Back in high school, my friends and I had a hangout spot like no other.

It was this baseball field behind the abandoned grade school.

We always thought that we'd get there one day and there'd be a construction crew plowing

the whole place down, but they never came, at least not when we were kids.

We all thought it was because our town was just too damn poor to do it, which is probably

true, but it's not like it's a good real estate location either. It was built right along the woods, far away from most of the town.

It was essentially in the middle of nowhere, just like the rest of our town.

The reason we enjoyed going there so much was because no one else did.

People would occasionally break into the school and do a little graffiti here and there.

Sometimes the cops would show up, but they never came to the baseball field.

It was a safe haven for the friend group.

And that was really important because a lot of my friends didn't exactly have the best home lives,

especially one of them, Tim.

His mom would always call the cops on him for whatever reason she could possibly

conjure up that day. Yet when we were at the field, there was nothing they could do. We spent a lot of

summer nights sitting along the rusted out bleachers, smoking and talking about God knows what to pass

the time. I loved that place. We all did. Although, even before it happened, there was this one thing

that always creeped me out about the place. There was an old lamplight right along the bleachers

that somehow still worked. The town must have forgotten about that too. It was one of those lights

that emitted an orange hue, and since it was the only light

there, we'd be shrouded in it.

It didn't really light up a whole lot either.

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