Haunting Family Secrets
By Don Iannone

Aunt Empsy's house was haunted.
Everyone thought so,
but nobody just came out and said so.
I was deathly afraid of the place.
The place smelled old,
like something long dead.
Suffocating.
Always cold and drafty.
Dark all the time.

Aunt Empsy's cat howled night and day.
You never saw the thing,
only heard it.
People said the cat was possessed
by Uncle Sy's spirit after he died.
He fell down the wooden basement steps.
Aunt Empsy said he was stone drunk
and lost his balance.
Cracked his head wide open.
Blood everywhere.
I didn't see it,
but I imagined the whole thing
every time we visited.
Some folks said Aunt Empsy shoved him.
Made him fall,
because he did something bad
to a young girl from the holler.

I hated going over there.
Everybody just sat around
talking about the past
--talking about dead people,
old things, and secrets.
Plenty of secrets in the family.
Stuff nobody supposedly knew about,
but you knew. You knew.

She's dead now.
Aunt Empsy lived to be 96.
The funeral was all black
and morbid.
People were afraid to look in the casket.
I did.
Wish I hadn't,
because I can still see her sinister face.
The minister giving last rites
at her funeral service
didn't look well.
Later we found out he had a stroke.

After all these years,
the house still sits there--empty
but filled with something foreboding.
Nobody wants it.
Why doesn't somebody just tear it down?
Some boys went up there last summer--
messing around,
gettin' into stuff they shouldn't.
A copperhead bit the Macklin kid.
He got real sick.
Almost died.
The other boys said
there was a nest of snakes in the old well.
Maybe a hundred or so.
It's a sign.
People should stay away.
That's just what I'm planning on doing.
My kids want to go up to the old place.
They've heard the stories.
I told them to leave well enough alone.
Some things you should never mess with in life.