As an only child raised by a single mom, I’d often spend Halloween nights at my grandparents’ house. We’d arrive after the rounds of both small towns – where my mom and I lived, and where my grandparents lived – and I’d proceed to gorge on whatever it was I pulled out of the bag first. My grandparents would get the Witches Treats toffees, my mother would get the hard candies like raspberry kisses and lemon drops. I’d get the rest, after it being thoroughly examined of course.

Absolutely wired on sugar, I’d have a half hour of TV, then a bath and bed. The routine was the same every year except one – the year we were moving in next door to my grandparents.

During the ten-minute ride from one town to the other, I became slightly feverish. After much pleading and many tears, mom let me go around the few houses with my grandfather anyway, and I was right good and sick by the time we returned to the house. One look down my throat told them it was my tonsils, but they weren’t inflamed enough to warrant serious worry. After a hot bath, chicken noodle soup, toast and tea, I was sent on up to bed.

At two stories, with five bedrooms upstairs, my grandparent’s home was your typical mid-1800′s farmhouse. I hated going upstairs alone; the floors creaked, the one light bulb at the head of the hallway was probably only 40 watts and seemed to cast strange shadows everywhere, but only for about five feet. The rest of the stairway and hall were dark; the little light from the full moon seeping through the window only accentuating those shadows rather than making them disappear. I turned the corner at the top of the stairs and stepped into the first ring of darkness on the upper floor.

When my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I looked towards my door and gasped. At the very end of the hall was an old Indian chief, dressed in rawhide leggings and wearing a full headdress. We stood looking at each other for barely a moment; when he raised his arm and pointed towards me, I screamed.

I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t stop screaming.

A bang from downstairs shocked me enough to get my feet moving. I didn’t stop to take the curve to the first landing (where the New Bedlam mirror resided), I leaped over the railing and landed on my backside half-way down the main stairwell. Before I knew it, I was almost out the front door of the house, and ran into my grandfather. He had been in the basement of our new house, and had heard me screaming. In what seemed like seconds to me, he made it from our house to his. In reality, it had been about three minutes.

The adults tried to tell me it was nothing more than candy and the fever, but they weren’t the ones to see the chief standing at the end of the hallway. Turns out, I wasn’t the only one to have seen him over the years, some of my cousins and an aunt had seen him too.

Until the day they tore the house down, I refused to walk down that hallway at night, until someone had turned on the light in my bedroom and all those between it and the stairs.