I had a neighbor that freaked me out as a kid because he was always watching me and my friends. He would just sit on his porch at night in complete darkness and watch us play Football or Freeze tag in the street. His grass was all overgrown and dead and his house looked really old and broken down.

Most of the neighborhood considered him crazy because he would always talk about the war from his porch to anyone that was walking by. His house was an eye soar and spooky.

On my 13th Bday, My father overheard me telling my friends about the crazy old man and his haunted house at the end of my block and decided to make me take a piece of my birthday cake, down to him in front of all my friends. My father asked me If I like cake, “Of coarse I do dad!!!” My father then said “I bet (pointing at the old mans house) he does too.”

As my father watched me from my front yard. All I thought about was throwing the cake in the bushes and saying that I did it. When I looked back, I saw my father & friends just standing in my yard watching me.

Here were some of my thought's: "Ah man! I can't believe I really have to do this" "What if I knock and while I'm looking back at my dad, he opens the door and stabs me in the chest with a knife???" “What if I trip on a dead body buried in his yard and fall on a pitch fork” "Maybe I should take off the plastic wrap on this plate, so incase he tries something! I can smack him in the face with this cake! and make my escape"

When I arrived to his front yard. I slowly opened the squeaky gate and carefully walked through the overgrown weed jungle towards his house. All the while watching for dead bodies trying to grab me from within the tall dead grass. When I arrived to the porch, his house was actually painted gray? “What??, That's crazy! Who has a gray house???” I thought.

Before I even knocked at the door; The old man opened it and just stared at me. I just stood there and mumbled out “It’s my 13th Bday, This is for you, My Dad (I pointed back at my house) said you like cake”
The old man looked at me for something that felt like an eternity and then said “Yes I do” Come In” and took me into the darkness.

Never judge a book by it’s cover, never became so true!!! The inside of his spooky old house was dark because he was too old to replace the burned out light bulbs. His yard was overgrown and dead because he was on a fixed income after he returned home from the war and America forgot about him. His walls were lined with many army photo’s and 1 family photo of his wife and two little children. But none of them when they were older.

As he was off defending our freedoms fighting in another mans war, His wife and two little children were killed in a car accident and the Army didn't tell him until he returned home. He wasn't a crazy old man that lived in the haunted house at the end of the block, he was just forgotten soldier and father that came back to nothing.

My friends and I came back a week later and replaced all of his burned out light bulbs and cleaned up his yard and made it all nice again. We painted his house light brown. My father bought the old man two wicker rocking chairs for his front porch and a little table and checker board.

I played checkers with him everyday after school for months and he filled my mind with the true meaning of a soldiers valor and honor. He died three years later and left me a locked wooden treasure chest. It was an old style pirate chest with the large skeleton key needed to open it.

I never opened it until years later. He must’ve known he was going to die. He put his family portrait inside on the top. Inside there were treasures that could change people’s lives. There were letters from other fallen soldiers that he never delivered, a few army medals and a big handful of single dog tags from his fallen friends, Allot of money, old baseball cards and a few rare soda cans from when those soda companies first opened their doors to the public.

As a child I really thought that I was going to be killed by that old man for years, but instead he did the exact opposite, He made my life better and then disappeared.