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.