One Night in the Log Cabin (Parental Guidance Suggested)

 Summer after 4th grade, I was a Cub Scout and four of us were chosen to sit at the Pike Theatre in uniform all day on Saturday to collect money for the Will Rogers Institute.  Right after the previews, a film about the Will Rogers Institute would play followed by the lights coming up and our walking around with buckets to collect donations. Aunt Alice Gwin managed the theater - she wasn't really my aunt but the aunt of my cousin so we all called her "Aunt Alice."

We decided to camp out in my log cabin that night.  My log cabin was a birthday gift to which I devoted an entire Blog. Teddy, Dan, and Bob joined me in this adventure (their names have been changed for reasons that will become clear later).

The night started in a pretty standard fashion with everyone telling ghost stories.  There were the standards - the hook, about a parking couple hearing a radio story in which an escaped murderer had a hook for a right hand.  After hearing a noise they drive off and get home to find a hook and blood dangling from the rear door handle.  The always frightful story of another parking couple but this time the boy gets out to investigate a noise and leaves his girlfriend crouched on the floor under a jacket.  He tells her not to get up unless he uses the code tapped on the window.  She hears a tapping, looks up and his destroyed body is hanging from a tree - the tapping produced by her class ring on his pinky hitting the window. These stories were made more terrifying by making them “true” told by someone who knew someone whose cousin knew a person that dated one of the parties involved.  Or occasionally the story was localized, i.e. the murderer was the Chatawa monster!  This was before the term “Urban Legend” was created and besides Magnolia or more specifically Chatawa (both legendary) could hardly qualify as “urban.”

The most terrifying story, however, was based on an actual event that all of us experienced.  The event was a horrible train wreck in downtown Magnolia one year earlier.  We were in the third-grade class when a “BOOM” shook the school building.  Teddy had fallen out of his desk.  A train had struck a gasoline delivery truck that was stalled on the tracks.  The truck exploded and ignited grain storage elevators along the tracks.  Several people were killed and the fire raged for hours.  We all knew one or two people who were killed.  As a matter-of-fact, "Uncle Bobby" who also was not my uncle but Aunt Alice's brother had been one of the victims. The story told that night was that whenever you hear a train whistle all you had to do was look at the darkest part of a dark room and you could see all the men who were killed just walking along and moaning.  My log cabin was only three blocks from the tracks so every hour or so we could hear a train and a fight would break out between those attempting to turn out the lights so that they could see the recently deceased and those of us that were not believers in the supernatural but had no desire to test our disbelief with empirical observation.

For hours we ate junk food, talked about stuff that kids our age were talking about and waited anxiously for the next train so that the scramble could break out again.  Many years later when I saw the movie, "Stand by Me" when the boys started talking around the campfire it reminded me of that night.  At the first sound of the train, Bob would jump up and grab the light cord hanging down from the middle of the cabin, followed closely by either Dan or myself grabbing Bob and tackling him. We would continue long after the train sounds had receded into the night.  Finally, someone would gasp, “stop, the train’s gone!” and we would settle back into the regular conversation.

 Around four o’clock in the morning, Bob said, “Let’s turn out the light and beat off.” This was not an unexpected request from Bob.  None of the rest of us would admit that we even did or thought of such a thing but Bob was constantly suggesting it as a group activity! We made fun of Bob for the suggestion and then a train whistle blew and we were back to our "fight" to control the light.

Frustrated on multiple levels, Bob went to sleep.  That proved to be the biggest mistake made all evening.  I'm not proud of what happened next but "boys will be boys." We put toothpaste on his cheek and tickled his face with a feather until he slapped the toothpaste and smeared it on his face.  We tied his feet to the logs of the wall so that when we shouted, “Fire, fire!  Bob, quick get out, get out!” while holding a flaming Sterno can near his face, he would jump up and fall down.  Then of course for the final act, we put his hand in warm water so that he would wet his sleeping bag.  Wetting the sleeping bag turned out to be our worst idea of the night because Bob had drunk a lot of soft drinks (Aunt Alice had told the counter clerk to give us one candy or small popcorn per movie and free drinks all day) and he peed enough to wet the whole floor of the log cabin getting all four sleeping bags wet.  We were forced to sit outside and talk for the rest of the night. The sun rose and three of us had not slept a single minute.

Just after sunrise Auline (our cook, housekeeper, nanny) arrived and made pancakes for the weary campers.  One by one my friends left, Bob still had a string hanging from his left ankle as he boarded his bike to ride home.  I left the breakfast table and went to bed until mid-afternoon. 

The crazy thing is that even now, more than fifty years later I still have a slight sense of panic when I am in a darkened room and hear a train – it only lasts until I remember Bob and how we tormented him that night.  I feel ashamed and amused at the same time.  Bob, wherever you are I'm sorry!