Haunted

The house on the hill looked like an aged porn star. Enough work had been done to make it superficially attractive but the closer you got, the more you could see the lived in lines of time. Knowing windows watch relentlessly and people who have stared deep into their rheumy recesses come away burdened with a heavy feeling that the house has seen the truth of a long and unpleasant reality. After all, houses are not allowed to die very often.

As occupants come and go, the corpse-bones of the house are tortured, twisted, and restructured until impotent rage must become madness. A fresh coat of paint cannot provide relief from such a deep well of pain that denying death constantly fills. Vacancy won't help either. It merely adds solitary confinement to the factors that haunt the house. Thus the ghosts encountered in such a place are not spirits of the living but rather the house's fractured memories of the living distorted by its own darkness.

Melanie feared such places enough that she had to seek them out.