Amanda Sedlak-Hevener

Charged By The Ghost Of A Horse

I grew up in a large suburb outside of Houston, during the early 90s when a lot of farmland settled by the original German immigrants was being bought up by developers and turned into new homes. My family lived at the very end of our subdivision, and past my house was a great expanse of farmland, flanked by thick woods and old decaying shacks from the 1800s.

Every day on my walk home from school, I passed by a particularly overgrown old shack, which I conjecture must have at some point been a house. It leaned like it would fall over at any minute on its tired old foundation, and just beyond it lay a long row of fence. While commuting to-and-from elementary school, and I always walked by it, picking up interesting rocks and things, and I never thought much of it. There was always construction while the subdivision was expanding, so developers dug long trenches for sewage and erected electrical lines through the farmland.

Beyond the fence was a small lake, which I often snuck into to explore and catch frogs. After an encounter with a water moccasin, a species of pit viper, I decided to stay clear of it. The farm also had cows meandering through the meadow, and one large black horse.

A storm rolled in the previous night, and I remember the clouds being so thick and black that it felt like night when arriving at school the next day. Once it hit full-force, the power went out at the school, so our teacher decided to have us all sit together on the floor and read to us for the rest of the day.

The storm passes, but the darkness lingers when I got out of school. Walking the muddy path past the crooked house and the aging fence in the darkness, each step becomes more and more difficult as the mud collects on my shoes. That’s when I hear a thrashing. The cows are gone, but I recall the old black horse, thinking it may be sick or injured.

Steam rises from the horse’s sleek, black coat, as it kicks its back legs wildly and violently slams its face into the muck. Looking at its face, it appear to not be panicked, but rather calm. Again-and-again, it plows its head into the mud and kicks out its legs, then shakes its head from side to side furiously. I stop to watch it; looking back I wish I had just kept walking. After after a minute or two, it stops to look up at me, the grime sliding off of its face.

Giving me no time to react, the horse begins charging towards me. Instead of jumping over the fence, it lowers its massive head and tears through the gap between the fence boards.

The wood cracks and splinters as the horse’s muscled body strains and its long neck extends through the gap, and it begins snapping at me. With its entire body covered in huge, swollen muscles it repeatedly recoils and slams all of its weight back into the fence, attempting to break the boards, again and again. Its enormous, broad teeth come inches from me, and I fall out of my shoes backwards, leaving them stuck in the mud. It’s a miracle that the fence holds it back.

Seeing it up close, I realize the horse is burned, badly. The skin around its mouth is seared, and tendrils of pink, bloody skin snake its way over its face like a spider web. The absence of skin makes its teeth seem even larger, its black gums exposed and frothing with spit I feel hitting me in the face. At this moment I am absolutely terrified this horse will kill me. I want to get up, but the thick mud traps me.

And the smell. It is like sulfur—a mixture of wet animal, burned meat, and singed hair. But what sticks with me the most are its eyes, which are clouded over like black ink poured into milk. As it struggles to reach me through the fence, its nostrils flared, covering me in its hot breath. The sound of its heavy teeth snapping shut over and over deafens me.

I leave my shoes and run home, and cause my mother to scream at me about the mud when I burst inside. I tell her about the horse that nearly killed me, and that I left my shoes there in the mud.

She grabs me by the arm and plans to make me take her back there to get them, but I cry and scream not to go, so she goes alone.

When she comes back she is holding my muddy old sneakers in her hands, and she tells me she saw the horse. It was dead. A farmhand dragged its body behind a tractor, telling my mom that the horse died earlier that day. One of the power new power lines running through the meadow knocked over during the storm, and the horse must have been near the lake, because it had been electrocuted and killed. He said it had died instantly beside the lake when the power went out hours ago.

Human Teeth And Nightmares

This isn’t something that happened to me, but rather something that happened to my father.

My father grew up in a haunted house: creaking floors when no one was there, doors closing by themselves with no impetus, and weirdest of all, my father’s sister (my aunt) was strongly plagued with nightmares once they moved into the house, and she was only about five at the time.

She would scream in her sleep, and wouldn’t wake up whenever she was having one of her screaming fits. Her parents tried to wake her up, much of the time with ill success. When she would finally wake up, she would start crying and say “the man was getting closer to my bed again.” She described the man as only having half of a face because part of his head was missing. My father’s mother felt disturbed by this, as her child was only five at the time, and so she could have gotten these images from any sort of media, as this was long ago.

Fast forward to few months later: the nightmares get worse. At this point, her parents attempted therapy, which results in no change whatsoever, but they’re getting desperate. A little time later, her mother vacuumed her room, and while doing so heard some larger objects get lodged within the vacuum. She opened the vacuum cleaner bag to see what the objects were. Turns out that the vacuum cleaner sucked up human teeth.

A few calls later, they discovered the previous owner of the house shot himself in that very room. I guess they weren’t thorough with the cleaning. Needless to say, they moved out as quickly as they could after that. My aunt never experienced nightmares to that extent again.

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