A TRUE STORY - AN ISLAND TRIP

For the month of spooks and goods, the Ambient Print Board hosted a HORROR STORY COMPETITON. Here's what the students of HWUM have got to say:

AN ISLAND TRIP – A TRUE STORY

By: C3PO

         Around six years ago, I was at a lovely little island in Maldives, vacationing with two friends. It was an inhabited island and we were staying at a house in the middle of the island. However, we were going to another house for meals and this house was right at the edge of the jungle; in a deserted area of the island.

One night, after dinner, we stayed back playing cards outside the house on comfortable woven chairs in the cool night breeze with two guys we met on the island. Locals sleep very early, so, the whole island was quite dark and dead silent after a while. After a while, the boys started exchanging ghost stories, and while I normally don't get spooked much by those, this time I started getting uneasy and couldn't help but to look around. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eyes, I spotted a figure standing at the edge of the jungle, under the moonlight. With my heart racing, I slowly turned my head to see that it was around 50 feet away. It was tall and clad in all white from head to toe, and it’s top-half looked weird and disfigured.

I grabbed my friends and urgently mumbled at them to look, but in a split second as my eyes averted from the figure, it was gone. But I knew what I saw. By then, my friends were also beginning to get spooked, including the two guys. We were debating if we should go home right then, when my heart suddenly started pounding. I slowly turned around and spotted the figure standing right behind us, barely 10 feet away. With my blood pumping hard, I couldn’t help but gasp loudly. Then my friends also saw the figure and they grabbed my arms tightly.

All five of us got up and just started running, some screaming. We ran as fast as we could, through the island's dark roads, not really seeing where we were going. We had to leap over a low wall in a pitch-black area, and I tripped and fell. As I got up I looked behind and saw the figure was keeping up with us. Terror gripped me in the worst way possible. Wild-eyed, I hauled myself back up and we kept on running. A few minutes later, we realised that the figure was no longer following us.

 We breathed a quiet sigh of relief but still didn’t stop running towards our house, as we were still scared. Even though the figure had disappeared, the uneasy feeling didn’t leave me. We were enveloped in a dark eeriness that we wanted to escape from. Just as we finally reached our house, out of nowhere, we suddenly collided with the figure. Immediately, we all started screaming and thrashing around.

 In the midst of all the flailing about, the figure's white cloth came off unexpectedly, and it turned out to be a local man wearing a kids' swimming buoy around his neck, just trying to scare the tourists. Still. The scariest experience I've ever had.

Side note: Glad we managed to at least properly shove him around and give him a few kicks, not to mention the shrill screams of three girls in his ear. Unfortunately for us, it being a small community, everybody knew the story by the time we woke up the next day and we turned out to be quite the laughingstock for the remainder of the trip. It was extremely fun though.