Blame this.
There is a house in Indiana that nobody has entered in almost seventy years. It’s a one story ranch building, probably thrown up with its neighbors in the post-war real estate boom, but all those records are gone now. There’s a garage, a front door, and a kitchen door in the back. None of those doors open any more; some brave people got as close as they could and chucked hot glue at the locks and hinges until they started bleeding black-yellow goo from their nostrils. They called it ‘severe allergic reactions’ on the hospital and coroner’s reports. I guess that’s even true.
You can still see the dried glue on the doors and walls and driveway. If you were damned foolish enough to go looking. Besides that, there’s not much to see. No lights in the house, no grass in the yard, the curtains disappeared decades ago. It should have fallen apart a long time ago, but the windows and roof have held up. A visitor might be forgiven for thinking it was only recently vacated, and by everything. It’s the quietest place in Indiana. You take a visit, you quickly realize that you are the only conventionally living thing there. While at the same time not feeling quite alone.
But what business would you even have being there? The house was quietly removed from the mail routes from the start — the US Postal Service knows more than it will ever admit about the things that happen just in the corner of your eyes — and it was hastily taken off of the Census rolls after what happened in ‘60. The IRS kept sending fellas to bang on the door about the arrears, though — for a while, at least. I guess eventually one of the ones that made it back explained that some doors, you don’t knock on. And that some taxes, you don’t pay back with money.
As for the building records? Well, back in ‘58 Mildred Haversham was the town secretary, and she got sick. When the doctors told her it was cancer and she only had a month to live, Mildred took all the files about the house, burned them in a field, and ate the ashes. She didn’t last a week past that, and I will not write down what precautions she told the undertaker to take with her corpse.
But what most people just do is, they don’t talk about it. There’s a chain link fence around the house, and there isn’t a door to that fence, and all the kids know not to go over the top. Back in ‘77, some kid did try — and the poor bastard broke a finger dropping down. That kid spent sixteen hours inside the fence before he could pull himself back over, and no adult did a thing to help until they could grab him without themselves going over the fence.
You would have thought there’d have been more of a fuss about that, but no. The family with the kid left town, nothing more was said — and every kid since then got the message. Some haunted houses you stay the hell away from, because if you get stuck in one, nobody’s coming to save you.
Could be a short story in a new horror-verse.
Could be the start to a stand-alone novel.
Could be a GURPS module intro.
Since it’s yours and still a baby, it can be anything you want.
Once you decide though, and release it into the wild, no backsies. Never give in to Lucasism.