I'm not young.

I'm not exactly old either.

Probably older than most of you reading this, though.

I grew up in a time before cell phones.

The internet was a pretty new thing.

Mostly didn't have places like this to share weird or scary stories.

I wish there had been something like that, though.

Maybe I would have gotten some advice or at least

had a better record than a spotty memory hazed over

with the alcohol and drug use of my 20s.

Honestly, I had mostly forgotten about the truth of this incident.

That is until recently, it all came flooding back like a nightmarish wave.

I think my brain protected me from the trauma, buried it so deep that it took a long time to come to the surface.

Oh, it's at the surface now, though. Now that it's back. I'm jumping ahead,

though, so let's start at the beginning. The year was 1996. It was 14 years old and living in a small California town.

My parents had purchased a house in the mountains.

My father had become disenfranchised with life in the city.

He wanted to go somewhere that our closest neighbor was nearly a mile away.

I can't say it made me or my sister Katie too terribly happy.

We lost all our friends and ended up in the small town school and involved an hour-long

bus ride to and from the campus. She made new friends quickly. She was two years older than me.

Pretty popular.

...