The Thompsons lived in a dilapidated farmhouse on a gravel road about ten miles from Route 11 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. It was a cold Halloween night in 1963, and the family of four had just finished eating dinner.

Norman Thompson looked out his window at the expanse of his property as he pondered the chores he would do the next day. By the light of one naked hundred-watt bulb, Emily, his wife, stitched a checkered quilt in the corner of the living room. Their teenage sons, Hank and Jeb, lay exhausted on the front porch after a hard day’s work bailing hay.

Jeb struggled to his feet from a hammock and flexed his aching muscles. He took a rock from his pocket, and after winding up like a pitcher on a mound; he hurled it as far as he could in the direction of the eerie, abandoned house across the road. The sound of glass breaking in an upstairs window of the weather-beaten structure shattered the stark silence of the desolate country landscape.

“Damn, Jeb, that was a hellacious throw,” Hank complimented as he leaned off the side of the porch and spit out a big chaw of tobacco juice. It won’t be long before you’ve broken the glass out of every window.”

“That old house gives me the creeps. I wish somebody would come along and bulldoze it.”

“What would be the point? Sam Johnson’s whole parcel is nothing but a pile of rocks. I’ll bet that house will fall down before anyone comes to knock it down. It’s just not worth the bother.” Hank scratched his oily black hair and continued. “Do you know what day it is?”

Jeb paused for a moment and then replied, “Hey, I almost forgot after liftin’ all those bails of hay all day. It’s Halloween, and I know what you’re gonna say before you even say it.”

“Last year, on this very night, with a full moon blazin’ just like tonight, we heard the sound of that horse. The hoof beats sounded so strange…like thunder,” Hank whispered in his spookiest voice.

“I’ll never forget how scared I was,” Jeb piped in as he peeled a scab from his thumb.

 Hank jumped up from his rocker, and like an actor on a Broadway stage, he motioned in the distance and shouted, “And lo and behold, the horse had a rider, both as black as night.” And then he continued in his normal voice, “He looked like he was goin’ to a Halloween party, dressed in black from head to toe and wearin’ a mask so you couldn’t see his face and a cape blowin’ in the breeze like some kind of vampire.”

“If it weren’t for the moon, we’d a never seen him at all.”

“But we still woulda heard that woman screamin’ he carried away in that sack,” Hank remembered.

Jeb sucked on the scab and spit. “I can’t believe Sheriff Wilkes paid us no mind when we spilled our guts on what we saw. Just because we lied about tearin’ the stop sign down at Columbia Furnace is no reason to think we’d be lyin’ about a woman bein’ murdered.”

“Sheriff Wilkes and his morons! They never did find who murdered those old maids that lived out near Possum Corners.”

“And I think their killer mighta been the one sneaking around the Johnson house in the dark last Halloween. He certainly was up to no good.”

Jeb rolled a cigarette from a tobacco pouch, lit it with a match, and took a long drag. Sticking out his tongue, he blew several smoke rings, which magically spun in circles, one through another, as he recalled that hellish night one year ago. “Yeah, I’ll never forget that poor woman screamin’. You could tell she knew she’d never see the light of day agin. He flicked an ash on the porch and said with a chuckle, “You still say that old house is not haunted?”

 “I ain’t seen any ghosts bumpin’ around over there so far.”

“What about the Johnsons? They disappeared in the dead of night. One day they were plowin’ the field; the next day they were gone.”

“There’s no doubt in my mind they were murdered just like that woman. The coroner said he found blood splattered all over the house. The maniac on the black horse probably done it, not ghosts,” Hank said, as he watched a bat fly across the face of the moon.

 “Nobody will ever live in that house agin’ after that. The county can’t give the place away, and since we live right next door, this place ain’t worth a shit either anymore. Dad always says if we didn’t have bad luck, we wouldn’t have no luck at all.”

“Well, Jeb, I’m gonna turn in before you give me the willies and I have to sleep with one eye open all night.”

Jeb smiled, flicked his cigarette onto the road, and pulled out his crusty wallet. “Since you don’t believe in ghosts, I’ll give you a dollar to go into that old house right now and stay ‘til morning.”

“Ain’t no way in hell,” Hank scowled as he withdrew his own wallet, “But I’ll raise the stakes to three dollars if you think you’ve got the balls to spend the night over there.”

“I don’t need money that bad,” Jeb conceded.

The two laughed and went to bed, but visions of ghosts and ax murderers lay heavy on their minds.

The night seemed uncommonly still as the two teens lay there rolling the things they’d seen the previous year around in their minds. The moon disappeared behind a cloud, plunging the land into pitch-blackness.

Hank couldn’t sleep. All he could think of was the masked rider in black with the flowing vampire cape, the blood, and the house next door.

Jeb tossed and turned as he hummed “Faith of our Fathers” into his pillow in a low drone. A cool breeze found the crack at the base of the window and blew a musty curtain across the back of his neck. Jeb’s hair stood straight up, and a chill ran down his spine that felt like icy fingers. He sat up, looked about the room, and listened for the slightest sound. The moon had reappeared in the sky, and its light shining through the limbs of the trees outside cast eerie phantoms on the bedroom wall. The open closet door gaped at him in the silence.

Several hours passed, and both brothers were restless in their beds. A sound pricked Hank’s ear. Hoof beats. He knew right away no Mennonite carriage would be out at this time of night. It was just one horse coming down the road. It sounded like thunder coming from far off. He looked at his watch—midnight, Halloween.

Jeb heard it too, bounded from bed, and made a beeline across the hall to Hank’s room, “It’s him, he whispered excitedly. The rider in black…he’s come agin. We can’t let him get away agin.”

