Makenzie O’Kanos The Old Silas House Kyra was walking home from her first day of eighth grade at her new school when something caught her attention. She noticed a little boy in the top left window of the condemned brown house next to her then he faded away—like a ghost!! She stared at the window for a few more seconds. There’s no way I just saw that, she tried to convince herself. “That’s the Old Silas Place. It’s haunted you know,” a sweet voice said, frightening Kyra. She turned around to see a familiar face. “Sorry to frighten you. My name is Abby. You must be Kyra. We have some classes together.” The girls shook each other’s hands. “You looked like you saw a ghost,” Abby said. Kyra looked at Abby with wide eyes, surprised that her guess was right. “Oh, you did?” Abby said, raising her eyebrows in shock. “I swear I’m not crazy. I saw a boy and then he just faded away,” Kyra said in a surprised tone. Abby looked at Kyra and said “I believe you. Last Halloween I went in there with two of my friends. We kept hearing strange noises. A man’s voice screamed at us to get out or he would kill us then we saw a black figure. That’s when we ran out. I never told anybody up until now, but since you just saw something ...” Kyra looked at Abby with her mouth wide open. The two girls exchanged phone numbers and then talked some more about the house. Kyra learned that over a hundred years ago, a man named Dave Silas shot his wife, ten-year-old son, and eightyear-old daughter. He then shot himself in the head. That night, Kyra struggled to go to sleep. She couldn’t stop thinking about the little boy ghost and she couldn’t understand why she began to obsess over what she saw. Were his mom and sister trapped in that house too? Was Dave keeping them there? Kyra couldn’t help but wonder what other secrets, if any, were beyond the brown, rotted exterior of that haunted house. The next day after school, Kyra walked by the Silas house again. She looked at it closely, waiting to see if any ghost would appear
30