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Enjoy the mystery that is Crawling Night. A Fantasy Horror Story by Allen ‘Wolfie’ Simpson
Inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Agatha Christie and Neil Gaiman, Crawling Night will bring the night to you…
Be prepared….. It’s coming soon….
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a true account on my fourth paranormal experience
© 2004 Allen Simpson
“There are three gates leading to this hell – Lust, Anger and Greed. Every sane man should give these up, for they lead to the degradation of the soul.” – Bhagavad-Gita Chapter 16 verse 21
I remember clearly as if it happened yesterday, my meeting with the spirit that haunted the house we lived in, within the Magoebas Valley, at a farm called Inzana. I can recall that Inzana meant ‘basket’ in the local language, since the valley looked like a basket to the African aborigine that resided in that valley since time immemorial.
We have moved there early in 1985, so that my father could manage the Banana Plantation as well as the Nursery on the farm. It was quite a picturesque little farm, surrounded by Banana and Frangipani trees.
I recall waking up with the aroma of Frangipani in my nostrils every morning, inviting me to come out into the fresh morning air.
The mountains surrounding the valley was almost always shrouded in mist and I felt as if I lived in a fantasy world, like the Fantasia of the Never-ending Story Michael Ende wrote about.
There were also two graves, two hundred meters from our house, one unmarked and unattended and one with a simple gravestone bearing the mark of the cross. The graves did not disturb me, but rather enhanced the magical feeling of the beautiful farm I lived on.
I was twelve and did not have a care in the world, except that I developed Asthma. It was something new to me, since I wasn’t a sickly child for the first ten years of my life. I have a theory that maybe it was the Pine trees in the surrounding areas that gave me Asthma, since we had relatives on my mother’s side that was highly allergic to Pine trees.
I think we were at Inzana Farm for three months when something happened that changed my outlook on life permanently. I can recall that the day was ominous and misty, the mist reaching even our farm, being at one of the lowest levels of the valley. I was ecstatic, because I loved misty, cloudy days, and still do, above all. I spent the day reading comics and listening to the radio, in my room.
That night, I watch a bit of television, Buck Rogers in the twenty-fifth Century, I think. My lungs were tired because, earlier that afternoon, I suffered a faint asthma attack, and I was irritated, because of the medicine I had to push up my rectum, to ease the after effects caused by asthma. I went to bed early, listening to music in the dark and tried to calm myself, since it helped the after effects of asthma to dissipate. When my eyes grew heavy, I switched off the radio and went to sleep.
At about midnight, I woke up when I heard horses trotting next to my room. It sounded as if they were trotting on loose rocks, as I heard rock scatter beneath their hooves. It bothered me since there were no rocks near my room, our house being surrounded by a vast grass lawn. Still lying in bed, I heard a feint knock at my door.
I sat up, it felt to me as if a goose was walking over my grave. My bedroom door slowly opened and a man was standing in the entrance to my room.
He was dressed in a strange cloaked suit, the type people wore in the middle of the eighteen hundreds, and had gloves on his hands. A monocle hung in the air above his neck, and above the monocle, was a gentleman’s top hat.
The man had no head…I could see the passage leading to the rest of the house through his body. I started to get scared at the translucent man, standing at my door. Suddenly a voice came from him, so gently and reassuringly that I calmed. He said my name twice and then disappeared.
I had trouble sleeping the rest of the night, not out of fear, but because I was freaked by the ghostly manifestation in my room, and spend the night thinking about the incident, and remembered the unmarked grave. The next morning I went there and left flowers on the unmarked grave. That afternoon after school, I went to the farm owner’s house to find out about the unmarked grave. His mother did not mind to share the tale with me.
Apparently there used to be a family on the farm, although I cannot recall their names or surnames, I will use names I picked out of a hat, in a manner of speaking.
