“You know there’s this haunted house by my home. Some woman went crazy and killed her husband and two sons and umm they never found her and she went missing and some say she still lives in the house. But the house is definitely deserted. It’s a big white Victorian, broken window on a hill in a huge dirt lot. You hear noises when you go near the house. It’s all in your mind.”

Samantha heard this story from her friends in Santa Cruz when she was in the eighth grade, so she was about thirteen years old. She says that the story is at least twenty years old because she knows thirty-eight year old people who knew about it when they were in high school. This story is usually told at night when teenagers want to scare their friends, especially after a scary movie. This legend would be very frightening to hear after watching a horror film because it is closer to home. If they have nothing else better to do and are not too scared, then they will go visit the house because it is in the neighborhood. Samantha thinks that all the sounds that people hear are in their minds. She says that bored teenagers probably came up with this legend in order to scare their friends one day.

I believe that what Samantha says has some truth to it. Since the house is a beaten down, Victorian styled home, it has that eerie feeling to it that makes the story more plausible. Being deserted, no one is quite sure of the house’s origins, so teenagers most likely just made up something to compensate for the lack of a real story. Only teenagers from Santa Cruz would know about this story unless they told it to visiting friends and relatives because it is mostly confined to the area where the house is located.