by Maxine Headd

Created on: November 26, 2008

The girls and the Hoot Owl

We were having a good time. It was a warm summer evening and we were out in the back yard of the house. We had been playing in the swimming pool, just playing around in the water and enjoying our summer vacation. I had four of my five grandchildren with me. We were at the back of the house sitting in a lawn swing which moved as slowly as our feet did in the evening hours. We lived in Marion, Illinois partly on a creek bed that overlooked the street. During the summers that we had been there with our grandchildren we had gotten to see a pink flamingo from Florida, (how he got there we don't know) some beautiful yellow finches, two baby raccoons, and a bald eagle in our backyard trees just this year. But the girls were just sitting there in the back yard, on a lawn swing. The girls were telling scary ghostly stories like bloody Mary, the golden arm, and a few others like Halloween type grisly stories.

We had begun a series of small ghostly stories of where I told them of places that I had lived in that were haunted. However, I felt it better that we build up the suspenseful atmosphere. They were walking around the back yard like there was nothing wrong with being out there. In the dark and late of night, it was only about 11:30 at night. All of the neighbors were safely asleep in their beds, but to us the night was still young, and we were ready to be scared of something.

They asked me if I would tell them some ghost stories, because they said that I could do a really good job of that. Well I softly agreed, and I had just started telling "I want my golden arm." And I had gotten to the place where the guy is knocking on the bedroom door. I reached my hand over and I subtly knocked on the wooden swing. The knocking startled the girls enough that when they heard a loud sound above them way up in the trees they just about went through the bottom layer of the wooden swing. I was giggling hard when we heard a sound. It said Whoo-oo-oo is that? Well, the girls just screamed and cowered lower in the swing. I knew that what we were hearing was a regular Hoot owl, but the girls had never heard one of them, and especially up close and personal. "What was that?" Joanna said, to me. "I don't like that sound." About that time, the sound repeated itself. Whoo-oooo-ooo? And the girls screamed and cried together "let's get out of here!" "I want to go in."

The sound came again, closer this time, it said "Whoo-ooo are you?" I swear it did. The girls took off for the back door of the house. They were screaming and carrying on like you had never heard them. Instead of lining up to go in the back door of the house, they were trying to get in as one person. But I want you to know that they were ready to quit the telling of Ghost stories that day. That was the first and only time we had heard of that particular owl, but it was nice knowing that he was out there. It was the first sound that we had heard of an owl being in our back yard. But we thought he was really inquisitive at that.

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