This document is a personal narrative by Russ Barbee recounting several supernatural experiences from his childhood and teenage years. As a child, he claims to have seen Bigfoot walking through the woods near his home. Later, he found his deceased pet cat walking around after being buried, which terrified him. As a teenager, he and his friends used a Ouija board regularly and communicated with a spirit named Malachi who made accurate predictions. On one occasion, Barbee and his friends planned a prank at a haunted bridge by having Barbee dress up as Jason Voorhees to scare one of their friends, but Barbee was left alone at the bridge waiting and grew uneasy in the dark, isolated location.

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Russ Barbee
Erin Bond
English 306
3, November 2014
Halloween Tales
Today I am a man ruled by science. My beliefs are grounded in the idea that any truly
important mystery can be solved through scrupulous use of the scientific method: Question,
Experiment, Analysis, Conclusion. I no longer believe in goblins, unicorns or other fantastical
creatures and I see the world as, pretty much, magic free. But just because the supernatural is
essentially fodder for fiction does not mean my life is magic free. I have seen a bigfoot and
experienced the terror of a cat that would not stay dead. I have even seen a monster climb over
the railing of a haunted bridge and lunge at an unsuspecting teenager. I saw these things not in
the movies, not in dreams or stories, but in real life.
Bigfoot in my Neighborhood
The year is 1979 and I am four years old. Saturday mornings are cartoon time. I get up
early to watch Batman, Spider-Man, and Bugs Bunny. In the afternoon all the cartoons are done
and it’s time for ABC’s Wide World of Sports. For me, it’s time to go outside and play. I run
around the acre and a half that is my yard and make the oak trees my personal jungle gym.
Across the road from my house is a forest. Behind my yard is a tobacco field about two acres
across with another forest just behind that. There are no other kids in my neighborhood, so the
playing is totally up to me. If I choose to sit in the grass and stare into the woods for an hour I
can. Often, I do just that. It is on one of these lazy Saturday afternoons when I see him. Behind

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my house, just beyond the field, a lumbering giant covered in fur steps from the forest. It’s
walking on two legs like a man. It doesn’t notice me but I know what it is, I’ve seen it on TV.
That’s Bigfoot. After a few steps it looks around, crosses the ditch and vanishes into the forest
never to be seen again.
The Eighth Life of a Stray Cat
In 1985 the king of horror is Stephen King. His book Pet Sematary has been out for a few
years and it’s all about a cemetery that will resurrect the dead with disastrous results. I have not
yet discovered Pet Sematary but I like some of King’s movies. I’ve become a bit of a horror nerd
in the last six years. My pet is a tabby cat named Julie, but after discovering I’m allergic, we
have to get rid of her. She gets a good home with my Aunt Peggy.
After a few years, casual strays start to wander up to my house and stick around for a few
days. One charcoal gray cat with glowing yellow eyes eventually decides to stay for a few
weeks. I play with the cat – once he’s tame enough to catch – and take care of him. One cold
winter morning I find him dead in the yard. He’s stiff with rigor mortis and my dad and I bury
him in the garden.
A few days later, on her way home from college, my mom stops to get a loaf of bread.
That night when she is relaxing after a long day, she realizes she’s left the bread in the car. She
asks me to go out and get it. I’m ten years old and filled with the kind of energy that makes steps
something to leap from. So out I go. I open the door and leap from the top step to the carport. I
bound towards the passenger side of the car and come face to face with the cat we buried a few
days ago.

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Never in my life have I reversed course so quickly. All forward momentum is pulled back
at breakneck speed. I fall immediately on my ass on the hard concrete and continue a makeshift
backwards crabwalk. I’m oblivious to any pain from falling on the concrete because the cat is
walking towards me. The. Dead. Cat. Is. Walking. Towards. Me.
I crabwalk backwards into the door, banging it against the house. Struggling to my feet
with legs of quicksand, I make it into the house and yell to my parents and older sister, “That
dead cat is out there walking around!” Everyone stares at me like I’m an idiot. I am not an idiot, I
am ten years old and I know a zombie cat when I see one.
After the kind of explaining you only see in horror movies, I eventually get everyone
outside. The cat is still there, walking around meowing his familiar greeting. Same glowing
yellow eyes, same charcoal gray fur, except now it’s also covered in the dirt of the grave. My dad
gets a flashlight and we decide to check the grave in the garden. It’s empty. The place where the
cat was buried is now a feline-sized crater of loose earth. Of course, everyone is shocked. It’s not
every day you get to see a dead cat go for a stroll.
The Ouija Chronicles
After a seizure scare, the supernatural, if you can call it that, seemed to leave me alone. I
never saw another bigfoot or undead cat; never saw a ghost, poltergeist, or spiritual occurrence of
any kind. So by 1993 I started looking for the supernatural. I saw a movie titled Witchboard
about a girl who used a Ouija alone and became possessed by an evil spirit. I was frightened by a
lot of the ideas my mom’s church put in my head as a kid. One of those ideas was that a Ouija
was a portal to the netherworld where demons and devils were waiting to steal my soul. The idea

