Sleepless nights

I just finished reading the newest blog post on Hyperbole and a Half. It was entitled The Scariest Story, I encourage you to read it, it's really comical. It got me thinking of my own childhood nightmares, and I thought share the cause of some of them to you.

Possibly the most frightening experience of my life happened one October when I was about eight years old. My aunt had taken my sister (who was 6 at the time) and me, along with some of her friends children to what she thought was a hayride. When we got there we found out that the hayride was in fact next weekend, and that the haunted cornfield was scheduled for that night. My sister was a huge fan of scary stories, so she insisted that we do the haunted cornfield, since we were there already. I agreed, because I didn't want to be a party pooper. The other girls we were with weren't to excited about it, but they agreed as well. We waited in line for a half an hour. We finally got to the corn maze, and walked about 6 feet in, there was a wire that shocked people as you walked by. The older girls, and the adults in our thought it was funny, but my sister and I, begin considerably smaller than everyone else thought the shock was kind of painful. This was not of too a good start. We walked a few more feet and someone jumped out, it scared me, but not as much as the girl who was about 12. She screamed and started freaking out. It was relativly quite for a while, except for the occasional nerve wracking rustle of the corn leaves. Suddenly someone with a running chain saw ran across the opening. There was a lot of screaming, and I was honestly concerned with my saftey, I mean, what if he tripped!? A few more things happened, and our whole group was terrified, but somewhat enjoying ourselves. Until my sister's ankle was grabbed. A hand shot out from corn field and latched on to her, the owner of the hand did not realize the owner of the ankle was a six year old, and pulled with too much force. My sister tumbled to the ground, not quite catching herself with her hands. She started bawling, the owner of the hand came out of the cornfield to apologize. You can imagine how that went over, when a grusemly clad, tall man comes at a hysterical six year old. She screamed bloody murder and leaped in to my aunts arms. This was suddenly not fun anymore. The rest of our group went ahead, and my aunt tried to find a way out, we decided to go forward, because we figured the maze couldn't be that much longer. We were wrong. It was so much longer. Luckily we found someone who was normally dressed who could take us out on a short cut. My aunt brought us hot choclate to calm us down.

 My parents were not happy when we got home, because we both slept on their bedroom floor for the next few nights.

Most haunted houses, and corn mazes don't allow the employes to touch people who come by anymore. I can understand why.