The Curse is a story from More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It tells the story of a man who recounts a strange incident in his younger years. Based on a urban legend often called "The Fatal Fraternity Initiation" collected by Vance Randolph.
The inside of the old deserted house.
The Story
My dad's friend, Charlie Potter was a small nervous man, who was always looking around as if he was in some kind of danger. After he told me this story about his college fraternity, I understood why.
"The frat doesn't exist anymore," he said. "It was banned years ago. We had just nine members at that point. And we were taking in two more: Jack Lawton and Ernie Kramer. "One night in January, just about this time of year, the nine of us took them out into the country for their initiation. We took them to an old deserted house where two young men about our age had been murdered recently. Their murderer was still at large.
"We gave Jack a lighted candle and told him to go up to the third floor. 'Stay there for an hour,' we told him, 'then come back down. Don't speak. Don't make any noise. If your candle goes out, carry on in the dark.' "From where we were standing, we could see the light from Jack's candle moving up the stairs to the second floor, then to the third. But when he got to the third floor, his candle went out. "We guessed that he had come to a drafty corner, and the wind blew it out. But when the hour went by and he didn't come down, we weren't so sure. We waited another 15 minutes and got more and more nervous.
"So we sent Ernie Kramer up after him. When Ernie got to the third floor, his candle also went out. We waited 10 minutes, 20 minutes, but there was no sign of either of them. 'Come on down,' we called, but they didn't answer. "Finally, we decided to go and get them. Armed with flashlights, we started up the stairs. It was as quiet and dark as a grave in that house. When we got to the second floor, we called out again, but there was no answer.
"When we got to the third floor, we walked into a great big open space like an attic. Jack and Ernie weren't there. But we saw footprints in the dust. These led to a room on the other side of the attic. "That room was also empty. But there was fresh blood on the floor, and the window was wide open. It was about 25 feet to the ground, but there was no ladder or rope in sight that they could have used to get down.
"We searched the rest of the house and the land around the house and found nothing. We decided that they were playing a trick on us. We figured that in some way they had escaped through the window and were hiding in the woods. The blood on the floor was to throw us off the track. We guessed that they'd show up the next day with a lot of stories and a lot of laughs. But they didn't.
"The next day we told the Dean of Men what had happened, and he reported it to the police. The police didn't find anything either, and after several weeks the search ended. To this day no one knows what happened to Jack Lawton and Ernie Kramer. "There isn't much more to tell," he said. "We weren't arrested, but the college disbanded the fraternity and suspended the nine of us from school for a year.
"The strangest part came after we graduated. Someone must have placed a curse on us. Every year since then, around the time of that initiation, one of us has died or gone crazy. "I'm the only one left," he said, "and I'm in pretty good health. But there are times when I feel just a little peculiar...."
(Now rush at someone in the audience and SCREAM:)
AAAAAAAAAAH!