7. OK, so this memory starts off as an incomplete, simply because I can’t remember what movie I had just seen, Gremlins or E.T. Both scared me silly when I was younger. Anyways, we had just come back to my grandparents house after a night at the movies, seeing whichever of those movies that scared the bejesus out of me. My mother had asked me to go down to the laundry room in the basement to get the clothes out of the dryer. Now I have to preface this story by saying that my grandparents’ basement was the alltime spookiest place on earth to me. As you walk down the stairs, there is a little window with a wooden door over it that opens up into my Papa’s workshop. I loved being in the workshop with him, but when it was empty, I wanted no part of it. Creepy stuff. There was also a little room under the stairs that housed goblins, I’m sure of it, and a boiler room that was haunted. SO needless to say, going down into that basement on the best of days was a traumatic experience for 8 year old little me.
I was trying to put the laundry into the wicker basket as fast as I could that night, trying not to think about where I was or to hear all the creepy noises around me, when suddenly it went completely dark. Someone upstairs, not knowing that I was down there, had noticed the light on, and being the energy conserving people that they are, switched it off and left me enshrouded in darkness. I was so scared I managed to throw up all over the basket of clean laundry I had just taken out of the dryer. (Raisin, Date, and Walnut Quaker Oats, if I remember correctly. Then I had to sprint past the boiler room. past the door under the stairs, and worst of all, past the workshop window. Ugh, just thinking about it now gives me the heebie-jeebies.