Goodreads asked Amiee Gibbs:

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

Amiee Gibbs The butcher knife in the tractor tire. When I was 11 or 12, I was staying at a friends house for the weekend and, she, I, her twin sister and another friend went to explore "The Rocks", an area in her neighborhood that was a heavily wooded hill comprised largely of huge slabs of black rock. Now, her neighborhood, was sprawling and wooded, and it was also experiencing a spate of strange happenings. Houses, including my friend's, were being broken into. Nothing was ever taken but damage was done, including the deaths of family pets. There were rumors of a man living rough in the area, a man the neighborhood kids had christened "Gus". It was thought that he was the culprit but no one knew for certain and he was never caught and rarely seen. But the threat of his presence did not deter any of the kids in her neighborhood, including us, from going into the woods and up to the rocks, where an old tractor tire marked the path. We made our way up on a Saturday afternoon, but once we got up to the rocks, there was an immediate feeling of something being off. The wind had started to pick up and it was quiet, barely any birdsong, only the leaves. All four of us felt it, the raising of the hair on the back of the neck like we were being watched, and it did not take us long to decide to leave. We made our way back down the hill and when we reached the tire, we saw it. A large butcher knife jutting from the rubber that wasn't there when we first went up. At first we didn't know if we were actually seeing the knife, but unlike "final girls", we did not wait around to study it further. To this day, none of us know who put the knife in the tire. Whether it was one of their older brothers playing a prank on us, or the mysterious "Gus" or someone else entirely. Prank or warning, I still think about this incident and one day it might find its way into a future work.

flag