The Bloody Handprint

By Travis McHenry

The incident that I am about to relate to you happened before I was born. My grandmother told it to me, and I believe her story, or else I would not be retelling it now. It happened to her mother many years ago.

Our family was very poor and they lived in a cabin that was deep in the woods. My grandmother's mother was watching over Grandma and her brother. Both of them were young, not much over six years old. Nights get pitch black in the Michigan woods, and all they had for light were a few candles. The nearest cabin was at least a mile away, so the whole family had become used to solitude.

My great grandmother was idly knitting, keeping an eye on the children, when a strange feeling came over her. She felt almost as though she were being watched. Instinctively, she looked towards the door of the small cabin. There, on the window beside the door, appeared a bloody handprint before her very eyes. I wish you could hear the way she told me the next part, for the thought of it still sends shivers down my spine. A voice, soft but terribly clear, came out of nothing and kept saying "he murdered me, he murdered me."

The next day, when Great Grandpa came home, they pulled up the floor boards of the front porch and dug up the soft dirt floor in the area beneath the window where the handprint had appeared. Buried in a shallow grave was a skeleton of a man. His skull was caved in, and the general assumption was that a former owner of the cabin had murdered a peddler for his money. My Great Grandparents moved out the next day and after that, no member of my family would stay in the cabin again, even though they had put his bones to rest in a proper cemetery.

On my grandmother's good name, not a word of this is a lie.