Orientation

The Haunted Wardrobe

Several weeks ago I bought a wardrobe from an antique store that was having a wicked deal on dead people's things. Now, typically I don't meddle much in the affairs of the recently departed nor the affairs of the previously departed for that matter. However, men do tedious and burdensome tasks all to be in the presence of a woman.

Which brings us to the antique store.

As the door creaks open, I'm immediately engulfed in that familiar smell; old. Its like having five hundred grandma's in one room, all gasping their final breaths at once. For those of you that have lost your grandma, I'm sorry. Get over it, I'm trying to paint a picture here.

We browse through the isles of what I have to admit is finely constructed furniture. Typically when I hear "They don't make 'em like that anymore..." I usually think to myself "There's a reason for that you old ass fucking country bumpkin." This however, does not apply to bitchin' old cars and apparently furniture. The problem is restoring the ancient ones. After wading through the furniture graveyard for about a half an hour, she had collected a handsome pile of crap that will be stored for future decoration. Thank fucking Jesums, I think, and was about to head out when I though I heard something like a child crying coming from around one of the larger islands of debris. I turned the corner and there was the most majestic mahogany wardrobe I had ever seen. It had hand carved lion heads encrested on the doors, and intricate carvings on the trim.
I was in awe of its glory and I think it made me pee a little.

I bought the wardrobe immediately and paid some punks to load it into their truck and deliver it to chateau Cheeks. We fought the motherfucker all the way into my apartment, where it came to sit in its final resting place... or so I thought. I cleaned the big bastard up and put a shine on it that could blind a retard at a hundred paces. A few days went by and I finally had my wardrobe filled with my ever growing collection of clothes I will never get around to wearing. I thought, man this is tits. No more trying to repair the hanger bars and shelving that continually collapses under the weight of my huge fat guy clothes.

Something disturbed me though, my clothes started to have a strange odor; something I couldn't quite place yet. I decided to remove everything and wash repeatedly. I put an application on the inside of the wardrobe that was supposed to kill any mold or mildew from moisture and dry up the wood. This turned out to be a bad idea because of the toxicity of the fumes. I had to sleep in the living room for a few days.

One night as I slept on the couch I was awoken to the sound of a kid screaming and crying. First I wondered where the fuck I was, then wondered who's brat that was. As I became oriented I wondered if I had just imagined it. As I sat there pondering the situations creepiness, I heard some more children crying. I went into the bedroom and looked around. I looked in the spare room and checked outside. What the fuck some kids were doing in my house at 3AM was beyond me, but when you hear strange shit at night, you check the scene... preferably armed. I found nothing, and eventually went back to sleep.

I'm a light sleeper, and when I'm expecting someone or something, I tend to sleep a lot lighter. Two hours later I heard the children's sobbing again. I turned on all the lights and waited until dawn.

Well, I'm no jackass horror movie victim, so first thing in the morning I had some neighbors help me drag the mahogany nightmare back down stairs. I thanked them and said nothing more. I went into my house, grabbed the long-handled axe from the utility room. My neighbors were all like "What the fuck?" as I splintered the wardrobe into debris, all while swearing, sometimes in English. That must have been a site. After about fifteen minutes, a crowd had gathered, and at one point I thought the sheriff's department may have been alerted to my actions.

Anyways, I'm selling souvenir haunted wardrobe chunks for five bucks each. My neighbors bought most of it that fine Sunday morning, but I still have lots of it left. It smells like rotten flesh, yeah I figured out that was what the smell was, weird huh, and if you hold it to your ear, you can hear children crying.

Apparently, after some researching, I found out the wardrobe dated back to sometime around the Civil War. It was supposedly from Virginia. There have been some stories of people who lived in Virginia capturing escaping slaves and locking the children in wardrobes a lot like the one I had. Torturing them, eventually starving them to death in some cases. Some of the children were left there, even months after they had died.