People who don't live here, who have just heard of our town, know it for two reasons. Back in the 1980s, a man murdered his whole family, wrapped their bodies up in sleeping bags, and cut his own face out of every photo. He stopped the mail, called the high school to say the family was off on a trip, and then disappeared. He left the lights on throughout the house, some lamps shining through the windows. A month passed and that provided the man with a head start, until the lights burned out one by one, and the neighbors finally called the police.

     I'm less familiar with that story. After all, it happened long before my time. But the house still stands, as unyielding as it looks in the black-and-white photos on Wikipedia. Someone bought it eventually, but they never decorate the yard with Christmas lights or place boxes of flowers in front of the windows. As if that's the compromise. They moved into that home, with all its ghosts, but decided to never celebrate living there.

     Lots of people in Glennon Heights think the house should have been bulldozed. Maybe you can scrub blood off the floorboards, but people still died in those rooms. When you stand at the front walk and consider approaching, the fine hairs on the back of your neck might prickle. You might feel a static electricity crackle over you, carrying a current of fear.

     I don't believe in ghosts the way most people imagine them. When I walk by that house, I don't envision floaty wisps shaped like people darting in and out of the attic windows. No invisible clammy hand clamps on my shoulder. I think it's more likely that when people feel really intense feelings---the worst kind of feelings---those feelings imprint the earth and the air. They don't dissipate even when we disappear. So it wouldn't matter if you knocked the house down where that family died. Those deaths would still create a permanent and painful haze on that property, in our town.

     Besides, if we intend to go around knocking houses to the ground, we can't stop with that one. There is, after all, another house that put Glennon Heights on the map. Another place of nightmares. And now, after everything that's happened. I get the same cold ball in my belly when I walk past it. The Donahue house. The Sentry's house. What happened there stamped the air with fear and put a family to ruin as much as if they were sitting at their dining room table, eating supper as the bulldozers plowed through.