The tale is about a wealthy British farmer, Mr. John Smith Sr. He was a very rich and successful and moved to South Africa in the middle eighteen hundreds, because of the opportunities resting in the rich African soil. He had two sons, John Jr., the eldest and James, his youngest son.
His hope was that John Jr. would marry a woman of British stock and keep on farming. But John Jr. fell in love with a poor Afrikaner woman that lived in the town Tzaneen. John Sr. was angry and forbade his son to marry the woman. John Jr. refused to listen to his father and married the woman, regardless of his father’s wishes. His father disowned him and he had to move to town with his bride.
One day, James and his father went riding on the farm, and rumour went that a snake startled James’ horse. The horse threw James off and the snake bit him. His father was afraid to move him and left a farm hand with James. He mounted his horse and raced to the farmhouse for help. On his way his neck broke when he did not bend down fast enough to get out of the way of a thick branch. Apparently his neck was half ripped off.
James died of the snakebite and John Jr. arranged that his father and brother must be buried close to the farmhouse. He erected the two graves, his brother’s grave with a gravestone; his father’s unmarked. His mother insisted that John Jr. should take over the farm.
My theory is that John Sr. Smith’s ghost appeared to me that night, because he wanted the recognition his son never gave him, recognition that we are only human and make mistakes, but an unforgiving son refused to mark his father’s grave.
I never saw the spirit of John Sr. again, but I pray that he found rest, and maybe forgiveness through that simple act that I, as a young boy, did by putting flowers on his unmarked grave.
Author’s Note
Whether you believe in ghosts or not, this is a true story, not something woven from the depths of my imagination, but a recollection of a true incident in my life. The only thing that might be fiction is the history of the Smiths since it was a story told to me by an elderly woman, who heard it from her mother, and we all know that stories tend to change as years goes by.
I have encountered many ghosts, but this one will always be special to me, for it initiated me into the belief that one must always believe in the unbelievable and that all ghosts are not scary. If you have encountered a ghost, I hope you can relate to this tale, if not, may your first experience be as inspiring and beautiful. May the gods bless you, and may you be always of an open mind.
The Author,
Allen W. Simpson
August 2004
When I was about 10 years old, visiting my aunt Gracey with my parents, I had a weird experience. My aunt and parents were outside her house and left me to my own devices. I loved to play around in her house, since there were artefacts of Historical value in her house and I loved to look at the weird and wonderful things, like an organ that played itself and books in Dutch that dated back 200 – 300 years.
She also had this ventriloquist doll she inherited from her father who was a stage magician. She did not inherit his talents though except ventriloquism, but her lips moved slightly.
Now this doll’s name was Schneider and he always sat on top of her dresser in her bedroom, with his back against the wall. On that fateful day, I decided to walk down the hallway to the guest TV room, which had to go past her room. I walked the hallway and when I passed her room, movement caught my eye. I looked inside, saw nothing except old Schneider sitting there on the dresser and thought nothing of it. I passed it off as my imagination and started to turn around when Schneider’s head turned in MY direction and asked me:”What are you doing here…”
Needless to say, I ran my ass off and never went close to that room alone.
My whole experience raises some questions:
There was a train accident near my aunt house in the 1950s or 40s and the railway is on her property. Many people died. Was it one of them, or my Aunt’s father that haunted that doll that day or something else….???
And another thing, I was definitely alone in that house.
I have met at least one friend that experienced similar phenomena.
(c) 2010 Allen Simpson
This is a true story, excuse any spelling mistakes, tense-mistakes or any typing mistakes. This is a revamped version of an old post
Has any of you experienced something similar?
You walk in a desert called desperation, your mind clouded by the stigmata of weariness, at your feet the sun-bleached skulls of your past and before you a door with an hourglass.
‘I dare you to open the door’ a million voices screech.
You claw at the scabs in your mind and yell ‘No’
but your hand reaches out and grasp at the door and you open it…
You wake up in sweat.
(c) 2011 allen simpson
wolfshadowwhispers 
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