Casual Conversation

Which shoulder is the skull over? I'm looking for it

Parents are dogshit I will never be one

Kind of? Maybe?

Back when I was about five, I was walking with my grandfather and some cousins.

We came across a cow skeleton in a field.

For whatever reason, some of the cousins wanted bones. I ended up with a tooth, one of the molars.

By the time I got home, I had halfway forgotten about it. It freaked me out. In my head, the tooth was haunted by a cow ghost, and this was a scary idea.

But I couldn't get rid of it. I had to hide it. Problem was I knew where it was, so it still creeped me out for over a year until I finally got up the nerve to take it back.

Weird as fuck, I know. What's funny is that I ended up having a small bone collection lol; some skulls, some long bones, baculum, and an almost intact dog skeleton. That's what I have left, I used to have more.

There was also the back room. That didn't get creepy until I was a little older, and became aware that I had an older brother that died before I was born. I can't say I was scared of the room, I wasn't. But in my young brain, despite him never having lived in this house, that was "his" room. Why? No fucking clue, it was used for storage, my mom's sewing, and the spare bathroom. There was nothing about it that pointed to a haunting or anything.

But I didn't want to go in the room. Again, not out of fear, I just didn't want to bother him. It was like going in the room would somehow interrupt his sleep or something.

What's really fucking weird is that I've never believed in ghosts. Ghost stories never scared me, I never saw a movie and thought ghosts were anything but fiction. Despite that, my brain managed to find exceptions to that belief lol. The cow and my brother weren't ghost ghosts, it was some other thing that I could only associate with ghosts, and I have no clue what the fuck my brain was doing other than its usual thing where I could wind myself up with imagination and the real world would drop away.

It isn't like I really thought there was a ghost present, or that there was anything real involved, but it was still giving me that same frisson of the numinous the way deja-vu feels mixed with a sense of mystery.

I don't know. I was a weird kid sometimes :)

Attics at my grandparents. One had wasps every year. The other had a small dark room that wound up in your nightmare whether you wanted it to or not.

I was scared of real demons and spirit forces lurking in the dark until I was around 10 years old. Ghost stories were common and told by most people around me with my religious upbringing. Around 10 is when I realized I had never actually seen anything like the stories and first started saying I want to see them to prove my beliefs system real. Over the decades that evolved into god doesn't have to be weird and can call me any time, my phone is on.

I was afraid of the world and realms around me, now I only ever fear the cruelty of humans and the monsters that hide within all of us, especially the battle within.