4. STEVIE
STEVIE
B efore meeting Lauren Lane—or Lo as she introduced herself—Andrew insisted on giving me a very thorough rundown of her background: She’s an actress who starred on a soapy medical drama for eight seasons, she has a massive following of adoring fans who consider her a fan favorite, and she’s well-connected in our industry.
“She’s also publicly a lesbian and has been single for some time,” Andrew had said on the drive over to her house.
I half-sighed, half-groaned when he glanced over at me.
I couldn’t tell if he was giving me a warning not to flirt with her, or warning me that she might try to make a move.
Either was a possibility; Andrew had seen more than a few women over the years stumble through making a pass at me.
“That usually just means she hasn’t been seen publicly with anyone. Girls like her don’t stay unattached for very long. I’m sure she has a long line of potential suitors,” I’d responded.
“So you agree she’s beautiful?”
The few pictures I’d seen of her flashed back into my mind. Long blonde hair, a wide movie star smile. When she’s not made up for TV, she has freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her eyes are a warm hazel with the kind of depth that comes across even in pictures.
“She’s alright,” I said and slugged back the rest of my hot coffee.
The conversation plays out in my head when I see Lo in person for the first time.
But I don’t date. I don’t have the time for serious commitment, and I’m not interested in having anyone waiting at home for me when I get back from shooting on location somewhere.
That doesn’t stop me from admitting to myself that Lo is someone I would hit on at a bar.
It also, unfortunately, plays out the entire time I’m interviewing her. I’m fighting off two parts of my brain—the first keeps worrying someone will slip up and we’ll be revealed as frauds to Lo, and the second is so focused on the way her lips form words that I’m worried I’ll forget how to speak.
After listening to Lo talk for long enough, though, I start to get lost in her story. The way she speaks and tells stories is mesmerizing.
And the way she’s so distressed makes me feel a little bad for developing an entire TV show around fake paranormal encounters.
Outside of a few stories my grandparents told me growing up—which were definitely just folklore, anyway—I’d never met anyone with a ghost story they really believed.
I’m not necessarily convinced Lo’s house is really haunted, but I do believe her fear is real.
“And you don’t know anything about the history of the house?” I ask.
She offers a modest half-shrug. “No, not really. It hasn’t crossed my mind to check.
I think I’ve been so caught up in figuring out if what I’m experiencing is real that I haven’t even done any investigative work.
I think I’ve mostly been trying to convince myself that I’m losing my mind and none of this is real. Doing research makes it feel real.”
“Are you looking forward to learning more about the house?” I ask.
As part of our show, we offer a historical background of whatever place it is we’re ‘investigating.’ We’ve gotten creative with making it up in some places but with Lo, Andrew and I agreed we wanted to do it right.
No embellishing, no feeding people lines—just a real and true ghost story.
Or an episode about how her house isn’t actually haunted, which is the more likely alternative.
“I’m a little nervous to look into it, to be honest.” Lo sits with her thoughts for a second. Her brow furrows with genuine worry. “What if something horrible happened here?”
“It’ll be alright. Whatever happened would’ve been a long time ago,” I assure her.
“But isn’t the whole point of, like, ghost hunting that… things can live in places forever? Sometimes people don’t leave? Or can’t?”
Shit .
“To a certain extent,” I offer, trying to sound more confident than I’m feeling.
I’m not used to having to talk without some kind of set script—or without the people around me knowing that it’s all bullshit.
Talking out my ass doesn’t work here. But saying things that suggest I don’t even believe in ghosts—because I don’t and never have—isn’t going to go over well here.
It’ll put us on the fast track to Lo seeing right through us.
“Right,” Lo says. Her eyes don’t leave my face and I worry that she’s already somehow onto us.
We wrap up our initial questions, mostly just baiting for her sound clips.
She’s doing a good job of selling the story.
Better than when Andrew and I draft something up quickly for us to say or for someone else to say.
We don’t do formal scripts for the show, but we usually have soundbites that we want to capture, mostly for promotional purposes.
Andrew and I have good practice with feeding people lines; after scaring myself out of thinking I was good enough for features, I’ve stuck to reality TV.
