked doing some sort of accounting related stuff. I didnt care for their company but it would have been impolite to sit alone when I was always invited to eat with them. Soon after I started work, one of the women, Laura, began recounting to us odd things about the house she had just recently moved into.

Laura was in her late thirties or early forties. She was married and had a four year old daughter. From the first day of sleeping in the house, the daughter, who had her own room, kept telling her mother about The Indian. She said The Indian kept coming to play with her, and to show her things. Laura was puzzled and asked her daughter how she knew her new friend was an Indian. The daughter said it was because he had paint all over his face.

Laura and her husband had made friends with a homeless man the previous year. When they ran into him around town they would invite him for dinner and to spend the night at their house. This day, Laura saw the man while coming out of the market and offered to take him home with her, to the new house, and he could sleep over. He agreed. They had dinner and Laura made a bed for him on their couch. The following morning when the family awoke the man was nowhere to be found, no note, no nothing. This was highly unlike him and it unnerved Laura and her husband greatly.

A month or so went by. They spoke of wine and shoes and tv sitcoms and I ate my lunch and smiled and nodded in the appropriate places.


Sometime after that month passed into memory, Laura told us she had finally run into the homeless man. She inquired as to why he left that night and expressed their concern and alarm. The man told the following story:

He wasnt able to sleep well that night. It was an unfamiliar place and he kept having feelings of anxiety. While sitting, up on the couch, which was located just underneath a large picture window in the living room. The window had curtains on it, the kind that have the two panels that meet in the middle. They were a little small, and didnt actually meet in the middle though. He saw something move just between the space of the curtains. He parted them a bit more, and looked out, seeing nothing. Just as he was backing away from looking, a face appeared in the window. He recoiled in horror upon seeing it and described it as having the sort of face paint on that a clown would have, however, the face was filthy and looked, literally, part rotted. The colors werent as bright or tangible looking as a normal, real person's would have been, he remarked. The man said the owner of the face seemed to look at him, no eyes were sharply visible, then it vanished. The main waited for morning to come, then hastily left the house. He told Laura he would never go near the house again.

Meanwhile, the daughter kept talking about The Indian.

One day, before dinner, Laura had been out in the garden, and came in through the sliding glass door that was the entry/exit into the garden from the living room. Her daughter was outside playing on a tire swing in the yard. She left the door open all the way, as she was going to be returning momentarily and, wanted to be able to hear the daughter. When she returned to go though the door, perhaps two minutes later, not only had the glass door been shut completely, but it was locked and could only be done so from the interior of the house. She tried again and again to open it, to no avail. She left the door to find an object in the kitchen to try to pry the lock open with and, when she returned, the door was unlocked.

Almost one year later, from my first hearing of these accounts, which no one had really strung together as related, save for me which I kept to myself, Laura didnt come to work. At the end of the week I found out why. The family had been sleeping at night already for a few hours. Laura and her husband in their room and the daughter in hers. Laura awoke first, to the smell of smoke, her husband next. They both claimed something was forcibly holding them down, and neither of them could create any audible noise vocally. Firefighters finally axed down the door and pulled the family out. The fire started in the garage. The investigators never found a cause.

So, your turn...tell me something strange. I promise to sit quietly and not to fidget.