The Witch

I was an incredibly frightenable child. Everything scared me. I don't know if it was because my dad always made us watch The X-Files right before bed every night, or because he also made us watch MASH and I'm not sure which one was worse.

My brother also didn't help. The most terrifying part of my childhood was when I had to get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. I'd have to cross over an alarmingly dark hallway to enter an abnormally long bathroom laid wall to wall with a minty green tile, not unlike what you'd see in a haunted hospital in some 1980's horror movie. A single bulb flickered over a cloudy mirror and even the toilet was particularly loud when flushed. Strategically, I'd wash my hands before flushing so I could bolt away from the thunderous whooshing, leap across the black-hole-hallway, and back to the safety of my bed. Although more often than not, my brother would hear me and while I was peeing, he'd race to my room, jump in the bed, pull up the covers, and laugh as I returned from the Amityville toilet to find a human body in my bed.

Everything scared me.

When we moved to Arizona, my parents divorced and we ended up in a two bedroom condo. My mother believed that I, as a teenage girl, needed more privacy so she gave me the room with its own bathroom while my brother took the smaller room and she took the living room sofa. Years went by with no X-Files, no traumatic trips to the bathroom, no MASH.

At fifteen, my best friend invited me to go see a movie with her and her mom after school. I didn't put it together that maybe my lack of scary moments in the recent years was due to circumstances. I thought maybe I'd grown up, maybe I'd changed. So I said yes, I would join her and her mom and together we would go see The Blair Witch Project after school.

I'm not a good enough writer to be able to explain the fear I felt in that theater. I watched the movie through a gap in my fingers as the terror sent me into a panic. I froze, hugging my knees close to my chest, thinking if I stayed very still, maybe I'd be safe.

Was it real? I thought as we exited the theater. It must have been real. It seemed so real.

They dropped me off well after dark. I lived on the second floor and the stairs were built with wide gaps; wide enough for a hand to reach through and grab my ankle. I sprinted up the stairs and fumbled with my keys to enter an empty apartment.

My mom worked the night shift at the telephone company and my brother was likely out at a friend's place, so in an effort to help, I turned on every light in every room and then headed into the kitchen to find something to eat. A tiny window just off to the side of the fridge looked out to a small balcony and I had an awful feeling that someone was out there. I stood a few feet from the window trying to hear any movement, but there was nothing. After several minutes, I decided I had to be sure. I had to peek out of the blinds and make sure no one was on our balcony. So very slowly, and very quietly, I inched over to the window until my face was right next to the blinds. With one finger, I lifted a single blind to see a pair of eyes staring right at me.

I flew backwards until my back hit the door to the laundry, my heart racing, a scream caught in my throat. It took all of three terrifying seconds to realize that the lights I had turned on had created an impressively strong reflection and I had been met with my own eyes in the window.

Angry and shaken, I sat down at our new computer and connected to the web to put this whole thing to rest. Determined to find out if the movie was real or not, I keyed in "Was the Blair Witch Project real?", pressed enter, and waited for my answer from the trusty internet.

Now I don't know if anyone reading this remembers the marketing for that movie, but the first thing that popped up was a very authentic missing poster, complete with a number to the Frederick County Sheriff's department and a plea to call with any information I might have.

Had someone been there to tell me it wasn't real, I surely would have pointed right at my monitor and exclaimed, "THEN HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THIS?!"

My heightened anxiety convinced me I should go try to find my brother as I clearly wasn't handling things well on my own. Determinedly, I zipped my hoodie, laced my sneakers, and stood in the living room, weighing my choices. On the one hand, finding my brother meant going outside alone in the dark. On the other hand, the Blair Witch was real and she was in my apartment.

I stood staring at the floor for a long time, trying to decide which was the better play when suddenly, the deafening sound of a brass band filled the room. It came crashing out of the corner of the room, distorted by the forceful volume. The perverted voice of my would-be murderer jovially called at me, "YEAH BABY!" and I felt my feet fly out of the apartment and down the stairs before I had the chance to realize it was our Austin Powers screen saver that had activated and someone (likely my brother) had turned the volume on our tiny speaker all the way up.

At the foot of the stairs, I caught my breath and reassured myself it was a completely different Michael Myers and there was no reason to be scared. I set off to find my brother only to return a half hour later with no luck.

Upon my return, I had a new plan. I was going to hoof it up the spooky stairs, head into the apartment, shut down the screen saver (which was still playing on a loop), then I'd call my mom at work and beg her to come home. We didn't have cell phones back then so my method of contacting her while she was at work was to dial 411 over and over and over again until I'd hear my mother's voice answer, "AT&T, how may I direct your call?"

I was halfway up the stairs when a sinking feeling alerted me that I had, in my haste to leave the apartment, forgotten my keys. Desperately I patted down each of my pockets but by the time I had reached the door, I realized that I was, in fact, locked out.

I curled up as small as I could, my back pressed to the corner of the doorway, my view a shadowy apartment complex, and listened to the sounds of "OH BEHAVE" and "DO I MAKE YOU RANDY, BABY? DO I?" for the rest of the night.