CreepyPastas

Old Boo Diddley

It was the year 2000. I was 17 years old, a junior in high school, and I had a shitty, low paying job at a rinky dink discount store that, at the time, was just a step above something like a Dollar General or Family Dollar. My boss was a bitch and I only made $4.15 an hour, the bare minimum wage at the time, if I recall. Needless to say, I needed a better job.

This is what lead me to our local Dairy Queen in town and, in August of the year 2000, I began my tenure there as a cook. I didn't really like the job and, at the same time, I didn't really hate it either but, with a spiffy $1 (or therebouts) raise in pay, I couldn't complain.

The weird stuff didn't begin until about a month later. I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. When I turned to look, it disappeared, much like one of those "floater" things that show up in your eyes from time to time. This went on for a while and it seemed like the more I tried to look at it, the more I thought about it, or the more attention I gave it, the more inclined it was to "appear."

Now, although it may sound like it, I hadn't yet realized, or even thought, that whatever I was seeing was an intelligent entity. I guess I thought that it was just one of "those things," whatever that means...

It wasn't until a few months later, in the fall, that the whole supernatural element of it all dawned on me. Myself, our shift leader Danny, and Patricia, the drive-thru girl, were getting ready to shut down for the night when the drive thru window opened by itself. To my surprise, neither of them made a big deal out of it.

"What the hell was that?" I said with a chuckle.

"Oh, that's just old Boo Diddley," Danny said with a cheeky grin.

"Old Boo Diddley? What's that all about?" I asked, intrigued.

"Whenever anything weird happens around here, we blame it on him," he answered.

"You mean this place is haunted?" I continued.

"Oh, I don't know," he answered, slightly annoyed. "We just say old Boo Diddley did it when something like that happens."

"What else happens?" I kept on.

"Sometimes people see stuff out of the corner of their eye. Sometimes they hear their names being called and stuff like that," Danny didn't seem to want to talk about it anymore.

"I've seen stuff like that. It goes away when I turn to look," I said.

"Yep. That's exactly what happens," he concluded.

"The drive thru window opens by itself all the time. I'm surprised you never noticed before," Patricia interjected.

"Cool," I said.

Now, at the time, I couldn't have been more excited about all this, and I'm sure my co-workers could tell. You have to remember, this was 2000 and it seemed like the supernatural and/or paranormal was flooding pop culture, almost as much or moreso than it is these days. Now, you have stuff like Paranormal Activity, Insidious, The Conjuring, and all the "ghost hunting" tv shows whereas, back then, The Blair Witch Project had been released a year prior, The Sixth Sense was fresh on everyone's mind, and MTV's Fear was popular in my circles. While there maybe wasn't AS MUCH to wet everyone's appetite, it was just enough to keep interests peaked; everyone was into ghosts.

It went on like that for many months; Seeing things out of the corner of my eye, the drive-thru window opening on its own, and I even heard my name being called once-in-a-while when no one was in the viscinity. Like I said before, the more attention I paid to it and the more I thought about it, the more it happened, and the 'clearer' things seemed to get.

And then something touched Patricia.

It was a particularly busy Spring. I live in a college town and the students had begun to move into their dorms and, with Dairy Queen being the only chain restaurant in our small hick town, they came in droves that day and night. I was finishing up an order when I heard a shriek come from the walk-in refridgerator. I and a few of my co-workers ran back to see what was going on.