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Absence of Light, and Occurrence of Time: Virginia Ghost Story

 True story of unexplained paranormal phenomena in a Virginia suburb. Written by Benjamin Stevens.

My friends and I will never forget our most eerie night together, intertwined into an everyday regular rural neighbourhood. The events that I will be describing are entirely true, with multiple witnesses and multiple happenings. This writing will show you about a possible curse, which may or may not be transferable by the simple telling of the story.

As most juvenile delinquents do, my friends and I liked to explore the neighbourhood on occasion, and loiter at the local park. Our neighbourhood was in an average rural setting in Virginia, with the occasional section of wooded areas in between houses. On my 15th birthday, I had a party and invited my four best friends as usual, Seth, Isaiah, Matt, and Anthony. However this time, we decided to go explore the Mission Township park during the night for a while.

We readied our backpacks with our snacks, soda, and other supplies that all teenage boys thought were necessary. We left my house at 12:34 A.M and started heading toward the park, which is a mile and a half away. As we got out of my backyard toward the road, all of my neighbor’s yard lights turned on. This didn’t surprise us at first. Seth suggested that there must have been some kind of sensor to detect movements. I lead the way toward the park, walking slow and quiet, so we wouldn’t wake any neighborhood creatures. We came around the first corner that had a street light, which was on the side of the road that was closer to my house. We checked the time on our watches underneath the light. Right then, the unexplainable began happening. It was 1:11 A.M. The light above us burnt out and shot sparks across the road in the direction of the park. While Anthony only laughed, the rest of us jumped back from the loud noise. After pondering the freaky light post for a while, we decided we were going to continue walking and just ignore what had happened, although the strange occurrence still lurked in the back of our heads.

As my friends and I drew closer to the house opposite of the corner, I noticed something through the rows of trees that made up the tree farm to our right. There was a bright yellow light at the end of the horizon. I looked across the road to my left, through the woods and across a lake, and the same bright yellow light was there, but on the opposite horizon. A bolt of fear shot through my spine. I checked my phone to distract myself from looking scared to my friends. It was 1:23 A.M. I began to see that there was something going on that was very unusual, but I continued to keep it to myself. I looked toward the next house in curiosity of more strange things happening, but all I saw was a dim LED yard light, and a large lakefront house behind it. We rounded the corner and got close to the house, and the light shut off. We all stood there in silence, listening for anybody who might come out of the house to tell us to go home. There was nothing; absolute silence.

Lamp post at night

The silence I heard struck myself more than it did my friends, because in my neighbourhood, there always seemed to be some type of background noise. Whether it be the wind, the lake, generators, or nocturnal creatures of the woods, the noise was always there. At that point of hush, I began to hurry towards the park, as if it was going to be some kind of shelter from the newly discovered eeriness of my neighbourhood.

My friends followed closely, as they began to see more and more spooky things happening to themselves. We approached the next house on our right which had a light on inside it. We looked at each other as if we know what was going to happen. We slowed down when we drew close to the house, and watched very carefully to see what would happen next as we continued down the road.

When the light inside the house turned off just like the previous lights, my friends and I began to jog. The next house had an outdoor light also. When we passed that house, we began sprinting as that light also shut off. With about half of a mile left to go, and none of us being conditioned for a run while carrying backpacks, there was no way we could continue at our speed. Before too long, Isaiah tripped and fell. Seth went back to help him, as Matt, Anthony and I looked back to see the lights behind us turning back on. One at a time, in our direction, the lights came back on. Our bodies froze with fear instantaneously. I am positive that this was the most terrorized that I had ever seen my friends, or been myself.

Luckily, the lights stopped turning back on before they got to us. Seth, being the Vulcan of the group, tried to use logic and reasoning to come up with why the lights seemed to be avoiding us. Matt and I just wanted to go back home, but the other three insisted to get to the park. Majority rules. We agreed to finish our journey to the park, staying as calm as possible on our way. We also decided to stay there until daylight.

Tentatively, we made our way toward the park again. The walk felt as if we were walking for miles. Just as I suspected, every light that we passed had turned off as we walked by. I checked the time. It was 2:22 A.M. The hair on my neck refused to recline. As we came close, I saw six sets of lamp posts that illuminated the park. Would they also burn out? Although we did not know why the light was avoiding us, we were horrified of what would happen if we were to tarry around the lights for too long. This was when I realized that every time we would check the time, it would either show repeating numbers, consecutive numbers, or reversible numbers.

We walked into the park worried about what might happen to us. We sat down at a picnic table under the roof of the large gathering area in the centre of the park. I took out snacks from my backpack and started nibbling, I wanted to eat, but i couldn’t out of nervousness. My watch read 2:34, which would excited me, but my adrenaline had already run out. The lights around us slowly began to die out. I just simply closed my eyes to avoid what was going to happen, but it turned out, everyone closed their eyes. We woke up a little bit before dawn, at precisely 4:56. We walked home talking about the crazy night, constantly checking the time, but whenever we would do so purposely, the time was not lined up like it had been before.

Later, at Matt’s birthday party, we had a serious meeting and discussed if it was going to keep happening to us if we went out at night again. We tried to go out that night, but was discouraged after his own yard light shut off as soon as we opened the door and saw that the time was 11:11. Since then, anytime my friends and I are together, we stay inside and watch the time closely to see if anything happens at the correlating times. We still don’t know why these things happened, or what they meant.

-THE END-

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