There was this old house around 40 feet from the chain-link fence that surrounded my elementary school.  In retrospect, it was just another crappy, run-down house in my crappy, run-down hometown.  However to the kids in the 5^th grade, it had taken on a life of its own, and had become… HAUNTED.

There were many stories around this house like that kids had died there, skeletons hung in the closets on coat hangers, blood stains could be seen on the windows, and countless other yarns that children find quite troubling yet feed on in some sadistic way.

By the time it was my 5^th grade class’s turn to have the legend passed to us, it had morphed into something quite simple:  If you looked into the upstairs window at the worn out dresser, and you stared hard enough and long enough, you’d see the drawers move on their own!

Looking back on things, I think what was really being handed down from class to class was a punishment in the same way hazing works, in that the older kids did it to the younger simply because it had been done to them.  Sometime towards the end of the year, when a kid had spent an entire year staring at the house, and hadn’t seen a single bloody handprint or dead kid waving from the basement, they would realize they had been duped.  To make up for this, they would then construct a story of their own to waste a year’s worth of recesses for the following class.

So we got the drawers.  Those damn drawers.  It was really just one drawer, and it was probably some hard working, blue collar father’s underpants drawer who probably would have been more than a little creeped out himself to know that an entire classroom of kids was staring at the drawer that housed his… well… drawers.

Yet there we were, every day, staring into that stupid window at that stupid drawer.  The weak kids peeled off one by one, turning their attention to the swings or the slide, but not me.  Oh no, I was going to see that stinking drawer move if it took every second of every recess of the entire school year.

Well I’ve built this up enough, so the big reveal is that I never saw the dumb thing move.  Not even an inch.  I have no idea what I would have done if I had seen it move, but I was sure pissed off when it didn’t.  I realized that I too had been tricked.  The blood-stained torch had been passed, and I fell for it rusty hook in the door, line and sinker.

So I dedicated the entire summer to shaping the legend I would hand down to the upcoming class.  I wound up telling a kid that a daughter of the family that lived in the house had been buried alive in the front yard, and if you watched long enough in one spot, you’d see the ground move.

Then I spent the entire year taking great pride in seeing him and all of his little 5^th Grade buddies hanging out at the fence and staring at that spot of ground.

What a bunch of rubes.