The Haunted Country Club Chap. 1 (Part 1)

     The haunted country club stood on the highest hill in the middle of town. Nobody dared to actually open it up as a country club because of all the unnatural things happening there. It had been fifty years since the country club was last opened in that building. The last owners were seen running from the building screaming, in the dead of night. There is a competition in my high school, Morning Sun, the seniors who are willing go into the country club and stay for as long as they can on Halloween. The starting time is 9:30 a.m., the longest anyone has stayed is midnight. The reward is three days off of school whenever you choose.

     It was ten day before Halloween, my class was having a lunch meeting to discuss the country club. Nadia, our class president, had been researching the country club. Getting information on who owned the building, who died there, how they died. Things like that. Nadia was a short, thin, blonde with brown eyes and a crooked smile. "Guys, get this. The country club wasn't built seventy years ago it was built eighty years ago by a Russian immigrant, uhh... Schinlaksuy Kabrokovvshuyn... At least I think that's how you say his name. Anyway, he built it because he wanted a building for his family to get together at. Sort of like a family reunion house. It was only used that way once. That was September 14, 1925. There weren't many relatives there. Just his brothers and sister and there kids. A month later he died from a snake bit. The used the building he built for his funeral."

     “How do you know all this?” Brandon, a tall, husky, red head asked. “I mean this isn’t in any of the history books.” Brandon was the class genius.

     “Well, my mom’s family has been here since 1915 and they wrote the newspaper for Matten county. I spent most of this past week in our attic looking through old newspapers and possible newspaper stories that were never printed. Anyway, the family moved to Ohio in 1928. The country club was left alone for nearly ten years. In 1935 a World War I veteran moved into the building and built onto it so he could live there and use the rest of the house as a country club. By then Morning Sun was starting to look like a town instead of a bunch of hills. Nobody around here really noticed that the building was there until the veteran built onto is so everyone assumed he built the whole thing.” Nadia stopped to take a bite of her tuna fish sandwich. The rest of us sat silently pondering what Nadia found out.

     “So what happened to the war veteran?” I asked after a long moment of silence. I knew what she was about to say and it wasn’t in any history books either.

     “Give me a second,” Nadia replied. “ This is where it gets weird. The veteran, John Benjamin, was usually seen once a day around the town. Well after a couple of years he was seen less and less. People assumed it was because he was getting older. By then he would have been fifty-four. In 1940 he stopped coming out of the house altogether. He kept the country club going but he was never seen. People figured he had fallen ill. But that wasn’t true. One day a reporter snuck back into the living quarters of the country club. he wanted to get a few snapshots of the now mysterious Mr. Benjamin. He opened the first door to his right and came upon a den. There was a high backed chair in the corner with its backed turned to the door. The reporter saw a head over the back of the chair. He crept forward and spun the chair around. Mr. Benjamin just sat there staring at the reporter for a few seconds he then stood up and glided through the wall. The reporter had taken a few pictures but when he saw the man walk through the wall he dropped his camera and ran out of there as fast as he could.

     He wrote his story but the editor, a cousin of mine, found the story so outrageous that he couldn’t print it without pictures. The reporter would not go back to that building alone so he took some of his friends with him. They entered the building through the country club side. Upon entering they came across a set of wet footprints walking from the living quarters to the door. The room they were standing in was the parlor. There was bar on the far side. Several tables were between that and a pool table. There was also a shuffle board and various other games scattered around the room. As the crossed between the tables the reporter gasped. There on the bar was his camera and a note.