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of a Ouija board was still taboo with my mom. But I bought one anyway. At some point, I had
decided that a piece of mass-produced corrugated cardboard from the makers of Monopoly and
Trivial Pursuit was not going to steal my soul.
My best friend Danny and I used the Ouija board almost daily. At parties we brought out
the board and people would sit around and ask questions of the spirits from beyond. We once
tapped into a young girl who wanted us to solve her murder. It was fascinating until she said she
was killed by an alien and then we remembered what they said in Witchboard. Spirits like to lie.
After a few weeks it became apparent that we were always speaking to the same spirit. It was a
guy named Malachi. For some reason he was inextricably linked to this board. He was the only
spirit we could talk to.
To be fair, he was a pretty interesting party guest. People would sit around the table while
he would spell out bold predictions with the planchette. He didn’t like other people on the board,
just me and Danny. We once tried other people, but Malachi made the planchette turn under their
fingers trying to tie their hands in knots. Eventually they gave up, Danny and I got back on the
board.
Malachi’s predictions were creepy and accurate. He said my sister was going to get
married in October. She was away at college and had the wedding planned for November, I told
him he was wrong. In response, he spelled out one word.
O-C-T-O-B-E-R
The next day my sister called and said she was moving the wedding up to October first. A few
weeks later Malachi predicted one of my friends would die in a car crash. The following January,
he did. We stayed off the board for a while after that. Eventually we got back on the board and

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called up Malachi at a party. He started right away, telling Danny and I that we were going to die
in a car wreck. He was very specific.
On Valentine’s Day, on a particular curve on Highway 111, a gray Firebird would pull out
in front of us. I would swerve to miss the car and would flip upside down in the ditch and we
would die in a snowdrift before help came. He even told us who would be in my little Chevy
Cavalier. I would be driving, Jason would be in the passenger seat, Lynn behind him, Danny
behind me and Brian between them in the backseat. Never gonna happen. Danny always rides
shotgun.
The girl’s at the party forbade us from going out on Valentine’s Day. I wish I could say
the whole thing was a cunning plan to get dates for Valentine’s Day, but it wasn’t. Valentine’s
Day was still a month away. When Valentine’s Day came, we got together and had a big fight
with the girls about cardboard dictating our travel plans. Danny and I drove around safely all
night with no hint of a wreck. No snow. No gray Firebird.
A few months later, Danny, me and three other friends were riding down Highway 111
after a big rain storm. As we approached the curve Malachi had warned us about, a silver
Camaro pulled out in front of us. I started skidding towards the Camaro, trying to stop. At the
last possible second, I hit a puddle of water and hydroplaned around the Camaro. We missed him
by inches. I looked in the rearview mirror at Danny sitting behind me. Jason was in the passenger
seat, Lynn behind him and Brian in the middle. Needless to say, we were done with Malachi after
that.
I started making my own Ouija boards and they worked great. I would buy a book on the
occult and cover the board with the symbols found inside. One symbol was for a spirit known as

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a sub-commander of the wind demons. The first time we spoke to this guy the wind began to
blow outside. The front door of our trailer blew open and busted out a window. Glass flew into
the room and the curtains went over a friend’s head. Everyone was screaming, but all Danny and
I saw was something cool finally happening.
After that, Danny and I would venture to various graveyards and talk to the dead with this
homemade Ouija. The last night we did this was in 1998. It was around three in the morning and
we found a creepy graveyard on Potter’s Hill. It was surrounded by a rusted wrought iron fence
with a solitary maple tree at the center. I parked my car and we walked up to the fence. The gate
was almost rusted shut and we had to fight to get it open. As soon as we stepped into the
graveyard the wind picked up. The branches of the maple tree in the center of the graveyard
began to wave an ominous greeting in the wind as dead leaves blew past us. We shone a
flashlight on a tombstone and suddenly, behind us, the lights in my car came on. This is years
before electronic keys become a standard feature so Danny and I looked at each other for a
second. Okay, what the hell is that about, we seemed to say without speaking a word.
“Did you shut the door all the way?”
“Yeah, you?”
“Yeah...”
I walked back out of the graveyard and checked the doors. Everything locked up tight,
the lights fade back out. I go back into the graveyard and we get the board ready to talk. The
wind has really starting gusting now. The same gate which we had to force open a few minutes
ago is suddenly loose enough that the wind blows it shut with a loud clang. The instant it clangs
shut, my car lights come on again. We’ve both seen enough and decide to leave the graveyard

