Okay, here goes.

A couple years ago I was living in Budapest. It was half study abroad, half hanging out with my family who lives in a town about 30 minutes south. Every once in a while I would take day trips with my friends. We'd drive to Slovakia or take the train to Austria, whatever we wanted. So on one of our trips to Romania (we intended to end up in Bucharest) our car shit out on us right at the boarder. One of my friends had family in Szeged which wasn't too far away, but way too far to walk.

So the four of us decided to hitch hike.

We grabbed what we could out of the car and then called her family to tell them we were on the way. We locked up the car and made a sign that read Szeged, please. Got picked up in 5 minutes in a Barkas van. These happen to be my favorite and I was quite thrilled to get to ride around in one again.

The guy who picked us up, Andras, was very nice. He was very interested in where we were all from, what we liked to do, where we've traveled and what kinds of things we were studying. It started to get dark. Andras mentioned his family had a house not too far from where we were, and that we could stop there for the night and sleep since he was tired and didn't know if he could drive us all the way to Szeged. We all kind of looked around at each other but ultimately agreed that it was rude to expect this nice man who picked us up to drive us all through the night.

Yes Andras was nice but driving up the dirt road to his house made all of the hairs on my arm stand up. I would later ask my companions and they said the same thing. All of us got silent as we tried to take in the scenery. It looked like any eastern European house set far back on what used to be a farm, with all of the old abandoned equipment around.

We unloaded and shuffled into his house which was very quaint and charming. He showed us into a room off the living room that we could all sleep in for the night. We all set out our sleeping bags and kind of congregated on the floor while Andras went into the kitchen. He started talking to his wife. "Honey i've brought back some travelers again" "they are all very nice, some of them are American!" "Yes of course I was going to offer them some brandy" which he did. He came back into the doorway of our room and offered us brandy. I passed but the others accepted.

He brought us out a tray and the rest of the bottle and then disappeared again. Eventually we all drifted off to sleep.

I woke up first, got dressed and went outside to pee. I ran into a little girl on my way back up to the house. She was incredibly shy. I asked her what her name was and if she lived there too. She said she did but she kept saying "but my father doesn't believe me" I chalked it up to either my Hungarian being rusty or her being a kid but I told her to come back inside, it's cold out. (She instead slunk back into an old mangled trailer she was playing in).

Inside the house I breezed past the kitchen with Andras screaming out "why are there not enough fucking eggs for our guests!?" "What kind of wife are you!?" But when I got back to the doorway of our room all of my companions were standing up, bags hastily packed mouths agape looking behind me.

I turned and that's when I saw a scarecrow dressed up in women's clothing sitting in an armchair at the far side of the living room. I turned back to my friends laughing and said "you guys are afraid of a scarecrow?" but just then Andras came through the door and picked the scarecrow up by the arm and flung it across the room. "You are the stupidest woman in the WORLD!" he howled. "I work so hard and you embarrass me!".

He went back into the kitchen still screaming and now riffling through drawers. I turned to my friends and we all agreed that it was time to leave. Only the things Andras was saying got worse. "I killed the last one! I can kill you too!" type shit

We kind of stood as a group, frozen. My friend Lidi turned around and saw a window so we decided to jump through it to get out of the house. She was first out of the window. Only when she landed she made this weird squishing sound. My friend Jani popped his head out the window and then started screeching and backing away from it. At this point Andras was stabbing the scarecrow with a very real knife and we were all trying to just get the fuck out of the house. The two of us still in the house pushed Jani out of the window, not really caring why he was screaming because KNIFE. Finally I jumped out and landed in what I to this day pray was animal remains. Blood and guts. Filling this deep trench next to this guys house. There was also a LOVELY portrait of a family painted on the side of the house using what looked like the blood from the giant hole.

The four of us, bloody, shaking and still able to hear Andras killing his scarecrow wife hightailed it the fuck out of dodge back to the main road. We decided against getting into another car and instead ran all the way back to our old car. We also took a break from day tripping for a while.