Hide-N-Seek, or Hango-Seek as we called it, was definitely our favorite outdoor summer game, and we had many great places to play it, but the best place was "The Junk Yard". It wasn't really a junk yard, it was a fenced in place on River Street with a couple of dilapidated old wooden buildings full of holes that housed giant bales of cloth that were soon to be turned into felt. It was a busy place and the bales were changed regularly creating an always changing maze of tunnels and holes to hide in. After the workers left it was our turn.
One day George, Gary, Jimmy, Ricky and me were playing there. George was a small kid with bright red hair and there was no mistaking him for anybody else. In hide-and-seek, if you spied someone and identified them wrongly it was called a false spy and you were "IT" again. We all spied George at least once when we were it and he'd pop up somewhere else yelling "false spy, you're it again". So after four or five false spies on George we decided something funny was going on. It was pretty dark in there except for a few beams of light coming through the holes in the walls. We now started to get a bit scared and decided to get out quick. We all scrambled for the exit hole trying to be the first one out.
Unfortunately, the hole was very small and we had to exit one at a time in single file. Gary was behind me and I heard him say "Come on George, hurry up". So I turned around and noticed that George was crawling along behind us but quite a bit back. However, when I got to the hole and looked out I saw George standing outside. Well let me tell you, I almost tore the skin right off my back getting out that hole. Gary popped out next and just about dropped dead when he saw George there. We took off like scared cats. Later at Gary's house we told his mother about this and she told us a young kid with red hair suffocated there years before.
Well, I leave it up to you. Was it a ghostly apparition or some kid that had a lot of moxie? If it was another kid, he was pretty slippery because after the first few false spies we'd all rush over to where the phony George was and he would simply not be there. Needless to say, we didn't go in there too much after that.
