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A Scary Tale of Two Men (A True Story)

Long before I met him, my husband, Ron, had a friend, Phil who roomed in the basement of Ron's home. Phil was a bartender who kept late hours. While working he usually helped himself to several drinks and would often come home quite tipsy. Such was the case on the night of this story. That night Phil came in the back entrance to the basement as usual and immediately went to bed and to sleep.

After a time, as Ron was watching a late movie on TV, the electricity went off. This was a house built before breakers, when fuse boxes were standard. Ron knew that a fuse had blown, so got a new one and a flashlight. He then headed for the basement. The fuse box was down there on the wall very close to the bed where Phil was sleeping.

Ron told me later that he crept very quietly and noiselessly through the room, past the foot of Phil's bed and to the fuse box. I found this difficult to believe because I never knew him to be able to move around while I slept without doing an impression of a bull in a china shop. But I wasn't there that night so I didn't argue.

He made it to the fuse box and opened it. As he was holding the flashlight and unscrewing the old fuse, he fumbled the fuse and dropped it onto the bottom ledge of the metal fuse box. This small action, this seemingly minor occurrence, began the terror.

The fuse dropped. It clanged. At the same moment, Ron turned to see if Phil heard it. As he turned, flashlight in hand, Phil bolted into a sitting position, saw a glowing light by his bed and cut loose with an awful, man sized, bone shattering scream. Although Ron knew that he was the cause of the scream in some way, the hair on his neck and arms stood at attention and he felt the rush of goosebumps.

Now, Ron knew, as anyone who had ever sat around telling ghost stories as a child knew, that sitting in the dark with a flashlight shining up into one's face was a great effect for adding a scary quality to the stories. He knew this, but, possibly due to having his nerves unsettled by the screaming man in the bed, he seemed to have forgotten.

In an attempt to reassure Phil, Ron turned the flashlight on himself and said, "Phil! It's me!" Phil, seeing a glowing, yellowish, disembodied head, released another hellish, terror stricken scream while flailing his arms about. Ron, with the best of intentions and hoping to quiet the screaming and howling somehow thought it would help if he stepped closer to the bed, with the beam of the flashlight

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