This short scary story is another account that I found deeply unsettling. I have written it from the perspective of the little girl who experienced it. By the time she told me the story, she was a grandmother of one. She narrated the events in painstaking detail, recalling a day roughly 45 years before that telling, in a graveyard that seemed confused betwixt the dead and the living.
Her Short Scary Story: A Holiday Game
Vacation time used to be the best. Primarily because there were so many games to look forward to, and our parents never complained, as long as we didn’t bother them. We never bothered them.
The best thing about our group was that each one of us belonged to the same age group except my two elder brothers. Even though they were the odd ones out, they enjoyed concocting games and taking part in them. We would always circle around them with numerous suggestions and they would, like the true veterans they were, choose the ones that sounded the best. Our little brains could think of thousands of games, only to be sifted through their judgement. Maybe we were not that good. Or those ideas sounded only good in our heads. But sometimes I think that’s what life is all about. Nothing is good enough until it is.
Somebody had a crazy idea; I think it was one of my brothers.
“Let’s head to the nearby graveyard!”
Scary as it sounded to my little head, we all gave in to the thrill of it.
“Yes! Let’s do it!”
And so we headed in all our mightiness and feigned pluck to see what the yard had in store for us.
In the Graveyard
We began playing our usual games like hide and seek and tag, getting ourselves thoroughly dirty, oblivious to our surroundings, without giving a second thought to the place we were in. Apart from the graves, it all seemed like a strangely familiar playground to us. We ran around, our laughter filling up the atmosphere as we hid ourselves behind the graves, or in reckless bushes that made a half-promise of hiding us.
As we played on for hours, the sun yawned at us. It started becoming a tad dimmer, as twilight came creeping in. We hid hither and thither. I found myself a good hiding spot behind a big rock. As our ‘it’ counted numbers in the backdrop, each one of us giggled with a hushing finger to their lips.
Suddenly, my eyes fell on something that intrigued me almost at once. I screamed at the top of my voice,
“Come here! Everybody! There is a hand here!”
Our playful trance broke at once with the shrill cry. Everybody came running to see the matter at hand, which was, quite literally, a hand. When I pointed them towards a man’s hand that seemed to have emerged from nowhere, everybody circled around it to check out the stranger that grew like a sapling from the ground.
The Hand in This Short Scary Story
We were very young. Even something so strange did not immediately send us looking for our parents. Also, it would have spoiled the fun. So, we sat around touching it, poking it to see if it moved. One of my elder brothers, the funnier one, horsed around it a lot.
“How many sugar cubes would you like Mr. Hand?”
He said it as we poured some imaginary tea into a clay cup for our guest.
“What is it? Oh five!”
And he gestured for us to drop five stones in his cup. We laughed as it all happened. He touched the cup to those creepy fingers and then stopped.
Then he shook it once saying,
“Nice to meet you too sir!”
Just when he did that, almost immediately the hand sprang to life and grabbed my brother’s hand. Scared as hell, my brother tried to get rid of it, pulling himself away from the clutch. But the grip was too tight. He could not prise those vile fingers away by himself. So despite feeling the stark horror of it all, with that dead hand grasping our hero, we pitched in. He cried out in pain. The hold seemed strong. All of us tugged at him with full force. But the hand would not loosen its grip.
The Release and the Run Home
There was so much commotion in those moments that no one could think straight. We began shouting,
“Help! Help! Somebody please help!”
That was when an engine roared on the nearby road. A vehicle, probably a car, crawled past with its lights on. Maybe it was because of that noise or the direct light that fell upon it, that the hand finally let go. Just as it did, we ran with all our might back to our houses.
We were convinced it was a ghost. We could not stop to catch our breath or look back, for fear it might follow us. When we reached home, we narrated the whole story to our mother, who seemed surprised too. But she was angry that we had ventured there on our own. Her scolding was fair, we thought, since we had been told plenty of times not to go near the graveyard.
The place was haunted by witches, my mother often said. I often imagined what a witch looked like. Often during the dead of the night, when I would have a hard time sleeping, I would hear drums beating somewhere and connect them to witches doing their black magic dance. I often heard anklets too which made me cocksure of it.
In our little town, people used to have plenty of short scary tales on their lips. Now we had one of our own.
Looking Back at the Short Scary Story
This short scary story leaves me uncertain about what happened. It is a remembered account, and nobody investigated the hand at the time. The children were convinced of what they had seen, but I cannot turn their fear into proof of what caused it.
I once wondered whether there might be a physical explanation, but I have no evidence that could establish one. My original suggestion about a newly dead body was speculation, not a verified explanation, and I should not have presented it as something that could prove the event. Black magic does not convince me either. I am leaving the short scary story open to comments, without pretending that I can settle it.
For another remembered encounter with an unexplained grip, read A Hand in the Dark.
Although this short scary story is extremely unique. Children were playing and suddenly one of the kid saw the hand and they started playing with the hand like a toy and it sprang alive and grabbed one child’s hand seems like a horror scene of a movie. There are no theories about it and nothing was investigated by anyone for this hand act. If somebody says it’s black magic it is false.
The hand was certainly a ghosts hand and it scared the children out of their wits. Children should never venture out in the cemetery even at daytime leave alone night.