When Fall rolls around every year, there is a particular story that comes to mind. With the cooler weather and shifting shadows this week, this memory found its way to the surface of my mind again.
When I was about 8 or 9, my friend Zach and I thought we were invincible (a stage that most little boys go through). The fall of that particular year, we decided that we could not be scared by anything. We had boldly watched every episode that we could find of “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” (even the episode with the creepy clown). If R.L. Stine had written a book with a colorful cover and clever name, we had read it. In our minds we were unstoppable, to the point of making our little brothers miserable with the constant taunts of how big and bad we were. Our parents had heard all that they could take and collectively decided it was time to take us down a notch or two. Enter the “camping trip”.
Camping is used here in a very loose sense. The trip consisted of sleeping in tents in the backyard. We had looked forward to the outdoor experience all week, though they cautioned us that we may have to cancel because there had been a mishap with a prisoner transfer from the sheriff’s department to the Rocky Mount police. We were young and excited, so we dismissed this detail as irrelevant to our immediate buzz of activity. We gathered firewood, we roasted hot dogs, darkness settled in. We sat by the fire for what felt like an eternity of wonder-soaked bliss, watching the flames dance on the charring wood, feeling the heat on our faces in contrast with the brisk Fall air. When darkness had gotten sufficiently comfortable around us, it was time for ghost stories. Zach and I did our best to terrify our little brothers with our retelling of the scariest adventures we could remember from books and television, then it was time for the main event. My dad began the story of “Stump”.
In days gone by, people would heat their homes with firewood. This wood could be purchased on the side of the road by stopping, dropping a few dollars in a bucket and loading up the back of your truck with wood. There was a roadside stand of that nature operated by Stump. Early on an October evening a man stopped at Stump’s roadside outpost to pick up wood for his family on the way home from work. The sun was beginning to set and the area was a bit creepy, so the man was quick about the business of gathering the wood into the back of his truck when, suddenly, he heard the barking of dogs. Shortly thereafter, he heard a terrifying scream, immediately followed by the startling buzz of a chainsaw then silence. This was enough to spook the man, so he quickly climbed in his truck and drove away as fast as he could.
About an hour later, another man stopped at Stump’s outpost. This man placed his money in the bucket and began gathering wood from the pile. After a few minutes of loading the back of his truck, he heard the same sounds as the first man. Dogs barking, terrifying scream, the pop and crackle of a chainsaw, followed by silence. He was understandably rattled by the sounds, but wanted to make sure he got his money’s worth for the wood, so he loaded a couple more pieces into the back of his truck before leaving.
Two hours later, darkness had fallen on the roadside firewood stand and a third man pulled his truck to a stop, dropped a few dollars in the bucket and began loading timber into the back of his truck. He worked silently for about 20 minutes when he heard the barking of the pack of dogs. Undaunted from his task, the man continued working to fill the bed of his truck. Suddenly he heard the barking of the dogs again, much nearer. This startled him, but his truck still had room for more logs, so he picked up the pace. He noticed that the next log he grabbed felt strange. In the darkness he couldn’t get a good look at it, so he opened the passenger door of his truck to let the light from the cab give him a better view. In the light of the truck he was able to see that this wasn’t a log at all. It was a human leg! Just as the terrifying realization of what he was holding dawned on him, he heard the barking again. Only this time, the dogs were right behind him. Before he knew what was happening, the dogs had pounced on him, dragging him away from the truck into the darkness. Within the minute his screams were silenced by the raucous blade of the chainsaw when he experienced what the other men had only heard. He met Stump, the crazed lumberjack and his limbs were added to the next evening’s woodpile.
The story didn’t disappoint. Zach and I were on the edge of our camping chairs the entire time. The sickening conclusion of the story was enough to send our imaginations reeling. If you’re thinking to yourself that the story may have been a little too intense, keep waiting to see what happened next!
With the conclusion of one of the most terrifying things our young minds had ever heard, our parents told us it was time for bed, showed us their watches (which had been set forward to midnight), and everyone climbed into the tents. As we lay there in the darkness of the autumn night trying to calm our racing minds, we began to hear something unsettling. It was almost too faint to hear at first, but, as the sound continued, it sounded like a chainsaw. When you hear things after listening to a story like that, you do your best to dismiss them as a trick of your imagination, but what happened next put that possibility out of mind. My dad stuck his head in the flap of our tent and told us to stay inside, that someone was in the woods behind the house. As young boys, the first thing we did was to gather at the front of the tent to see what he meant.
Sure enough, there was a large man coming out of the woods wearing a mask, holding a chainsaw and handcuffs that still had the hands attached to them! The memory of the escaped prisoner flooded back to my mind, we had been told that he escaped by cutting off another prisoner’s hands. My dad grabbed the ax that had been used earlier in the night to chop firewood and ran to face the stranger from the woods. We quickly exited our tent! I remember seeing him swing the ax at the intruder and then I ran to hide inside the other tent. I was terrified. I curled up in a ball behind the tent flap so that if anyone came in after me the flap would cover my cowering body.
I remember thinking that if the murderous stranger from the woods killed everyone, maybe he wouldn’t know I was there, and I could wait and escape to my grandparents’ house. After a few minutes of clamor outside the tent, people started calling out for me. I was convinced that the intruder knew I was there and was making them find me before he killed all of us. I didn’t like the idea of dying, so I stayed put. They began searching the campsite for me. They looked in the tent. The flap successfully covered me.
After what seemed like decades, they began announcing that the whole thing was a joke, that the man in the woods was Zach’s dad, and that everything was okay. Eventually, I believed them and came out from hiding to discover that everyone knew what was going on except Zach and I. Needless to say, he and I learned that we did not have the ice in our veins that we once thought.
I haven’t slept outside since.
Adventures with the Morgans 