THE THING IN THE OLD HOUSE

When I was about 7 years old, my family and I took a trip to Virginia Beach on a 10 day get away vacation. On the long ride down from New Jersey, my father and mother talked about all the fun we were going to have and the things we were going to do.
Needless to say, I was excited.
One thing in particular my dad wanted to do while we were there, was to go and visit his old childhood home in Knotts Island North Carolina. It was a rural area where he had spent a few years of his childhood before his little brother mysteriously vanished into thin air, never to be seen again. Devastated by the tragedy, his mother moved them to New Jersey, eventually passing away a few years later without ever learning what had happened to her youngest son.
Although I didn’t know about the disappearance of my father’s brother at the time of our visit, something terrifying would happen to me on this trip to my father’s childhood home that would make me grow up believing I had learned what fate befell my late uncle. It was something I repeatedly told my parents about over the years, but I could never get them to believe.

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When my father lived in Knotts Island, he, his brother and their mother lived in a very small trailer that she rented on an acre of land which was surrounded by cornfields on three sides.
What was most unusual about where they lived was that their trailer was parked about twenty feet from the side of an old abandoned house that must have been well over a 150 years old.
While my father spoke very little about this time in his life, apparently the house next to their trailer was still solid enough to play in, although some parts were just too spooky to enter. Since he and his brother had no neighbors with children to play with, the two had only themselves to rely on for fun.
For two years the three of them had lived in the trailer by the old house without incident. Over time my father and his brother came to view it as their own private fort.
On the day my late uncle disappeared, my father and he had been playing hide and seek outside in the spring time sun. When it was my dad’s turn to seek, he hid his eyes against the only tree in their front yard and began to count. The last time he ever saw his brother was when he snuck a peek and saw him entering through the front door of the old house.
Unaware that his brother was running off into the twilight zone, my father continued counting. From that moment on, his life would forever change.