It was a cold, crisp autumn day. I was about ten years old and was spending the day at my best friend Tami's farm. We were going to play in the fields while our dads cut down trees to use as fire wood for the winter. Tami's grandparents lived in the small farmhouse and her father had grown up there. There was all the usual old farm accessories, a delapitated old barn that smelled of old cows and hay, a rusty swing set nestled into a grove of trees and some small sheds that held strange farm things that I did not understand. The house was small and always smelled like cabbage. It had a cracked, dank basement that we would play in for hours but the most interesting place to be at the farm was behind all the buildings right before the fields in a thick tangle of trees. Anyone who lives in southern Saskatchewan knows that trees don't just grow in the fields here on their own. They were all planted for a purpose and that purpose was to protect farm yards from the sharp winter winds. Tami and I used to wander through a grouping of those trees that were behind the farm yard in the summer. We would hide in the green leaves from her cousins and the summer heat. It was cool and safe in the summer but in the fall, with their red and orange leaves, it had a much different feel. Tami and I would often make up stories about what lived in those trees come fall time. The crackling of falling leaves would bring on imaginings of witches that would wander through looking for young girls to trap and make their slaves. Ghosts of long dead pioneers would peek from behind the trees as we approached on one of our walks. Tami and I always knew the trees were haunted, we just did not know how haunted they were. On this particular day, Tami and I were obsessively discussing the evidence that we had complied that our neighbours were killing people and burying them under the garbage can in the back yard. We were over our investigation of the UFO that we were certain landed on our street. (The resulting "alien mud" turned out to be cement from a newly poured sidewalk corner). We walked out to our trees without paying much attention to our surroundings. Suddenly, we could hear cries for help coming from ahead of us. Tami and I stopped our conversation and looked up. What we saw stopped us dead in our tracks. Faintly, through the thick autumn leaves we could see the outline of a white, two story farm house. There was smoke tendrils just beginning to enter the atmosphere from the upstairs windows. A woman dressed in white was leaning out of one of the top floor windows, calling for our help. Dark smoke was leaking out from behind her as she flailed her arms wildly at us. Tami and I never questioned the fact that we had never seen a house in our trees before. We both turned and ran through the farm yard towards the house. We burst through the back door, breathless and panting and told her Grandmother that she needed to call the fire department, that the neighbour behind the farm was trapped in her burning house. Her grandmother cocked her hear curiously to one side and asked us what house we were talking about. We looked at each other, unable to understand how she could not know the house given that it was so close to her farm yard. We explained that it was the white house in the trees near the yard right beside the field. Tami's grandmother's face grew ashen as she told us that the only house that had even stood in that grouping of trees had belonged to her husband's family, that it had been the original house on the farm and that it had burned to the ground years before, trapping their housemaid inside. Tami and I could not believe what we were hearing, we had seen it so clearly. We burst through the back door and tore through the yard. We could still see smoke curling faintly through the cloudy October sky. We ran as quickly as we could to our trees. When we reached the field adjacent to the them, we stopped dead in our tracks. The only thing in the trees before us were the red and orange leaves blowing gently in the breeze. This is a true story.