Hunting Knife

The Hunting Knife is a spooky ghost story about two friends who go hunting in the woods. When only one of the comes back, police become suspicious. This story is based on an old American folk tale.

There were two men who owned a cabin in the woods. Their names were Barry and Conklin. Every Winter, they would go up there hunting deer, bear and coyote. They spent weeks up there in the cabin, just the two of them and everybody assumed they were the best of friends.

One day, Conklin came down out of the woods alone. He said his friend Barry had gotten lost out there in the wilderness. A search party was sent back up into the woods to find him, but there was a snow storm and they couldn’t find any trace of the missing man.

The police thought there was something fishy about the whole business. Conklin got very nervous flustered when they asked began asking him questions and they suspected he wasn’t telling them the whole story. However, they didn’t have any evidence against him. They didn’t even have a dead body to prove a murder had actually been committed, so they had to let him go.

Then, the Spring came and the snow melted. A hunter came across a corpse lying at the base of a tree. It was Barry and his his skull had been bashed in. Still, the police couldn’t prove anything. He could have fallen and hit his head. He could have been killed by a bear. After an autopsy, the coroner listed his death as being “from cause or causes unknown.”

Beside his corpse, they found his rifle, which was all rusty. Strapped to his leg was a sheath for his hunting knife, but the knife itself was missing. Nobody thought much about that at the time.

The next Winter, it was hunting season again and Conklin went back up to the cabin. This time, he had a new friend with him, a man named Newcombe. It was a long hike and when they reached the cabin, Newcombe decided to go to bed early.

In the middle of the night, he was awakened from a deep sleep by the sound of a man screaming. It sounded like Conklin’s voice and he was screaming, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”

Newcombe jumped out of bed and felt around for a flashlight. When he switched it on, his eyes were greeted by a horrible sight. There was
Conklin, sitting in his chair. He was dead and there was a hunting knife sticking out of his chest. Blood was pouring down into his lap and forming a pool on the floor. His eyes were wide open and his face was twisted in a grimace of abject horror.

The one thing that puzzled the police was what they found when they examined the hunting knife. There was only one set of fingerprints on the handle and the man they belonged to had been dead for a year. They belonged to Barry.