After doing a few dating shows—one of which was where I met Andrew—we pitched our own show using the skills we already have, but in a way that no longer felt evil.
Neither of us really thought it would work, but we’ve had a lot of fun doing it, and it’s paid better so far than anything else we’ve done.
“She just doesn’t want to scare you. Don’t worry until there’s something to worry about,” Andrew offers from across the room.
He’s getting the camera set up over his shoulder so we can do the walkthrough of the house with Lo.
Everything after this point is pretty casual—one camera that goes with me and Andrew, and then some random cameras we’ll place around the house.
“Exactly,” I say, grateful for the out. I make a mental note to buy Andrew an entire bottle of whiskey as a thank you for saving my ass.
“Have you guys seen the second lav mic?” Andrew asks, glancing over at our interns for assistance. They look at him blankly, like it’s their first day on earth.
“Did you pack it?” I ask.
“Yeah, it never goes anywhere without the other,” he says.
He looks around at all of the equipment we have laid out.
We’ve made a mess of Lo’s dining room. There are open boxes for our equipment, coffees, and copies of the shooting schedule.
“Shit, dude. I just bought those new replacement ones, too.”
“It’s probably just caught up in the rest of the stuff.
” I wave our two interns, Sean and Tanner—or affectionately tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum because they’re twenty-one-year-old twin boys who would forget their heads if they weren’t attached— over.
“Can you help Andrew look? Did you guys pack them up by accident?”
Tweedle-dum shook his head. “Man, I don’t think so,” he says, looking over the rest of the table. He scratches the back of his neck, where his mullet meets his bare skin. “Um.”
“I can help look,” Lo says.
“It’s alright. This happens sometimes,” I say.
“Not really, if I’m going to be honest.” He groans, uncharacteristically more stressed about this snafu than I was. But he’d also always been our equipment guy; every piece of tech we owned was his baby. “Those things were expensive, dude.”
“It’s literally fine.”
“It’s probably gone,” Lo offers ominously.
That makes the rest of the room pause.
“What do you mean?” I ask even though I’m not sure I really want to know the answer.
I don’t get freaked out because I don’t believe in this stuff, but Lo’s tone is so grim it feels like the set-up for a horror movie.
And personally, I’ve never been interested in being a final girl, especially not against some kind of paranormal entity.
“It was like I was saying, things go missing here all the time.” She explains this like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, so matter-of-fact that I know this isn’t the first time.
“I’d initially told myself that the things I was missing had just gotten packed in the boxes I hadn’t opened yet.
And then when I opened all of the boxes, I told myself the movers probably forgot one or one got put in a weird spot of the house.
But then other things that I know made it to the house went missing. ”
“But you’ve found them, right?” Andrew asks. “Since then?”
She shakes her head. “No, I haven’t. I had an entire bag of winter attire, like hats and scarves and whatever else, I was going to repack and then hide in a closet for my next ski trip. But I literally haven’t been able to find it anywhere.”
The hair on the back of my neck stands up. I’ve always been a skeptic, always the asshole who shoots down ghost stories or pokes holes in myths, but I’m not liking Lo’s tone. When she was just telling us her story, it felt different. But now, it feels more like a warning. Or a threat.
“Have you seen anything weird here?” I ask, directing my attention to Lo’s friend. She’d been suspiciously quiet about her own feelings about Lo’s house.
“Oh, none of us have seen anything other than Lo,” she says. She has her legs folded up under her on a loveseat, her eyes fixed on her phone. “I believe her, but I’m not interested in engaging. If there’s a ghost, it’s not my business.”
Lo shrugs. “And I mean, it could always just be moving stress. People misplace things all the time.”
“How long ago did you move in again?” Andrew asks.
“Two months,” she says. “Just over, at this point.”
“And you have things you haven’t been able to find in all that time?”
“Andrew, can you come grab something from the van with me?” I cut in, interrupting the conversation. Hopefully, Lo can’t hear the edge of panic in my voice.
“Sure,” he says. His eyes dance around the house as he walks across the living room toward me.
“Can you hurry up?” I say through my teeth.
“Sorry,” he says and picks up the pace.
“We’ll be back in a second. We’re going to check if the mic was just left behind in the car.”