A Spooky and Unintentionally Hilarious Halloween Tale From Chrissy

In the spirit of Halloween, here's the story of one of the scariest and most embarrassing moments I’ve ever had.

My family had just moved into a new house and we were excited to paint and decorate it just how we wanted. After begging and pleading, my mother allowed me to paint my own bedroom however I wanted. For some reason, I wanted to paint stripes on my walls. I know...scary, right? Ick. But that’s beside the point.

For this particular project, my grandmother, an artist and painter herself, was enlisted to help me.

We began in the morning, taping off different sections of my walls with painter's tape in preparation for the stripes, and then gradually painted each stripe. We had been working on it for hours when I looked up and noticed I was painting alone.

I wondered where my grandmother was, but figured she was just taking a little break. I continued working and waited for her to come back. After 10 or 15 minutes passed, I started to worry about her and came down the ladder to wander through the house and find her.

The house was new to all of us, and because of that, slightly eerie to walk around. We had moved from a much smaller house, and this new house boasted very long and creepy hallways that took all of us some time to get used to. Even in the middle of the day, the main hallway was very dark, and as a kid with a wild imagination, I used to stare down it at night and freak myself out imagining shadows as anything other than what they were.

I made my way down the hall calling for my grandmother. She didn’t answer. I decided to turn the corner and grab a few extra paint brushes from the utility closet before I continued my search.

I made my way to the closet, grabbed the handle, and pulled it toward myself. As the door swung open, the old automatic lights flickered on and off several times, revealing an old woman standing there in the dark with her arms reaching out toward me. I couldn’t even scream. I fell to the ground, like a fainting goat, which knocked the wind right out of me.

My grandmother walked out of the closet, laughing maniacally. I caught my breath and tried to figure out what was going on, but not before my mother was on the scene laughing at me, too.

My grandmother had actually gone to the kitchen for a snack, and on her way back to the bedroom, stopped to get the same things out of the utility closet. The closet door just happened to close behind her, and she was searching for the light switch in the dark, unaware of the door sensor that controlled the light.