I hadn’t been this creeped out in a long, long time. Maybe since my days on the farm when I was upstairs in the barn at night, forking down hay for the cattle. There was a bad guy around every corner. Why they all decided to hang out in our barn I don’t know but they did.
I might not have been so worried except I knew they were carrying baseball bats, guns and maybe even a sword. A vivid imagination is a great thing unless you’re a boy alone at night in an old barn that was built in the 1800s.
Last week, over a 24-hour period, every time I put on my coat and went outside, before long, someone would tap me on the shoulder. I’d look around quickly but no one was ever there. The worst was when I was in the back yard in the dark, heading for the house. Tap, tap! Turn around. Nobody there. Was I losing my mind? This was so real, it had me really freaked out.
The next day, I put on my coat once more to go outside and got tapped again. This time I couldn’t stand it anymore. I whipped off my coat and turned it over to find that a cap had been accidentally velcroed to the hood on my coat and when I walked around, the cap swung here and there and hit me on the shoulder once in a while.
I hate that cap.
©2012 Jim Hagarty
