The Vanishing Act

        A Father's Encounter with a Haunted Chain Letter

 "The time will come when you will open your mailbox, and you will see the postcard that will instruct you to keep the postcard going. The instructions will be specific, and if you don't follow them exactly, you will be haunted the rest of your life."

"This is a chain letter that you don't want to let sit, so make your choice and make it quick."

   One Saturday evening, my father went to the mailbox, where he found a postcard that gave us instructions on how to send the chain letter without consequences, but he didn't believe in it. My mother and I warned him more than once about the consequences that would follow us, but he wouldn't hear anything we had to say. Within a few days, strange things started to happen. I kept seeing a woman in the basement who wasn't there, and then on Tuesday, my mom thought she saw some guy just sitting at our kitchen table.

   My father just thought that it was a stream of bad luck or just things happening for no reason. On Wednesday, I got blamed for breaking our China set that my great-grandmother gave us before she passed. I think he was just being stubborn. He finally believed us when he started seeing a girl in the bathroom mirror on Friday, but by then it was too late. Saturday morning, I awoke to my mom screaming that Dad was gone, and all she had in her hands were his pajamas from the night before.

    What do you think? Did he vanish due to the chain letter, or did something else happen? How do you explain the clothing that his wife held in her hands? Is the chain letter real, or did he simply do a vanishing act?