My informant is a 19 year old student studying neuroscience at USC.

“Um okay so, my first story is about this house on my street growing up that always was like a little bit – I just always had a weird feeling about it because…um. Basically my neighborhood has like, four, not four, maybe like, six different like basic housing plans and then like each house in the neighborhood is just like some variation or mirrored design of those different options. But there is one house on my street that was just like, looked very different than the rest and had this very ornate gate that led into their courtyard. It was like very, I don’t even know how to explain it. It was like this iron-cast gate that had very swirly-like type metal, uh. I don’t know like Medieval looking, but not Medieval. And it was painted royal blue. And basically never saw anyone going in or out of the house. And, even on Halloween, all the houses, you know, they usually leave their porch-light if they’re home and want people to trick-or-treat. This house never, uh, had the porch-light on and never had anyone home for trick-or-treating. And so it was always just this very mysterious house, uh, I just – we didn’t really know actually who lived in it. Um… except for one year, on Halloween the porch-light was on. And so I figured, okay, this..this is interesting because now we can trick-or-treat there. Um, and so, we go, and we trick-or-treat and then the people that answer the door – it’s like kind of this maybe twenty something year old guy with like his girlfriend, um. And so, yeah, they give us the candy, whatever, we leave. Um, and that was the only time that I ever saw anyone in that house. And I lived in my house like my whole life, so this is like, you, ten years that I’d never seen anyone in the house before. Basically then, so in middle school, so fast-forward like two or three years or whatever, um. There – I’m driving home from school, and, or my mom is, and the entire street is like, coned off. There’s police cars and caution tape across the road. Um, you can only get to my house by going, like, this opposite way, ‘cause we’re on the other end of the street. And basically what happened was I guess a woman was actually – an older woman – was the one who owned the house and she had been murdered … by her son – who, now, retrospectively, looking back, I think, was the guy that was there that one night for Halloween trick-or-treating. And basically, he killed his mom, who was living at the house alone. And killed her and cut her into pieces and put her in the freezer – in the fridge, of like her refrigerator – very gross. Um, so yeah, I feel like that house is like scary, and always got weird vibes from it, and then very bad stuff happened there. And that’s that. And obviously the house was foreclosed, and someone else bought it, and they redid the entire house and took out the gate and now it’s like a young family living there so. Hopefully, it’s like not … scary.”

The informant would perform this in a setting where everyone is telling some sort of strange or scary story.

Analysis:

People are afraid of the strange or unknown and assign these things supernatural or paranormal powers. My informant, as a young child, noticed something out of the ordinary and naturally labeled it as a bad thing. This time, she was right.