The Old Lantern

When it comes to matters of the supernatural, my beliefs are limited to what I have seen, and so far I have seen nothing. However, one night in the fall of 1969 almost changed everything.
My brother, Jerry and I, and brothers David and Mike Swan, had just wrapped up another evening of guitar playing at our house, just outside of Marion. It was one of those warm nights with clouds racing past the moon, and leaves tumbling across the road like varmints in the darkness.
The old two-story house up the road had been abandoned for years. It was probably built before 1900 and was well beyond repair, and was sometimes used to store hay on the ground floor. The upstairs was a bit of a mystery, one we were eager to solve.
We headed up the road with an old miners lantern that Grandma Johnson had given me. It shined a dim but steady light in the autumn wind.
The front porch planks had given way to the weather. Seeing the exposed floor joists as an obstacle, we went around to the back of the house. The back porch was not much better, but did afford passage. The old screen door was hanging by the top hinge only and had to be lifted and set aside. Nobody wanted to be first and just as certain, nobody wanted to be last, but we all wanted to be within the light of the lantern. Together, we stepped inside.
The first room had been the kitchen with its old linoleum floor and buckling cabinets. Each step sent mice running. We made our way through three rooms and advanced to the stairway at the front of the house. The stairway, just inside the front door, went half way up the flight to a landing where the stairs turned full about and continued unseen to the second floor. Moonlight shown through a window at the landing, just beyond the range of the lantern. The shadowy fingers of a tree limb reached across the wall by the stairs. We hesitated as the wind gave movement to the specter.
Bravery can be cultivated by the company one keeps, and the more company one keeps, the braver one gets. Besides, we had a lantern, so we started up the stairs.
At that moment, the lantern flickered and dimmed. We quickly backed down the stairs as the light steadied and brightened. Panic gave way to humor as we joked about the other guy’s wild-eyed reaction, never admitting for one minute that anyone was scared. We gathered our collective nerve and marched up toward the landing.
Suddenly, the lantern went out as if snuffed by some phantom’s breath. Now, the first was last and the last was first, and whoever it was that was screaming seemed to be right on my heels. We tore through the house, crashing into obstacles that didn’t seem to be there before, but nothing short of a solid wall was going to keep us from that back door.
We burst through the screen door, shattering the one remaining hinge, and sending the door flying. Once out, I could see that everyone else was in front of me. I wasn’t about to look back to see what was behind me. We didn’t stop until we got to the front yard of our house.
Later that night I relit the lantern, which burned without waiver, as it did on many occasion since.
The old house was finally razed in the Summer of 2008, but the old lantern’s failure on the stairway will remain one of this life’s little mysteries.