On the Old Corner of Mainstreet

Assignment: Name a street and tell what happened there. Sometimes hauntings can be in plain sight.

On the Old Corner of Main Street

 

            As far as anyone knew, nothing ever happened on that vacant corner of Main Street. It was a small empty lot, a very vacant plot, and no one alive knew it any other way. The locals occasionally mentioned it by simply referring to it as the old corner of Main Street when giving directions to somewhere more notable but more frequently whispering about it in the many arcane tales shared and debated.

            The oldest residents told tales of the corner being haunted where, as they as children heard say, no structure stood for very long. Some said others saw strange sightings and heard soft music. One teller went as far to say that they had heard from a reliable source of seeing the gentle old woman slowly dancing there once, alone in the dark on a rare spring night. None of those tales was ever substantiated.

            Across the street from that corner lot, Melissa lived alone in her small second story studio apartment. New in town, Melissa had run away from home and ended up here taking a menial job with no close friends to mention. She whiled her evenings away reading gothic romance novels while the neon lights flashed purple and orange on her windowsill. Weeks and months slid by and while at work one day Melissa overheard that the old woman had simply disappeared on one spring night. No one provided an explanation, and no seemed to care.

            As time lingered to the following spring, it so happened to be April 30, Melissa sat near her window reading another novel. Finishing for the night, she rubbed her eyes and leaned out the window to breathe in the fresh spring air. The day’s light had long faded and darkness enveloped the small town punctuated by that colorful flashing neon light down the street. Always to bed by eleven, Melissa sighed and stood facing the lot down below to slide the window closed. A movement caught her eye down at the corner lot. She fisted her eyes again. Was it blowing dust or a smudge on the window? She slid her thumb across the window determining the strange sight remained down below at the corner lot. She reopened the window to look closer.

            Melissa stared at the enigmatic blur that seemed to drift about the lot. Glancing at her alarm clock, it clicked over eleven just as the clock tower sounded. Returning her vision to down below, she saw a handsome, well-dressed young man standing there staring up at her. Melissa blinked and instinctively backed away from his view. Peeking around the window edge, she saw the man standing there patiently in the same place looking up to Melissa’s window. She pulled away again, but immediately had to peer down at the young man who seemed fixated on her alone.

            Appearing as an attendee from an earlier times formal ball, he held one arm up and one arm cocked out at waist level in front of him stepping from side to side and twisting as if he held a dancing partner in his arms. Incredulous, Melissa watched in fascination. The man swayed back and forth with his invisible dancing partner as he remained focused up at Melissa’s form standing in the window. With his raised arm, he gestured with his fingers as if to ask Melissa to join him in a dance. She put a hand to her mouth and looked away but turned directly back to the shadowy man with a finger to her chest. With two hands now, he urged her to come down.

            On that particular night, an unknown impulse drew Melissa out of her apartment and down to the street level. She paused across from the corner lot and studied the man.  Wearing fine evening clothes, he stood tall and straight while conveying a genteel manner. Finely groomed and debonair, he wore a perfectly trimmed beard. With a grand polished gesture and a bow at the waist, the man urged her to join him. Melissa glanced down at her own casual attire, but it didn’t seem to matter to either of them. She stepped off the curb and guardedly walked across the quiet street toward this beguiling man who beckoned her in earnest. As she stood on the lot’s adjoining sidewalk, his eyes caught hers and Melissa stared into his hypnotic pale gray eyes. Wearing white gloves, the man held out his hand for Melissa to join him though fear remained in her soul. Nonetheless, she stepped off the hard unforgiving concrete sidewalk leaving her shoes behind to step onto the supple, cool soil. Melissa sucked in a breath taking in a fragrance that conjured emotions of another happier life. The young man smiled and nodded politely to her.

            Melissa stood there, and her heart swelled. Again, he gestured, turned aside and cocked an elbow toward her. She glanced about to see if anyone watched while lowering her eyes to the ground. With a deep breath, she looked up and reached out to him, looping her arm through his cocked elbow. He patted her hand and a charge shot through her arm that shot straight through her heart. She thought she could dissolve with his touch. Leading her to the middle of the lot, he faced her, wrapped his arm about her back, grasped and lifted her hand, and took her close into a dancers’ embrace. Faraway music began to play, a soft waltz from a time long past. Together they danced to that faraway song playing in her head that never ended them strolling and weaving there in the dark for an hour. As midnight neared, he stopped and held her at arms length looking into her eyes with a look of adoration. When she wanted to say a prayer of gratitude and blessing, he only solemnly shook his head and placed his gloved finger to her lips.     

            A breath of wind blew in, and the tower clock chimed the midnight hour. Melissa glanced away and in that moment, her dancing partner disappeared. She called and ran about barefooted searching, back and forth, but in that empty old corner of Main Street, he was nowhere about. Melissa shivered as she wrapped her arms about herself and walked unsteadily back to her apartment unsure of what sort of paradise she had just experienced.

            In the years that followed, Melissa remained in that small apartment overlooking the empty lot. The townspeople wondered why every night she stared across the street to the old corner of Main Street, but she would never answer if some audacious person asked. Some heard and shared a tale that Melissa spent every spare cent she earned to purchase the lot from the old woman’s estate though never knowing if it were true because Melissa would not say.

                                   ***

            A new generation of townspeople grew up in the small town. Some say that the empty lot on Main Street is haunted with at least one saying that they saw old Melissa dancing out there on certain cool spring nights before she disappeared; but as we of the town know, the tales of unexplained events transpiring on the old corner of Main Street will never be substantiated.          

 

 

Inspired by “Save a Prayer” by Duran Duran