Jessica Williams

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Haunted House-The Unicorns

DRIP. DRIP. DRIP.

I was in high school and I was stuffed into the car, a Jeep, with a bunch of my friends on Halloween night. I was dressed like a hippie, and everyone else was dressed in costumes too, but it was so long ago, I can’t remember them. I think we must have been desperate to come of age, because the feeling of liberation was tangible, but there was also frantic and ignored sadness, and none of us were talking about how this was the first year we didn’t trick or treat. Alcohol was still exciting then, and I believe one of my companions tried their first (of many) cigarettes that night.

The driver of the car was not really our friend but she was older and she could drive what are you going to do, and she was a bit reluctant when I told her about the haunted Vanderlip Mansion, but she eventually took us there, and we talked our way into the gated area of the Palos Verdes Estates by explaining that we were guests at a party a teenage celebrity was having at his house up the way. I can’t remember who it was.

None of us had any way of using the internet on our phones, as that was a relatively new thing at the time, and so we drove around through the dark wooded hills for almost an hour with the windows down, letting the cold air and the quiet atmosphere outside calm us, before we found the gates to the old mansion. The local rumor was that Frank Vanderlip, “The Father of Palos Verdes”, murdered his family, or put his insane daughter away, or something else I don’t know what for sure.

My friend who visited the year before told me about a group of ghost dogs and a vanishing horse he saw, and so this was in our minds as our Jeep rolled slowly across the gravel onto the grounds. About 100 yards in, we came to a turnaround, with a locked gate ahead, and we had no choice but to head back the way we came.

The driver especially was disappointed, and she was busy telling all about it when the rest of us noticed what look like a white-haired old woman in a nightgown, who was standing quietly near the low brick post on one side of the gate. If she was there when we first got there, we would have driven right past her. None of us made a sound as we slowly drove past and away, and we were almost a mile from the grounds before we exhaled and laughed the nerves away.

We spent the rest of the night drinking and laying on tables in the park, and I couldn’t tell the girl I loved how I felt. I got home early, and fell asleep to The Twilight Zone.

This alone was scary enough, but just now, as I was typing this, I ran a quick google search on Vanderlip to confirm the proper spelling, and one of the pages I found mentions a common ghostly sighting: an old white-haired man, who wanders the grounds in a nightgown.

SHIVERS SLITHER SIDEWAYS ON OUR SPINES.

I Remember This Well. Happy Halloween, Spookies.