Informant Information:

Ace Spade is a student at the University of Southern California. He is from New York and moved to California for college.

Story:

“When I was little I lived in a dead end. At the end of the dead end there was an abandoned house and all of the neighborhood children used to think it was a haunted house. We later found out it was a gang/drug house but it was still very spooky”

Q: What made the house seem scary or haunted?

“Have you ever seen Monster House? It looked like that but with trash all over the area and with gated fences. People said that they would see figures enter and exit the house”

Q: What was your personal experience with the house?

“We used to use it to cross the dead end so we would walk by it and everything was boarded up. I didn’t see any figures and crap but it still spooked me.”

Analysis:

It seems as though the primary reason for the “spookiness” of the house was the atmosphere. As the informant mentioned, the house was extremely unkempt and had been long abandoned for some time. Because the background of the house involved gangs, and some of the children saw dark figures in the house, it can be assumed that there might have been deaths in that house. If this is true, then the figures might have been the deceased people, or they could have just been figments of the children’s imaginations.