There used to be an abandoned community college in the foothills near my house, and every so often we'd muster the nerve to go visit.
The rumors were that this had been a Christian community college, and that one year they closed down in a huge rush for no apparent reason.
This hadn't been an orderly, organized departure, either - a cheap rent-a-fence had been erected all the way around the campus, and a lot of personal belongings (mattresses and bedding, textbooks and binders, entire dorm room setups) had been left behind.
The place was just vacated, and left to be reclaimed by nature - waist-high grass grew between all of the buildings, and every now and then as you waded through, you'd startle a deer that had wandered in through a hole in the fence.
This was prime real estate, too - located right next to a golf course in one of the more upscale communities in the area - and so for it to remain dormant and unsold for years struck us as odd.
Rumors were that there had been deaths there, possibly a possession, and that the old owners refused to sell it, for fear of releasing whatever malevolent spirits resided within.
And when you entered some of the buildings, you could almost start to believe the rumors. Insulation draped out of the ceiling in long slashes, gaping holes were missing from the walls, and as you gingerly walked down the silent hallways, flashlight shaking in your hand, every black doorway would seem to loom out of the darkness like an open maw.
Creepiest of all was the old church building, every wall of which had been graffitied with satanic messages and swastikas.
One wall, in huge dripping red letters, simply read, "Poor, little Jenny..." I recognize in retrospect that the real risk there was not encountering the occult, but rather coming across the addicts/vagrants/cannibalistic Nazi zombies that had taken up residence on the abandoned campus.
Fortunately we never did, and so every so often we'd slip through a hole in the fence and go skulking around the hallways, nervously muttering jokes and trying to scare the girls in our group, if only to mask that we ourselves were scared shitless.
Anyway, the last night I ever went to the abandoned campus, two drama friends and I approached the main gate via a long, tree-lined road that ran parallel to the golf course.
As we drew near, it became clear that something was amiss - where normally there would be a ragged hole in the fence that you'd catch your sweater on as you slipped through, the chain link fence was instead brand new and perfectly intact.
We were about to turn back, secretly relieved, when one of us noticed that the chained and padlocked gate had actually been pried open just wide enough that someone could slip through if they turned sideways.
We scanned the fence line and the campus beyond, and though we noticed that a broken-down old car had also materialized twenty feet beyond the gate where we were pretty sure none had ever been before, a quick check with the flashlight revealed no one inside.
Since the gate was locked from the outside, we decided this development posed no threat, and so one by one each of the three of us turned sideways, sucked in our gut, and slipped through the mangled gate.
Cautiously, our little group proceeded forward into the high grass. It was a new moon that night, and so the only visible lights were our flashlights and the porch-lights twinkling in the neighborhood beyond.
We were ten feet into the deserted campus when without warning that broken-down old car roars to life, its high beams blazing right at us, its engine revving like a stallion out of hell ready to just burst out of the gate.
We shrieked like the pubescent high schoolers we were, and bolted back to the gate, each of us grappling and pulling at the others in desperation to be the first one to slip back through.
Being the smallest of the three, I was pushed to the back, and spent a panicked eternity of several seconds shouting hoarsely at my friends to hurry as they scrambled through the gap, certain that at any instant the demonic car would come barreling down upon me or, worse,
I would feel a yank on my collar and the gate would slip from my grasp as some howling ghoul dragged me off to sacrifice me upon an altar newly-consecrated in Satan's name.
Finally my friends were clear of the gate and I forced my way through, the sharp metal tines raking at my skin as I flopped into the dust on the other side.
We half-stumbled, half-sprinted all the way down that tree-lined lane, the roar of the car's engine echoing behind us as we ran.
Even as we reached our own car, parked a quarter-mile away on a street in that upscale neighborhood, still that car's high beams pierced into the darkness as though searching for us, the tortured revving of its engine rending the still night air.
We never did go back to that campus.
One year later, we found out it had been torn down, and that the land would be repurposed for another subdivision.
That night still sticks with me, though.
None of us ever mentioned it after, but a singular question has always burned in my mind - we had checked the interior of that car.
We'd shined a flashlight on it from twenty feet away, and there was definitively no one in the driver's seat.
So who, then, or what, had started that car???
Username: axolotlfarmer