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before some ghost tries to run us down in my car. I have never been able to find that graveyard
since then.
The Haunted Bridge on Sarecta Road
Nestled deep in the swamps of Duplin County, five concrete bridges connect the base of
an enormous hill to the highway. According to legend, back in the thirties, a woman was
decapitated in a wreck on the third bridge. Late at night you can hear her walking through the
swamp searching for her head and frightening passing motorists. Having heard stories from
various people, my friends and I decided to go ghost hunting.
There were at least half a dozen of us, maybe more. Mike and I were best friends since
the fourth grade, Kenny and his sister Stacy were more troublemakers for the group, Jeromia was
the latest and youngest addition to the tribe and finally, Johnny rounded out the group. Johnny
was the pathological liar in the group. Guy lied so much he couldn’t keep it all straight with a
ruler. We began frequenting the haunted bridge every night; at first driving through incredibly
slow – until an owl or a bat flew out of the darkness and scared us. After a few weeks of owl
hauntings, the novelty of the scare disappeared and we began parking our cars on the side of the
road and walking out onto the bridge just to hang out.
One night, while Johnny was absent, I noticed the support beams for the bridge jutted out
past the bridge railings leaving about a two foot platform outside of the bridge railing.
“Hey Mike,” I pointed to the small platform, “That look big enough for someone to stand
on?”

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“Yeah it does,” Mike looked back at me and we both laughed. The plan was already
forming in our minds. I had to see if it was safe, so I climbed over the railing and slowly lowered
myself onto the platform. It wasn’t just safe, it was solid concrete. Mike and I tested it out and
realized if someone were to squat down on the small platform they would be completely hidden
from anyone who crossed the bridge. But they would also be hidden from anyone standing on
the bridge. It was the perfect place to scare the high holy hell out of a pathological liar.
The plan was pretty simple, at some predetermined time I would hide on the platform and
wait for the others to show up. Once everyone was comfortably propped on the bridge railing, I
would pop up growling and scare Johnny half to death. Johnny was always breaking his glasses;
he had to wear his mom’s oversized glasses more often than not. This just made his already
deplorable eyesight that much worse. Couple that with his pathological lies and the fact that he
was almost a foot shorter than the rest of us, and as you can probably guess, he was the butt of
every prank the group pulled. This prank would be no exception; everyone was in on it but him.
On the day we put the plan into action, we met at Kenny’s house. Johnny was there,
surrounded by four conspirators without a care in the world. It was five friends hanging out after
school – business as usual. Then, just before sundown, I made an excuse to leave and Mike
carried me home. We had two stops to make; the first was my house so I could change, the
second was the bridge so I could lie in wait. Mike would then return to the others and bait the
trap.
When we reached my house I ran inside and put on the thickest winter coat I could find. I
covered the coat with a pair of long-sleeve black coveralls and tightened the waist with a military
surplus army belt. This made me look twice my normal size; but I wasn’t done yet. Next I

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wrapped a t-shirt around my head and pulled a camouflage ski mask over the shirt, making my
head look enormous. I covered my hands with thick padded ski gloves and finally added the
ultimate piece to my ensemble – the hockey mask. When I emerged from the house in full Jason
Voorhees gear, a smile spread across Mike’s face and we both started to laugh, we knew Johnny
didn’t stand a chance. I hopped in Mike’s truck and we left for the five bridges.
During the drive to the bridges we finalized the details. As they crested the hill someone
would blow the horn; that would be my signal to get into position. The rest was a waiting game.
We laughed about the scare we knew was to come. Yet when Mike dropped me off and sped
away to get the others, I noticed we had forgotten one minor detail. The five bridges on Sarecta
Road were really creepy. As the tail lights to Mike’s car disappeared over the hill, I realized I had
to be down there for about ten minutes, in the dark, alone.
Determined not to be frightened by something that wasn’t there, I ventured out onto the
bridge and began to busy myself with the details of where the platform was, how easiest to get
onto it and how to strike when the time was right. Though I was still too frightened to actually
get on the platform with no one else around, these details kept me from thinking about the
unknown horrors I suspected were lurking in the swamp surrounding me. After what seemed like
an eternity I saw the headlights of a car coming over the hill. Since there was no horn blaring and
no signal, the car passed without incident; but the second passing motorist was a different story.
At least twenty minutes passed while I waited, growing ever more impatient and
paranoid. While trying to keep my mind off the ghost lady in the swamp, I made note of the
section gaps of the bridge railing. The scare platform corresponded to one of these section gaps.
All I had to do was run along with my hand on the railing, feel the gap and hop over. After

