Here’s a short story I wrote quite a few years ago. I wondered how I could write a sort of classic ghost story, and this is what  came out.

RED ROVER, RED ROVER

By Joanna Parypinski

It wasn’t the hill, which was more of a small cliff, that went thirty feet straight down to the rocky creek below. It wasn’t the craggy old tree with black leaves whose boughs bent over the edge, reaching to the trickling water. It wasn’t even the vast cemetery that spanned the rocky soil of the westward field.

It was the story that scared them.

Like any small town with mischievous children, Charlotte kept its inhabitants in check with its very own ghost story. Familiar as they were with the tale, the children all avoided venturing onto that grassy plain that dropped off into a rocky creek and overlooked the cemetery.

Danny shivered in the evening air laced with a thin mist. There would be spring dew in the morning. A waxing silver moon rose into the dusky sky. He bowed his head against a chilly breeze.

“We’ll know,” Frank had hissed at him with a devious grin. “We’ll know if you don’t get the leaves from that tree because the other trees don’t have leaves like that. And everyone’ll know you’re a big chicken.”

The eight-year-old boy had felt a bolt of anxiety zap through him. Being labeled a chicken was the elementary school equivalent of the electric chair; if he didn’t prove that he’d gone out to the edge of the hill, the entire second grade would know by Monday. Danny sighed and wanted to smack himself for his big, flapping lips.

“I’m not afraid,” he’d told the other kids during lunch.

Of course, that had been said under the bright April sunlight of midday, sucking on a fruit punch juice box and eating a bologna sandwich that his mother had cut into triangles. Now, his parents under the impression he was spending the night at Logan’s house, traipsing down the lonely road to the hill over the cemetery, the moon shining silver on the evening mist, he wanted to stamp his promise into the dirt.

“I dare ya,” Frank had spat, eyes twinkling darkly. “I double dog dare ya.”

As he neared the miniature field, he heard whispery echoes of red rover, red rover, and his heart tapped out a quick rhythm in his chest. They were supposed to still be there—the kids who had been stupid enough to play red rover on the flat top of that hill.

His shoe came down on a twig, and the ensuing snap cracked through the air like a gunshot. Danny stumbled forward and nearly lost his balance.

“Red rover, red rover, let Roger come over!”

The eerie call seemed to breathe with the wind, rustling through the leaves on swaying branches. Danny’s legs worked harder as he ascended the hill, the stooped and gnarled tree now in sight. He counted the steps he took ‘til he reached the field and stood, paralyzed, at the edge.

Steeling himself to cross the immeasurable distance to the tree, Danny thought about how Frank would tell everyone he was a chicken if he didn’t get a handful of those shriveled, black leaves. So he took a step forward, and another.

“Red rover, red rover, let Roger come over!”

It was louder this time, more pronounced, unmistakably separate from the whisper of the wind. Danny was almost halfway to the tree, pulse throbbing in his throat, bare arms icy with the damp tingle of the fog.

“Red rover, red rover, let Danny come over!”

His heart plummeted all the way to his shoes, sticky around his sweating feet, which stopped dead. A blanket of cold dread numbed his body, his breaths coming out in sharp, white puffs of air.

Lined up on the edge of the hill beside the tree were eight pearly figures, hands clasped at their sides, eyes glowing silver in the moonlight. Wicked smiles curved their lips into concave crescents, their skin a luminescent gray, so pale it was almost transparent. They were waiting for him, just like Frank said they would be, and they wanted him to play.

He could no longer control the increasing speed of his breath, which left his mouth agape and dry. The sudden image of a gangly kid called Roger with angular elbows and thick glasses darted through his head, gaining momentum, colliding with two clasped hands—unable to break the grip, tumbling over the edge, bringing down all seven others with him as they plunged into the tooth-edged stream. Pale skin blossomed with blood, staining the water red; blank, empty eyes stared skyward, hollow like a carved-out pumpkin.

Danny opened his mouth to scream, but only a high, thin whistle of dead air escaped his lips. His legs, like two headstones glued to the ground, remained stiff and immobile. Eight children grinned eagerly at him across the field. The one on the left was tall and lanky, his glasses reflecting the moonlight like white flames.

They called again, in a unison sing-song, “Red rover, red rover, let DANNY come over!”

His stone-like legs started forward, to his great surprise, until he was trotting across the field, and then sprinting, right at the row of misty figures that were smiling at him. In an infinitesimal moment where time slowed to a near-stagnant crawl, a single fleeting thought shattered his brain like fragile glass: if he didn’t break through their ghostly grip, they would have him. They would take him. And if he did break through… only the bloodstained creek and quiet cemetery lay below.

The crooked, wizened tree loomed above him now, reaching down over the edge for the lost children, and Danny’s stomach collided with pallid arms. An immense invisible force pushed at him, and for a moment he thought it would bowl him over backwards, leaving him next in line on the left by Roger…

…but it snapped like a breaking bone, and in a rush of frigid mist, he was flying, the ground falling away beneath his feet and transforming into the rocky creek thirty feet below, slanted gray headstones peppering the field. His palms scratched roughly against the bark of the warped branch from which he hung, and when it had bent out to its farthest limit, he swung backwards, rubber soles sliding for purchase on the slick grass. A bouquet of spiky black leaves came off in his hands as he let go.

He could no longer see them, but their presence was heavy and stifling; they pressed in around him, calling his name, entreating him to play another game. Now that he had regained the use of his legs, he tore off across the grass, ethereal laughter clipping at his ankles and cold breaths brushing the nape of his neck as he ran.

He clutched the black leaves tightly in his fist as he pumped his legs, vowing never to return to the hill. It wasn’t because of the straight drop into the creek, or the ancient tree that looked like a wrinkled hag, or even the graveyard below where slept eight restless corpses.

It was the story. The sleepy town of Charlotte had a good one—very good, in fact. The real ones always were.