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The First Time We Killed Ted

Shawn Ingram
19 min readJan 29, 2025

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The first time we killed him wasn’t our fault. It was an accident. We could hardly be blamed for that. I mean, what the hell was he thinking scaring us like that? It looked like someone had tried to hack his right arm off with a dull machete. It hung by only a few tendons. And his face was the stuff of nightmares. He should’ve thought it through a bit more. In a way, it was his fault.

Saturday — 11:13 PM

The five of us had decided to blow off some steam. Monday would start the last week before midterms. What better way to do that than to spend a night at an allegedly haunted house? We were at the abandoned house out past the cemetery on Greeley Road. Someone dared us to spend a night there. It was a few miles outside of Carbondale. We planned to get good and drunk, sleep in the house, and return to Smith Hall Sunday morning.

The wind was bracing. The temperatures were in the low forties. The moon was full. The sky was clear, and we were ready for adventure. The boarded-up house stood before us like a behemoth lurking in shadows. The full moon cast pitch-black shadows that looked like a mouth. We were young and invincible. We laughed at the idea of ghosts. Sure, the house was spooky, but we were destined for greatness and long lives.

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Shawn Ingram
Shawn Ingram

Written by Shawn Ingram

Just a guy telling stories. One silver lining of the 2020 pandemic was I started writing!

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