We spent a whole month at the cabin during the summer of 1969. Dad couldn’t take that much time off from work, but he drove us up and got us settled, then went back to Mesa
Linda and I each invited a friend to stay with us. Tina, my cousin, came with me, and Linda’s friend Janice came with her for a week. We wanted to do something really fun, so we asked mom and dad if we could have a slumber party in grandma and grandpa’s old trailer.
Originaly the trailer was attached to the back of grandma and grandpa's cabin. Eventually they had got around to building a real kitchen and the trailer was pulled aside. It was old but still usable, so it was parked next to the hill at the foot of the trail. It wasn’t used very often, but it was still hooked up to electricity.
Mom and dad said us girls could stay in the trailer if we wanted to, so we excitedly began making plans for the coolest slumber party of our lives. Keith and Phillip also began making plans. They began by telling us stories about the Mogollon Monster and all the wild animals that lived in the mountains. Keith spun a tail about the night he slept in the trailer and a bear or something climbed on top and scared the death out of him. He warned us to keep the lights on and not to go outside after it got dark.
We laughed at his warnings and were in high spirits as evening fell and it was time for us to take our blankets and pillows and go down to the trailer. It was pretty dirty inside. Daddy-long-leg spiders climbed through the dust and mouse droppings, and it took some time for us to sweep everything out and get the trailer clean enough to stay in. Then came the problem of where we would sleep. The little bed wedged at the back of the trailer may have been big enough for four kids when we were little, but it was too crowded for four big girls now. Finally we decided to pull the top mattress off the bed and put it on the floor for Linda and Janice. Tina and I got the bed.
We had a great time telling stories and gossiping for the first few hours. When it got dark we turned on the single light bulb that hung down from the ceiling above the bed. As the night drew on we began to get sleepy and ran out of stories to tell. It was then that we noticed the intense quiet of the woods all around us, and we began to feel nervous. It was just about when we heard a rattling thump on the roof over our heads. The younger girls screamed but Tina and I laughed. “It’s nothing,” we reassured the little girls. “Probably a pine cone dropped on the trailer or something.”
We wracked our brains for something new to talk about and then filled the trailer with laughter and girl talk for half and hour or so more. Eventually the stories began to peter out again and the little girls started to nod off to sleep. Suddenly a big thump rattled the top of the trailer, and it was followed by another thump, thump, thump. Janice and Linda screamed and jumped up onto the bed.
“It’s OK,” Tina and I assured them. “Don’t scream, you’ll wake up Keith and he’ll think we’re scared.” Carefully, we parted the curtains of the window above the bed and looked out into the black night. There were no lights on in the cabin above us.
“We want to go upstairs,” Linda and Janice whimpered. “We’re scared!”
“Are you going to walk up there in the dark?” I asked. “I don’t want to go out there.”
“We have the flashlight,” Linda said, but she didn’t really like the idea of walking up the dark trail with just that little pin prick of light, either.
“We’re safer here in the trailer,” Tina agreed with me. “What if there is some kind of animal outside. I’d rather stay in here.”
“Ok,” the little girls finally agreed. But they stayed on the bed with us.
Again, we found things to talk about and time slowly crawled by until the little clock above the bed said it was almost . Then suddenly, thump, thump, thump. The roof of the trailer rattled with the sound of something bumping all over the top of it, and the light bulb swent out!
This time everyone screamed! I grabbed the flashlight and turned it on. Linda and Janice were shaking, holding each other in terror.
“What should we do?” Tina asked in a whisper. “Maybe we’d better try to get upstairs?”
I stood up on the bed and reached in the dark for the light. Finding it, I carefully twisted the still warm bulb tighter into it’s socket. Immediately, bright light filled the trailer.
“It was only loose,” I giggled nervously. “See, everything's OK.”
Linda and Janice were still shaking, but the bright light helped to calm them down. None of us wanted to leave the safety of the trailer to walk up the dark hill, so we snuggled down on the crowded bed and kept on talking. At last, the little girls fell asleep and Tina and I drifted in and out until morning finally dawned. Our necks were stiff, our legs cramped, but we were alive!
Gratefully I switched off the light-bulb that had kept us safe all night, we piled our blankets and pillows into our arms, and we trudged up the hill to the cabin. There we found a smug looking Keith and Phillip, wanting to know how we had slept.
“We slept fine,” we told them shortly.
“We saw that you kept the light on all night,” Phillip accused us. “Were you scared?”
“No,” I answered for everyone. “We were just having so much fun we never stopped to turn it off.”
“Right,” Keith scoffed. “How come we heard you scream?”
“That was just Linda and Janice,” Tina retorted. “Some pine cones fell out of the tree and startled them, but we weren’t scared.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t a raccoon, or a bear crawling around on the roof?” Phillip wanted to know.
“How do you know there was something on our roof?” I demanded.
By this time Phillip and Keith were both grinning wickedly. We soon figured out that they had made the noises in the middle of the night by throwing rocks on the trailer from the top of the hill. We were sure glad we hadn’t given in and run up to the cabin!
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