The Baby Burned.

When I was a young child, I slept In a room in my grandmothers basement. It was an old house so the basement had exposed cement, the stairs being made of old creaky wood, and pipes exposed all about... there was an area behind the furnace which was always stacked with old stuff but there was enough room to walk the whole way. because directly behind the furnace...or was it a water heater... was a hole.

I'm not sure how deep that hole was, only that I was constantly bugged by my family about being put into it... to this day I'm not even sure what it's purpose was. But ai avoided the basement as much as I could. I never liked it down there, and I had never been exposed to scary stories of basements... or the like... in fact the room in which I stayed which was across from my grandfathers private room... which as it turns out was just a bedroom with no windows, and old bed and his old treasures... but my room and my mothers room... consisted of a carpeted floors, a closet, an old tv which I don't think ever actually worked... and of course two beds... one which was closer to the floor and had wood all the way down and one with the frame lifting it from the floor.

What matters is that my bed was the one closer to the floor and had a view of the underside of the framed bed and had been the whole time. as a child I rarely if ever had nightmares... the earliest ones I remember were always grounded in some form of reality... and some were downright strange... such as when I was three... and i dreamt of getting out of bed in my mothers apartment, seeing the bathroom as blood red, and the hallway had a large hole by which i mean there was no floor... just empty sky and clouds...there was no ground in sight either... and when I finally traversed around the hole I dreamt that I set the suite on fire... to this day I apparently did all of these things... minus the red bathroom and strange hole... including starting a fire when I woke up.

I do not usually dream up nightmare scenarios, and the only ones I ever do are as I said grounded in some form of reality, such as creepy toys or scary shows. So it became increasingly worrying to my mother and grandmother when one night I just up and started screaming... I ran up stairs away from my mom and refused to sleep downstairs without someone else and without being forced to; for months on end. The reason I gave, so I'm told is that a baby burned in the basement... in the very room we were in. and the corpse of it was hidden under the bed. When asked what baby, I just kept saying the baby burned.

What made this so troubling, is that no baby had ever lived in the house... There had never been a housefire in the building... and at the time I was too young to even care about watching television. What disturbed them the most was how much I could describe this child... how it cried while it burned... how its flesh melted and how it was left abandoned.

When Asked how I knew all this I said that it had burned and it had told me.
When Asked how it did that if it burned up, I couldn't explain...
I just kept saying it was under the bed and it burned.

I never dreamed of it again... heck I was awake the first time i mentioned it, and no new details were ever added... and I never spoke of it talking to me again... unless asked.

But until that point... I had never had a problem sleeping down there, or even going down there alone. I may not have liked it but it wasn't bad enough that I was afraid of the basement. My grandma blamed my grandfather for telling me about the hole... but I protested that the baby burned, and it hadn't been in the hole.

I had never been told of any babies burning... I didn't even know about the house fire I started in the apartment back then. I'm not sure how I was so damn adamant that a baby burned, but after a few months I started sleeping facing a different part of the room and I slept with ease.

This was confusing as I never complained of monsters under the bed as a child, I thought the concept was dumb even then. So when asked why I was suddenly okay, I just said "The baby went to heaven." that it "Wasn't under the bed no more" and when asked why that was... I had said "The baby was trapped under the bed... and it went away"

Years later nobody can explain this... And I know I'm repeating myself but I thought this year I might share something real... something screwed up from my childhood.
Instead of the usual fanfare of darktober...

Now that I think about it...
It had green eyes...