In my hometown there is a giant house perched on a hill right on the corner of Alan Street and Hitcherson Road that you should never approach on Friday the 13th.
It is a menacing mansion, with rotten black shutters hugging its clouded windows, and peeling green paint that never ceased to fascinate me as a little boy. My parents would drive past it on the way to the supermarket, and my eyes would become fixated upon its every window and two lofty towers.
I grew up in the small village of Lordestown — where very little was remarkable, so us kids would often talk about the mansion while playing in the schoolyard. There were so many crazy stories associated with the house that they were hard to all keep track of. Todd claimed that his runaway dog had chased a squirrel into the mansion — to never come back. Jack says that the mansion used to be the home of an eccentric doctor who experimented on his patients in the house's gaming room. Claire said that the house's builder had been killed during the mansion's construction, and wanted nobody to live there in peace.
And we all ate this shit up. Every Halloween we joked about going up to the house and giving it a touch, sometimes when we were exceptionally brave we talked about venturing inside. Jack would tease Sarah about the mansion until she cried. Chloe would end up shoving him on his ass and then we'd all laugh and forget about the scary place that sat right up the road from our neighborhood like a dormant volcano.
Years passed, and jokes about the old house perched on the hill eventually faded. It wasn't until senior year of high school that the green mansion came up in conversation again. A group of my closest friends and I were sitting in the hallway after school, just shooting the breeze, when somebody (I think Sarah?) mentioned that it was a few days before Halloween and whether someone would actually have the balls to go up to the notorious building. We all laughed, obsessed with our own nostalgia, and kept joking about the house up until the point we where we were interrupted by the school's elderly night-shift janitor.
Ball and dice games are now at Choctaw, which means they're more social and exciting than ever.
"It's not visiting that house on Halloween that you have to worry about," he mumbled through his long, white beard.
Our conversation stopped immediately, as if he had screamed at us rather than utter a small phrase barely above the volume of a whisper.
"What did you say?" My best friend Jack demanded.
"Nothing will happen to you if you visit the house on Halloween," The old janitor croaked. He was wearing a typical blue custodial outfit, and his long white hair matched his white beard, tied back behind his head in an elaborate ponytail.
"Okay, thanks for the advice," our friend Chloe chimed in, twirling her fingers through her long jet-black hair. "As much as I'd love to visit some creepy dank old building, I think I'll be okay just...not."
"Just don't visit the house on Friday the 13th." The old man finished as if Chloe hadn't even spoken. "For your sake, do not approach that hill, or that mansion, on any Friday 13th."
As the old man slinked off, we all stood dumbfounded.
"What the hell is wrong with him?" Todd exclaimed in disbelief.
"Just ignore him," Chloe responded dismissively, "I'm pretty sure I walked in on him jacking off in the janitor's closet when Mrs. Cook sent me to get some paper towels. He's an old crank."
Months go by, and both the mansion itself, and the conversation with the crazy janitor quickly falls from our minds. One-by-one, my friends and I get accepted to various schools from around the country. Only Todd and I are attending the same college, both having been accepted to a prestigious engineering university in Indiana.
