OUR SCARY BASEMENT! part 2

      Now that I was down and in the furnace room the real test would begin! Once in there you were greeted with the huge coal-fed monster with steroid-induced heat pipes all leading upward that engulfed two thirds of the room. To the back and right of the furnace was a dark vacant area that you knew was awaiting something else "very bad." To the left, walking into the furnace room was a smaller room used for cobs and kindling to stoke the furnace. It had been a bathroom at one time possibly. Even that little room someone could have come out and said BOO!

      Each evening, as it was my job to fill the stoker with small, chipped coal that was then augured into the furnace, I would have to gather up the courage to open that door to the "coal room." First, just thinking about opening that door the hair on the back of my neck would rise up! My heart would be throbbing. This was bone chilling stuff!

     I knew, opening that door each evening, there would be something monstrous lying behind the coal mound toward the back of that room. That feeling never went away. It was a wonder that my mother didn't find me lying there frozen in fright or at the very least sitting in the corner babbling to myself!