A Scary Story

Prologue
My uncle and his new pre-teen wife were having money problems, despite him putting in sixty hours a week at his job. Month to month, they were finding it difficult to make ends meet, and part of the expense was the nice, newly-built condo they had moved into. Uncle John tried branching out by taking on a second job in his spare time, but that ended up paying even less than his regular job (namely nothing). He was considering renting his very young wife out on the weekends to visiting dignitaries or traveling businessmen. I started saving up my pennies.

The Story
But suddenly, there was a ray of hope: in my mom's neighborhood, Uncle John heard of a five-bedroom house that had gone empty. The elderly woman who lived there (alone) had been shipped off to a home, and they needed someone to move in there immediately. The price ended up being nearly exactly what John was already paying at his condo (though the landlord was raising the rent at the end of August). Faced with a two-bedroom condo and a parking place, or a full, two-floor house with three bathrooms, a front yard and backyard, a deck, newly-replaced carpeting, a driveway, and a two-car garage, John accepted the kind offer and gave notice at his previous dwelling.

Too good to be true, right? You'd think so, except John has been struggling for so long and working so hard that everyone just assumed his good karma was finally paying him back.

Well, the deal was worked out, and John came over for some moving boxes, then took me aside. "Look, you can't tell Emma this, okay?" he said, and made a little revelation. Turns out there was a little more to the excellent price than he had originally thought. A year ago, there were three people living in the house: said old woman, and her two adult sons. And one night, for no reason in particular, one of the sons got a gun, went upstairs, and killed his brother. Then he went downstairs and killed himself. The woman did go to a home, but it was apparently not the kind of home we were led to believe.

Well, this was something of a surprise. I asked John if he was still going to move in, and he said, "Of course!" as if somehow the deal had just gotten sweeter.

And here's a paragraph you can skip over if you already know my Uncle John or have heard me rant about him and his older brother--my Uncle Len--before. You see, John--and especially Len--are BELIEVERS. I.E., they have some kind of connection to the spiritual plane of existence, or have drunk the Kool-Aid of the Ghost Whisperer. Len has volumes of stories that will absolutely cause your short and curly hairs to grow back inside your body, and John has told me and my mom several stories about his dead mother appearing to him in dreams--"dreams?"--commenting on what's going on in his life, or creepier, what's ABOUT to go on in his life. These are experiences I for one have not shared. And for once, I'magonna count myself lucky.

And while I admit that Len's experiences have been much darker and more terrifying than John's (his seem a bit more positive and benign), my philosophy is that if you open up your mind to believing in this sort of thing, you're going to see things, hear things, and above all, feel things that somebody who doesn't believe will not. If your mind is attuned to the idea that there are invisible beings walking among us (or a mere dimension away from where we are now), you're going to interpret the sound of the house settling, voices from a radio or neighbors, gusts of wind, and random unexplainable chanting in Latin to something very different.

So, I fully expect two things:
1) that John's child bride will find out the morbid history of the house she now calls her own* and there will be an interesting conversation after that.
And 2) that John is going to see or hear (or most probably feel) something strange in the next few days, and is going to interpret it according to his supernatural belief system.

Time will tell.

Epilogue
So, John moved into the house this week, and I just came back from visiting there for the first time. It is a lovely place with high ceilings and a backyard big enough to play soccer in. I like it, and can appreciate the new carpet (since my own has gone from a nauseating shade of tan to an upsetting shade of grey). But everywhere I went, I waited, expecting to see something odd, or downright horrible.

You see, I am, if not certifiably crazy, at least a little bit unstable. And my imagination, while it doesn't get me work or donations for my podcast, is quite extraordinary, and has been known to get carried away with itself. I've imagined things before and just about convinced myself they were going to appear, and hated my brain for doing that to me.

So, when I looked down the long hall and saw light coming from one of the bedrooms, spilling into the hall, I waited for a shadow to move across that light, as if someone had just walked across that empty room. And I did, for a moment, expect John to point to the room where it happened and see blood running down the walls, or a body sprawled across the floor.

Didn't happen, though. Even when my Uncle Ali went poking around in the crawlspace** above the second floor.

And I wonder if I could live in the house. I wonder if there's such a thing as a Bad Place, or psychic residue that sticks around after something bad has happened. I don't have the answer to that, and it's one of those questions, I find is better left unanswered.

My mom asked John if he had had any odd experiences there yet, and he told us about how he couldn't sleep their first night, and got up to exercise. When he turned on his I-Phone, all he got was static on it, and when he rebooted it, the date changed to April 29th, 1969. He seemed to think this was an amusing story, and followed it up with commenting that they invited a religious leader over on Sunday to bless the house, and in the middle of the prayer . . . the screen door slammed.

My cousin Ryan reminded me that the wind was blowing awfully hard on Sunday, but it was too late, and I had to go home to change my Fruit of the Looms.

John made us steak on his George Foreman grill while the kids watched that WIMPY KID movie. We made a joke about his daughter talking to an invisible friend named Jodie, who claimed this was her house, and John went on to say, "Bella? Why are you holding that knife?" in a mock-nervous manner.

My Uncle John is anything but reverent.

Rish "Our House Is A Veryveryvery Fine House" Outfield

*You can't live in a suburban neighborhood with people coming over to borrow sugar or lend you jumper cables (or watch your wife exercising late at night through the curtains) without somebody talking, and in a place like this, a murder/suicide would not have gone unnoticed. I asked John what he would do when somebody finally tells her, and he said, "I'll act surprised. Tell her that's the weirdest thing I've ever heard." And when I asked him what he'd do if/when she exclaimed she couldn't live another day in a house where that happened, he told me she would just have to tough it out, since he was the man and it was his decision, not hers.
See, you see why this guy was my idol for so many years now, don't you?

**Man, isn't "crawlspace" one of the scariest words you've ever heard?