The House

Live Oak, Florida. Present Day.

“There it is,” my coworker says to me. “You see it?”

“Yeah,” I answer.

Looking out the window from the passenger seat of the car, I can see about two blocks back, a large two-story house with a turret.

We are moving 25 miles per hour south down Highway 129, so I only get a brief glimpse of it.

“Why is that house haunted?” I ask.

“They say a girl died there, and that she lives upstairs in that tower.”

“Really? How did she die?”

“I don’t know. But my sergeant said they once went into the house, into the upstairs part, and the door closed on them by itself.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That house is always for sale, too,” my colleague continues. “Anytime someone moves in, it’s not very long before they move out and put the house back up for sale."

“I’ll have to check that out sometime,” I say.

We continue driving on to the local bowling alley and enjoy some games with other coworkers.

***

A few days later, I am riding my bike in the early evening and decide to go over to the “haunted house.”

It is on Pine Street, surrounded by a nice group of other houses. Sure enough, there is a “For Sale” sign in the front yard. The house is larger and looks a bit older than the surrounding homes.

I park my bike on the sidewalk leading to the steps of the front porch, putting down the kickstand, taking off my helmet, but carrying the helmet with me.

Looking up at the windows of the turret, they are covered by thin, ghostly white curtains- except for one. In that window, the white curtain is pulled back, revealing only the blackness of the room.

When I step up onto the spacious front porch, I see a mailbox mounted on the wall. There is a slip of colored paper in the box that says “VACANT.”

Walking to my right, the windows of the house are covered with curtains and I am not able to look inside. Several paper wasp nests are high overhead under the roof of the porch. A couple of the wasps in the nest turn to look at me as I walk underneath, but stay put. Gigantic shrubbery marks the end of that side of the porch, so I walk back around to the left.

The left side of the front porch has even more space than the right, and is screened in.

I pull on the screen door to see if it will open, and it does. Some patio type furniture remains inside the screened in portion of the porch. Also, the windows on this side of the house are not blocked with curtains.

Through the first window on my right, I can see a spacious room covered in polished hardwood floors. There is no furniture whatsoever inside, but I see the wooden stairs leading up to the second floor of the house.

At the back wall of the porch is another door with a window. Looking through it, I wonder if perhaps the house is in fact occupied.

I see the kitchen. On the counter are unopened bottles of wine, two-liter drinks, and various kitchen utensils.

Now I feel that I should not be here, that maybe I am trespassing where someone actually lives. But then I see the refrigerator, with both of its doors open, and it again assures me that the place is vacant.

I am about to check if the door to the kitchen is unlocked when I suddenly hear a crash outside. I turn and run out the screened porch and to the front of the house.

My bike has turned over for no apparent reason.

I look around to see if anyone might have done this as I step off the porch, but no one is in sight.

To my surprise, I see that my bike has sustained quite a bit of damage from the fall to the sidewalk. The side of my seat is scuffed, as is the foot pedal where it made contact with the rough concrete. A rock or something has actually cut a hole into the rubber covering the end of my handle bar. And the headlight that I bought for the front of my bike, so that I can ride at night, is completely broken off.

I work on the headlight for a couple of minutes, as this is really disappointing. The light still works, but there is no way to mount it on my bike now, sad to say. The key plastic piece actually snapped when my bike turned over, so I have to put the light in my pocket.

How could this have happened? There is a bit of a breeze, but not strong enough to turn over my bike on a kick stand, I would not think. I also would not think that my bike would have sustained all these marks and damage from just tipping over on the sidewalk.

I look up at the tower, at the black window with the white curtain pulled back, and I wonder…

I mount my bike and get out of there.

***

Thinking back now to that day, I am a little puzzled at myself for leaving the house before I was done exploring. I meant to look through all the windows fully, and then walk around to the back of the house to see what I could see.

For whatever reason, though, I got on my bike after something turned it over, and I pedaled back home.

Perhaps in the near future, I will go back, finish checking out this haunted house, and see what happens. In the meantime, I have to mount a new headlight on my bike.