By Gisselle Mireles, Staff Reporter
November, 2021
Halloween marks the start of spooky season, when everyone is rushing to see the newest horror movie at the theaters, gathering around friends and family to hear a creepy encounter they had, or decorating to get in the spooky spirit. So, I found it appropriate to interview Kipp Austin Collegiate High School students about scary stories. To get a variety of stories, I included students from all grade levels and a teacher.
To start, I learned freshman Angel De Blas is brave. When asked if he’d respond to the summoning of a spirit, he said, “Yeah, probably yeah to make it fun. If it was like an ouija board then I would.”
Whereas Spanish teacher Maria Juarez said, emphatically, no. But then she wavered. “No, it depends. I guess my quick answer is no because it makes me really scared, I don’t want to talk with someone that’s dead.” Though Juarez didn’t want to converse with the dead, she did share with me a story her husband told her about when he was a teenager. He and a couple of friends left school to visit an abandoned house of a deceased doctor. Their interest came from rumors that you could hear voices from the doctor’s daughter, who died of a strange sickness. The doctor blamed herself because even though she was a doctor she didn’t know how to cure the child. So, she buried her daughter there. When her husband and his friends went inside the big house, Juarez said, “they heard a soft voice from a girl saying who’s there?”
“And when they heard that they got chills and were all scared. There was no one who didn’t hear it. So, when they all noticed it was real, they ran and as they did the voice told them wait for me,” added Juarez.
I wanted to get more good scary stories, so I went to senior Evelyn Martinez, whose house could probably be the set for the next Conjuring movie. She said, “One time in my house at night, I could hear footsteps walking towards my room and laughing. Also, I’ve seen this little girl running by the restroom. I’ve told my dad if he’s experienced that before, and he said yeah. Then one time, me and my sister were fighting, and we heard something scratching and crying under the bed. We thought it was the dog, but when we checked there was nothing.”
Later, Martinez told me her family found a vintage photo of a teen girl dressed from the 1980s under the floor when they were remodeling and that her neighbor who’s lived there for years thinks it was the girl who died in her house.
On a darker note, junior Erik Rodriguez told me of his past experience with the Occult, when he tried to contact spirits. “One night nothing happened, and for the second night, I went to school, and my mom recorded when she was cleaning the clothes all alone. She heard someone calling her name five times and footsteps. When I got back from school, she told me. I didn’t trust her, but then she showed me a clip of it. So, then I was just like what? I didn’t know what to do.”
A friend recommended I interview junior Angel Medina because he had a lot of paranormal encounters. In one story, he told me about when he was in Mexico, and something unseen pulled his shoulders and threw him. “I remember it happened in broad daylight, not in the morning or night. They pulled my shoulders and squeezed them, and I felt how I lost balance, and they threw me,” Medina said.
Finally, I talked with sophomore Keila Zubieta, who enlightened me about an Honduran legend called el cadejo negro. She explained, “It’s about a black and a white dog. So, if a person has been doing bad things or has bad influences or thoughts, the black dog appears to you. But, when you have pure thoughts and do good things, the white dog appears to you.”
I asked her, “so I’m guessing you see the black dog a lot?”
Zubieta responded, “No. Well, my grandma saw it.”
The Cardinal Post 