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I'm a big old wimp. If something even feels remotly od, I turn tail and run. I can't walk through certain houses, avoided specific places growing up, etc.
Out behind my neighbor's house growing up, there was a small "village" (for lack of the right word) which had long ago been abandonded. Basically, it was about a mile back in the woods, and there were probably 5 or 6 buildings all rotted out, and in varying stages of falling down.
I can't recall how we found it, because we didn't know what itw as until my brother and I asked my parents. Back in the early 50's, some people had bought land together, and it eventually became sort of a hippie commune, only earlier than hippies would have been around.
Long story short, no one had lived back there in probably 30 years, possibly longer. But one small shack I went in with my brother had a bushel of rotting apples in it, apples that looked like they couldn't have been there for 30 years or more.
You know that feeling you get, where you think someone's watching you? Hairs stand up, skin prickles? Well, that happened when we were in there. The shack was tiny. You walked in one side, it was one room, wide enough for a couch on one wall, and then out the other side was another door. Basically, the room couldn't have been more than 8x8, and was likely only a storage shed.
But I felt that feeling, that prickling skin, and hair standing on end. That feeling where you don't want to turn around, you just want to run forward, as fast as you can, and not look back until you are safe at home.
In my mind, at the same time, I had this image of an old man, long gray hair, and a scraggly long gray beard, wearing an old hat.
We left soon after, and once or twice went back, with me never going near that shack.
A few months later, we were at my grandpa's house, and I was looking through some old family albums, and saw a picture of the guy I had "felt" that day, and asked about him. He had been a great uncle who had never married, and had lived back there in the 50's before he had died.
About a year after that, my neighbor had the whole thing torn down, and the trees cleared out, and he built a house for his daughter and her family back on the land.
Back then, you wouldn't have been able to pay me enough to have stepped foot in that shack again, though.
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