Friday, June 27, 2014

Haunted House, Holy House - #fridayflash



Sometimes you call a setting evil, or hallowed. There’s good houses and bad, at least according to home owners associations. But there’s this one house crumbling on the city limits, near the Target no one wants there, the last house on the right. The one made from white bricks that have yellowed with too many seasons, and that everybody says they’ve seen angels in the windows of, even if they don’t have a photo. People park outside but you seldom see the lights on.

People still aren’t sure what that house is. It does something to you, to be sure, though I think most of the stories are lies. Everybody wants to say they stayed there and were molested by angels or something.

The first documented tenant of the house lost his mind and said he was walking on air. This was in the eighties. Some of the time he was right, and there’s ample video of the man walking upwards of ten feet above the floor of his room at the sanitarium. His problem is that he always thinks he’s walking on air, even when he’s not. There’s a claim that the airport twenty miles from the sanitarium sees more accidents whenever he’s hysterical. There’s a scientific study going on to check this.

There are a couple of people who claim the house turned them into geckos, but their visits are unsubstantiated. The next documented tenant is a woman who rented the house for four consecutive weekends in the early nineties, and claims to have used a door in its basement to transport herself to Mars, from which she has returned with four garbage bags full of artifacts from Mars’s ancient civilizations. Whenever she is asked why astronauts have never found remains of such civilizations, she responds, “My relics aren’t from our Mars.”

The third documented visitor grew wings. They’re very pretty, turquoise and oily mauve, though they’re flightless and don’t fit in her smart car. Skeptics say she might have always had wings.

The fourth person to stay there was cured of her manic depression and catastrophic writers block. He’s self-published four books in the last thirteen months and has bought his way out of debt. He just paid off his parents’ house. This convinced many people that the Awful House was a miracle, even though the man’s books are mostly about glorifying violence. Copies were found on the phones of two school shooters. There’s a serious question of how much this has helped his sales.

In fact, it can’t be proven that the original documented man wasn’t a deluded telekinetic before his stay. Skeptics dispatched three people with fully recorded histories of normal behavior to reside in the house. They livestreamed their entire stay and reported the week so uneventful they wound up playing tech support.

The streams captured all of their heads detaching at various points and flying about the house. Two of the three were seen to go invisible at seemingly random intervals, while the third seemed to become super-visible, appearing in no less than three parts of the house simultaneously. There is at least video of him talking to a second self who’s on the roof, cleaning the chimney.

But if there’s an oddity to the skeptics’ tale, it’s that they don’t believe it. Given audio and video evidence, the threesome routinely debunk or cast doubt that the events were anything more than digital tricks. They claim no memory of random beheadings or invisibilities. Since their stay, they’ve also lost belief in many other things, such as that anyone actually disbelieve in manmade global warming, or the George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election. In fact, they are skeptical to the point of certainty that Bush was never President of the United States.

A second threesome of skeptics spent a second week in the house, but went missing. There is no video or audio evidence as to where they disappeared, causing many internet commenters to joke about how tame a fate the house gave them. They were hoping for gargoyles to eat them or something. Gargoyles show in the backyard every so often. The trust pays me to clean them when they appear.

Is it an evil house? Since it started getting famous, there’ve been murders there. In 2011, ten kids were chopped up inside, stalked by the shadow of a coat rack. That time police beat the skeptics to the punch, and found the two tweens who’d faked all the videos. The house hadn’t done anything.

Seven of the kids came back to life, discovered in an attic closet, their graves inexplicably empty. Three graves, though, remain full. The house isn’t saying why.

Personally, I still can’t tell what sort of house that makes it. I’m only sure that, if there’s ever been a problem with that place, it’s the tenants.

24 comments:

  1. A sneaky flash, which took me in unexpected directions. And I loved the ride, but suspect I will be considering it in the small hours for a while. Thank you. At the moment I am leaning towards Holy rather than Haunted House. But not a traditional version of either.

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    1. Thank you so much. I'll be very interested for what directions your consideration takes.

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  2. The house is door to another dimension any fool can see that - or am I imagining it ^__^ Cool story John!

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  3. Oh wow John this is fantastic. And I had to el-oh-el at the gecko part :)

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    1. Thank you kindly! That was actually the last line I changed. Geckos just seemed like a more novel fate for the charlatans.

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  4. That's one messed up house!
    It turned me into a newt.
    I got better...

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    1. To date, no Monty Python works have been shot in the house, despite it appearing in every episode.

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  5. Hang on... a Target nobody wants? That hurts the believability of this piece.

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    1. They say they don't want it, but the parking lot is always half full.

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  6. I like how you ended it. I don't put much faith in hauntings or videos (and TV shows) that supposedly prove such hauntings. Still, it's amusing to see how weird people can be who believe such nonsense. They're almost as bad as the Area 51 crowd or those who call in on Coast to Coast AM. A nice story, John.

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  7. That is one strange house, or maybe it's the tenants, or both. :-)

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  8. My favorite is the woman who collected relics from somebody else's Mars. :) Fun story John!

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  9. I'm not sure I want to stay in that house. I like being random and stuff, but that's a little too weird for me. LOL

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  10. I once had a dream that my writing group stayed in a haunted house for a weekend and I touched a freaky "toddler-in-tiara" type ghost girl who laughed and thanked me for touching her, causing me to wake up terrified. Weird. Anyway, this reminds me of that dream. I love this line, "Everybody wants to say they stayed there and were molested by angels or something." I literally LOL'ed at that. I like how by the end, you kind of wonder if it's not just the weirdos that made up the stories about the house that have the real problem.

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  11. Quite a lot of twists and turns here - I read the piece three times. I've always wondered if there are certain places with an energy of their own which draw people have mental illness or balances of some sort. Or is it that they seek out those places which reportedly have a history of psychic or supernatural events? I'm on the fence. I can tell you that I am a skeptic and generally chalk this sort of thing up to nonsense. And yet...my husband and I were shopping for a used car many years ago. He found one that he liked, but the moment I sat in it I wanted out. I LOATHED that car for no apparent reason and we had a huge fight over it, but there was no way I was going to have anything to do with that car. It scared me. So maybe it was the car...or maybe I had a momentary lapse in reason.
    Really thought-provoking piece for me, John.

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  12. I want to visit this house. Maybe I'll visit somebody else's Mars too.

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  13. I loved this piece! My favorite line: "though they’re flightless and don’t fit in her smart car". =D
    I'm reading HOUSE OF LEAVES, so I was in the mood for another Haunted House story.

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  14. Third reading and I still love this!
    Very Fortean; or perhaps Keelean.
    Most imaginative flash fiction I've read in some time!

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  15. I love that while the skeptics' video shows supernatural phenomenon, their personal recollections don't include anything odd happening, so the skeptics with the anecdotes instead of the data!

    And yeah, like Margit, I'm reading -- or at least pecking at -- House of Leaves, so this is a good story to read that way.

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  16. Lovely to see your imagination is as wild as ever. I wouldn't mind staying in the house for a couple of years to write and sell some books!

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  17. Weird and Unique and wonderful, as always. :)

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  18. Ah ha! My comment on here didn't go through before. I was afraid of that. It was an evening of technical glitches and errors for me. And now I don't remember what I said, but great ending. The ones having the problems are the ones WITH the problems.

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  19. Is that house for sale? I'd buy it.

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