Category: Spirits

Spirits – a horror story (Part four of five)

Before I called 911, Eli and I went through what we would tell the police. It was an accident. Grandpa tripped and fell. Daddy tried to help. They questioned me and Eli separately, but whatever the boy had seen, he told them the right thing. He was a good boy.

I put him to bed, then went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I vowed to prove my father wrong, to be a better father to Eli than my father had been to me. That Eli would never become like him. Like me. Alcoholism had plagued my family from time immemorial, like some ancient curse. But it would stop here.
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October 24, 2025
Spirits – a horror story (part three of five)

By the end of that October, I was back up to drinking a handle every three days. I’d stock up every time I went out to buy my father his cases of rum, then stash my extras in the basement, concealing them in the laundry room’s darkened alcove. I didn’t want to give my father the satisfaction of knowing that I was juicing almost as heavily as he was. When I’d finish a bottle, I’d hide it in the bottom of a laundry basket full of Eli’s clothes and bring it downstairs, switching it out for a new bottle and stashing the empty in the darkened alcove. Then I’d smuggle out the empties early in the morning on trash pickup day, while my father was passed out and before Eli woke up.
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October 17, 2025
Spirits – a horror story (part two of five)

Over the next few days, I tried my best to make the place habitable, enlisting Eli for help. We filled up garbage bag after garbage bag of empty rum bottles and moldy old microwave dinner trays. For the glasses full of cigarette butts, I had Eli hold out a colander, through which I’d dump the yellowish water, then we disposed of the waterlogged butts in trash bags.
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October 10, 2025
Spirits – a horror story (part one of five)

It was bedtime when my six-year-old son Eli whispered, “Daddy, I think your daddy is a ghost now.”
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October 3, 2025