Scary & Freaky stories: The Paranormal World

The Path of Dead Roses

I wasn’t like the other girls and there was never a shortage of those willing to remind me as to why. I was rangy, completely devoid of grace and just not pleasing to look at. The clothes I wore were better suited to boys, but they were better than nothing, I suppose, I was used to the name-calling and the tricks the other kids played on me, but still I felt cheated somehow. Cheated because I didn’t have anyone that I could talk to about it, someone to tell me that it would be okay, maybe even explain to me why people are so cruel. Daddy didn’t say much and I didn’t have a mother, so I was pretty much on my own. Daddy cared about me in his own way, but he didn’t have much left over for me, he was doing his own dance with what haunted him.

I loved the summer because it offered me room to breathe if only for a few short months. I could let the mean words pass through me and get myself ready for more in the fall. But things would change this summer, or at least I would. I’ve heard people talk about ghosts, and how they are really just a reflection of us or they represent our greatest fears. I’m not sure about that but I know that life is full of twists and turns and we go through things that change us along the way. Something went through me that summer, and it would cause me to believe in something I never thought I would, myself.

Some days I would walk down to the church and help Pastor Dan with the garden. I seemed to have a flair for gardening; at least Pastor Dan said I did. He would let me borrow some of his gardening books and over the years he had given me a rose plant or two. When I started the garden it didn’t look like much, the roses were as scraggy as I was, but things change. I planted each rose bush and took care of them and before I knew it they had grown into something beautiful, maybe there was hope for me yet.

I felt things that summer that I had never felt before, Pastor Dan said it was because I was turning into a young woman, which scared me because I wasn’t sure how to do that. How would I know what to do, worse yet, what if I did it wrong and people laughed. The other kids teased me as it was, being gangly only added to the problem. I tried to hold my head up but sometimes I couldn’t and it felt as though someone was stroking my hair, ever so gently, but when I looked there was no one there. Sometimes when I would sit in the swing with my eyes closed I would feel someone push me. I asked Pastor Dan about it, at first I thought maybe it was God. But certainly God has better things to do than stoke my hair and push me on the swing. I wanted to ask him what he thought about ghosts and if he thought a house could be haunted, but I could never work up the courage.

I didn’t think our house was haunted but something about it wasn’t quite right. I’m not sure why I kept going into the room, it was always so cold and still. Even in the middle of a Southern heat wave, the room was frightfully cold. I knew why it was cold but it had nothing to do with the weather, it had to do with love. There were mementos stored in tattered, cardboard boxes, meant to remain hidden from view, but there are some things you just can’t hide. Some things you can’t see even though they are right in front of you. The boxes contained pieces of a lost life and a love that refused to grow cold. Sometimes I would gather up my courage and look through the boxes that smelled of the past and of timeless hurt.

Some of the photographs were of my mother, I barely remember her because she didn’t stay long enough for me to get to know her. I was never sure if it was me or something else that drove her away, but I figured I would find out one day. Daddy never talked about it and I knew better than to ask. I guess they looked happy in the wedding pictures, at least they were smiling, but that doesn’t really mean anything. People always pretend and smiles seem to hide even the deepest pain.

There were scattered pictures of another woman in one of the boxes, I desperately wanted to ask who she was, but didn’t. Her long, straight hair covered part of her face and whenever I looked at her pictures I would get butterflies in the pit of my stomach. Her head was always down in the pictures and I wondered if she was sad or just camera shy, like I was. On the back of one of her pictures someone wrote, “It was because she was beautiful and I was not, and I had to die to make you notice”. I wondered what it meant. I wouldn’t have to wait too long to find out.