“Hey, He’s not our problem. Let’s call Sheriff Wilkes.”

“You know he won’t believe us, and if he did, the maniac will be gone before he could get here.”

Hank paused to weigh the alternatives and whined, “Let’s wake up, Pa. He’ll know what to do.”

“You know what Pa said last time.”

“Yeah, I know. The same thing he says every time.” Hank rattled off a few Pa-isms in a stern voice, impersonating his father: “Mind you own business. Don’t catch a bullet that was meant for somebody else. Don’t go huntin’ a wolf unless the wolf is huntin’ you. Let’s face it, Pa’s not gonna get involved unless the man in black comes knocking on our door, and maybe we shouldn’t either.”

“If we don’t take the bull by the horns, he’s gonna get away. Who knows, he might be comin’ to our house one of these nights to chop us up,” Jeb said with a long face.

“Look, birdbrain, I wanna live. I’m too young to die.”

Jeb knew his brother well enough to know Hank would never to put his life on the line to save a total stranger. He didn’t want to take any chances either, but he couldn’t stand the thought of letting the murderer get away two years in a row. And if not this night, it was true their family could be victims some other dark night. He grabbed his slingshot and some rock pellets from a drawer and tried to reason with his brother: “Hey, let’s just see what he’s gonna do and where he’s gonna go. We don’t have to arrest him or anything. Let’s just see where he goes so we can tell Sheriff Wilkes. We could be heroes.”

Hank nodded and reluctantly joined Jeb. They sneaked out through the back door and crawled behind the shrubs facing the Johnson house.

The autumn wind blew through the old tattered curtains hanging in the windows of the battered house. The full moon shone high in the sky as they watched the rider in black dismount his ebony steed across the gravel road and disappear insider the Johnson house. Hank and Jeb’s hearts pounded in their chests. They were so excited they could barely catch their breaths.

After what seemed like an eternity, the mysterious rider reappeared, carrying something in a sack in his arms, the same as last Halloween. The teens heard the sound of a woman’s screams emanating from the writhing sack.

“Time for the police,” Hank stammered excitedly

“Hey, Nimrod, by the time they get here this pervert will be gone with the wind. Another poor lady murdered.”

The rider tied the sack on the back of his mighty steed, mounted, and rode off into the night, heading away from the direction of the state road and deeper into the country. The teenagers mounted their bicycles and followed as close behind as they could without drawing attention to themselves.

“Where can he be going?” Jeb panted, struggling to keep up. “This road is gonna end in about a mile. There’s nothin’ out here but the old abandoned—”

“Cemetery! Damn, that’s where he’s headed all right,” Hank howled.

Reluctantly, they peddled on. Neither had stepped foot in a graveyard after dark before. Their eyes flitted nervously across the eerie landscape ahead of them. They had never been so scared, but in spite of the unknown that lay ahead in the black night, they continued to follow the masked rider from a distance down the lonely road.

The boys hid their bikes in the bushes a little before they reached the abandoned graveyard. They continued on foot as silently as they could. This graveyard hadn’t been used for years. Many of the graves had collapsed, and most of the old stones were leaning. The grass was high, and the trees, gnarled and leafless. The wind crawled up the back of their necks as they sprawled on the ground near the entrance to the cemetery.

The man in black dismounted, and lifting the sack from across his saddle, pitched it into a grave already dug. The pitiful screams of the helpless female filled the teens’ senses with horror.

“He’s going to bury her alive. What kind of monster could do such a thing?” Jeb whispered in disbelief.

“I don’t want to find out, so stay quiet or I’m out of here.”

Hank and Jeb were so terrified they could barely lift their eyes to look at the monster shoveling the suffocating earth on top of his helpless victim. Her futile screams diminished as the dirt filled the grave and sealed her doom.

Finally, the monstrous deed was done and the screaming ceased entirely when the woman was finally enveloped in the damp, wormy earth. The rider placed the shovel neatly in its place on his saddlebag and mounted the bellowing, hellish steed. Without the slightest reservation, he rode off into the night from which he had come.

After the hoof beats disappeared entirely, Hank and Jeb ran to the grave in hopes they could still save the helpless woman from the horrible fate of being buried alive.

Hank found a piece of stump and Jeb a flat rock to dig. It seemed like an eternity before they finally reached a burlap sack. The worms blanketed the earthen tomb. The teens’ skin crawled with disgust and loathing as they hurriedly untied the rope binding the top of the sack.

The whimpering sound of the woman within lifted their spirits as they pulled the burlap away from her head and shoulders. The full moon shone down from behind her through her golden tresses. Her neck and shoulders looked like ivory in the moonlight. Her sheer nightgown felt like silk to the touch, and the sight of her breasts heaving underneath it was the most erotic sight Hank and Jeb had ever seen.

Hank felt like a hero as he lifted her into his arms and turned the shadow of her face toward the moonlight, saying, “Jeb, I think I just died and went to heaven.”

“Not yet, dearie,” the she-beast cackled as she pulled Hank into the grave like a toy soldier. He heard the sound of bones breaking and looked up to see Jeb’s headless body, with arms flailing and blood spewing from the cavern of his brother's neck. Hank tried to scale the slippery wall, but again, he was caught in the vise of her icy fingers. He writhed in agony as the monster playfully harvested his left eye with a long fingernail and popped it into her mouth.

Hank remembered his pa had once told him, “Good guys don’t always wear white hats” as the world started to spin.

The last thing he saw with his good eye was the horror of her face in the moonlight.