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getting all the details down in my head I decided to sit in the middle of the road and wait for my
friends to show up.
Finally car lights shone over the hilltop. Without a moment’s hesitation I hopped to my
feet and ran along the bridge, hand on the rail, searching for the gap to climb over. When I felt
the gap, I threw one leg over, then the other and started to lower myself down onto the platform.
I dropped lower and lower until my forearms were locked over the bridge railing barely keeping
me supported, but the platform was not there. I had climbed over at the wrong gap. Dangling
over the side of the bridge all I could think of was the ghost lady; lurking under the bridge
waiting to drag me down to a watery grave in the swamps below.
Suspended somewhere between either doom or embarrassment, I had completely
forgotten the oncoming car. It dawned on me that this car had never blown its horn, and therefore
could not be my friends. Then I noticed that it had slowed to a crawl while crossing the bridge. I
can only imagine what those people thought they saw when I poked my head up from behind the
railing; but the sight of a huge man in a hockey mask climbing over the bridge railing must have
been too much for them. All I heard was screeching tires and one word being screamed
repeatedly from the passenger side of the car as they disappeared, “Go! Go! Go!” I laughed so
hard I nearly lost my grip on the railing. I struggled back onto the bridge and sat on the railing
for a minute trying to catch my breath between laughs.
After a few minutes I realized I was no longer frightened by what was lurking below or
anything else in the swamps. Shortly, I saw car lights cresting the hill once again and I heard the
familiar sound of a car horn blaring repeatedly. I would later find out that it was Johnny who was
blowing the horn. They had even tricked him into giving me the signal. I checked the bridge gaps

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and found my platform, the second gap, not the first. I climbed over the railing and took my
position. This was going to be great.
Crouched on the platform – in full costume – I could hear everyone talking as the car
pulled up and stopped. Everyone got out, laughing and goofing off like any other night. As they
got closer, one by one they took their usual spots on the bridge railing. Mike propped on the
railing and leaned back in a gesture so casual you would never know he was looking to see if I
was on the platform as planned. After a few minutes the joking calmed down a little and I looked
up to find Johnny propped on the railing just out of arms reach. Seizing the moment, I stood up
and reached for him, growling like a thing from hell.
When he saw something coming for him, his eyes grew to the size of saucers and he
began to scream like a child faced with his worst nightmare. Within seconds of my attack, he had
jumped off the railing and ran about twenty feet. In his haste, Johnny must have forgotten where
the car was because he ran the opposite direction from where it was parked. At the site of his
hurried retreat, the rest of us burst into laughter. I dropped my arms on the railing and rested my
head in my hands cackling. When Johnny realized he had been tricked yet again, he stopped
running and jumped into a defensive kung fu stance. I guess once he had put twenty feet between
him and his attacker he was ready to fight. I climbed over the railing and pulled off my mask still
laughing as Johnny returned to a semi-calm state. He was visibly shaken, but laughing just as
much as the rest of us.
We never went back to the bridge as a group, but we all still talk about that night. I have
since told everyone about dangling over the edge, scaring myself and scaring the passing car.
One day I even went down to the bridge where I was dangling and saw the ground was only

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about two feet below me. Johnny tells the story too but he omits the part where he runs away. Yet
one thing remains constant; every time one of us mentions the five bridges on Sarecta Road we
all share a laugh. You see, we know the place is haunted, because we haunted it ourselves.
The Untold Bits
When I saw the bigfoot I was about four years old. This was the first winter when the
field was there. Before that, it had been a forest for centuries. At four years old you don’t realize
that a recently deforested area usually has animals pass through that are now homeless, like
bears. Plus, from two acres away, a bear standing on his hind legs looks an awful lot like a
bigfoot to a four year old. Of course that doesn’t explain how I saw what looked like a werewolf
when I was about twenty.
Back in the Ouija days (pronounced WeeJah, not WeeJee) it never bothered me that the
“board spirits” could only seem to spell when I was using the board. If any of my dropout,
burnout friends were using it, the spelling and messages reflected their ability and imagination.
The book of the occult where I got all the symbols turned out to be a novelty work of fiction by
H.P. Lovecraft. And that sub-commander of the wind demons was only active during that
particular hurricane season and in that particular drafty, run-down dump of a trailer I was renting.
The day after my car went haywire at the graveyard, I got a factory recall from Pontiac.
Apparently the interior lights would malfunction and come on whenever they felt like it. Things
aren’t always what they seem but sometimes a dead cat does go for a stroll a few days after he
dies. I have no idea how Malachi’s predictions came true.