Every House Is Haunted by Ian Rogers Read Free Book Online Page A

these.”
    She looked down and saw that he had taken a single bite out of each piece of pie.
    “There was a guy from around these parts, name of Mundy or Mindy, I can’t remember which. He wrote a book about bad places.”
    “A food critic?” Rachel asked.
    “Something like that,” Henry said dismissively. “He had a word for these bad places. He called them ‘pressure points.’ I knew a girl once who called them something else. A much more appropriate word, in my opinion.” He paused in remembrance, or maybe for effect. “She called them ‘tornadoes.’
    “Do you read?” he asked suddenly.
    Rachel shook her head. “Only the expiry dates on the milk cartons at the Food Mart,” she said, and Henry laughed.
    “Can I get my bill?”
    Rachel took her order pad out of the pouch on the front of her uniform. She flipped through the sheets on which she had scribbled Henry’s orders throughout the day. She couldn’t remember the last time she had to add so many numbers. Finally she scribbled a total at the bottom of the page and plunked it down on the table.
    Henry reached into his houndstooth jacket and produced a thick wad of bills bound with a rubber band. He paid the bill and then placed the still-considerable stack of cash on the table. He smoothed it out and placed the origami cow on top of it.
    “That’s for you,” he said.
    And then without another word, he stood up, ignoring Rachel’s stunned expression, and left the diner.
    Rachel turned around in time to see the door swing shut. She heard the sound of Henry’s shoes on the crushed gravel in the parking lot, and a second later she saw him pass in front of the side window on his way around to the back of the diner.
    The next time she saw him he was on page four of the Sutter County
Register
.
IV
    There are haunted places in the world. Dark places. Shunned places. Forgotten places. All existing in reality and every bit as tangible and accessible as the house next door. Sometimes it
is
the house next door.
    But hauntings aren’t restricted to houses. There are also haunted apartments and haunted trailers, haunted farms and haunted restaurants, haunted churches and haunted schools, and, on Lake Shore Boulevard in Toronto, there is even a haunted fish-processing plant.
    In the unexpunged edition of
The North American Guide to Haunted Architectural Structures and Supernatural Pressure Points
(Horsehead Press, 1949), paranormal researcher Dale Mundy declared that the most haunted building south of the Mason-Dixon Line was not a house but a cabin. Cabin D, to be exact, at the Crescent Moon Motel in Tennessee.
    According to Mundy, no one who stayed in Cabin D—the Crescent Moon’s honeymoon suite—lived to see morning. The cabin had been built away from the others in a clearing in the woods, the thought being that seclusion equalled romance. Mundy didn’t mention exactly how many newlyweds had died in Cabin D, but he soliloquized on vast numbers of young lovers who never even had the chance to consummate their wedding vows. Eventually the owner stopped renting it out, and then, in October of 1923, a hurricane dubbed “The Southern Banshee” tore through Sutter County and reduced every cabin at the Crescent Moon to splinters. Every one except Cabin D.
    Some people in Sutter County said the destruction of the Crescent Moon cabins was a blessing; others went one further and called it “nature’s exorcism.” The following summer, the land was bought by a developer and a motel was put up in the cabins’ place—not directly on the site of the demolished cabins but closer to the highway. The new owner was never told about the existence of Cabin D because the old owner wasn’t around to tell them. The Southern Banshee had exorcised him, as well.
    The new motel opened in the fall and Cabin D was left to rot quietly in the woods. It had always been a dark place, a shunned place, and now it became a forgotten place.
    Occasionally it reminded the world of its