Scooby Don't

Here's a spooky little tale from "Grimm's Ghost Stories" that traumatized me as a child, but more on that after the comic-

This seemingly low key tale of terror played (still plays, I suppose) on one of my biggest fears and that would be the fear of baseballs. It's not pathological or anything, just a healthy respect for the little round missiles of death that was born from the fact that when I was a kid my father was a volunteer fireman and every spring and summer he would take part in the local firefighters baseball league. Those guys may have been great smoke eaters, but they were lousy baseball players. I would say that a good 90% of the balls that they managed to hit ignored the outfield completely and veered straight for the bleachers. People would scramble madly out of the way, hot dogs and giant foam fingers flung to the wind, as an itty-bitty horsehair comet plummeted from the sky to smack off of the metal bleachers with a deafening 'CLANK!' and then ricochet off into god only knew what direction. I spent most every one of those games looking for excuses to hunker down behind the cinder block concession stand as far out of the line of fire as I was allowed to stray.

It was nerve rattling, to say the least.

The fact that this guy killed someone when he was a kid and then didn't find out about it until many years later unnerved me as well. After reading this comic I spent many long hours going over and over in my head any point in my life where I may have similarly been responsible for the death of a fellow human being and not even been aware of the fact. That train of thought kept me awake more than one night.

In case you were wondering... the number of times I think it was possible that I may have accidentally killed someone when I was a kid is three, but we won't go into that now.