Naughty Noose

by Gracie
(Lake Villa, Minnesota)

One time, my family and friend and I went on a short camping trip. The campsite was not a very well known one, up in Long Prairie, Minnesota. We only planned to stay one night, so when we arrived at noon on a Saturday morning, my best friend Raina and I decided to explore instead of helping with helping set up camp. We wandered off into the woods and stumbled upon a ramshackle little shed.

It was a horribly hot day in July, so Raina and I headed in to see if it was any cooler in there. Surprisingly, it was, but only in the doorway. We looked around the shed for a while, discovering nothing but a rope hanging from the ceiling. We went back to our seats in the incredibly cold doorway, where Raina promptly marked the rope by painting it with a little sparkly nail polish.

I began to tell the few ghost stories I knew, the commonly told stories everyone knows. After a while of me telling scary stories and Raina playing with the rope, she suggested we play a hand game. So Raina put the rope down between me and her then we played a quick game. When we finished I began to tell another story while Raina reached down to pick up her rope. When she reached down, however, the rope was no longer between us. We began to look, but we didn't look long. When we stood we saw the rope, distinguished with a small stripe of sparkly paint, retied to the ceiling. Raina, being a superstitious freak that believed in ghosts, began to scream. I'll admit, even though i didn't believe in ghosts at that time was REALLY freaked out. I tried to calm my racing heart, then pulled the rope back down and handed it to Raina, crumpled up on the floor. I gave it to her and said to put it in between us again, then I told another story. When I finished, I turned around and sure enough there was the rope hanging from the ceiling.

Now I screamed while Raina ran for her life. I wasn't far behind, pausing long enough to take the rope down and flinging it into the trees.That night I fell asleep uneasy from the rope experience. When I woke up in the morning I felt a strange lump in the bottom of my sleeping bag. I looked down and saw the rope, sitting intently on my feet. It was all I could do not to scream. I picked up the rope and ran to the lake next to the camp site and tossed the rope in the water.

A few hours later we packed up and left. I never told anybody about finding the rope. A few days after we arrived home, Raina called me in a panic. She said she'd gone to open her sketchbook (she is an avid artist) to find the rope in the middle of the sketchbook, next to an unexplained picture of a little girl being hanged.