4. STEVIE #2
“Take your time,” Lo says. When I look back at her, the expression on her face tells me she doesn’t expect we’ll find it. It sends a shiver down my spine.
When we leave out the front door, I nearly drag Andrew by his shirt collar to keep up pace with me.
We follow the path of flowers lining the pavement, cutting back down to the street.
Unsurprisingly, Lo lives in one of the few neighborhoods of Los Angeles that has wide streets and beautiful, healthy trees.
Even though it looks like my parents’ house, tucked deep in the suburbs of West Pennsylvania, I know it cost her five times what my parents ever paid.
I lean against the van and look at him. “What is wrong with you?”
“I don’t like whatever is going on in that house,” Andrew says. “I have a weird feeling, dude. Like a really weird one.”
“She’s just telling you a scary story. People lose things all the time. Imagine if you blamed a ghost every time you misplaced your keys. It’s ridiculous.”
Andrew doesn’t seem convinced. He looks back at the house like it’s an animal preying on him.
“Are you seriously telling me you believe her?” I ask, lightly hitting my hand against Andrew’s chest. “Ghosts aren’t real. Our entire show is proving to both of us that it’s all bullshit.”
“This feels different.”
“Does it? Or is an actress just doing a really good job of convincing you that she thinks her house is haunted?” I ask. “There’s probably some very reasonable explanation behind all of this, just like there always is.”
Andrew takes a deep breath through his nose. “I don’t want to stay here too late tonight.”
“Bummer. We work for a ghost hunting show and literally can’t film our most important scenes during the day,” I say.
My patience is growing increasingly thin with him.
We don’t have time to fuck around like this; we have a job to do.
“Need I remind you that you were the one who wanted to take this episode on?”
He’s quiet for a long beat and then finally says, “You’re right.”
“We’re good to film now? Think you can handle it?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Andrew says, even though he still looks uneasy.
The one pass that I’ll give him is that this is the first place we’re filming where someone is telling us actual—or supposed—-firsthand accounts of paranormal activity.
Typically, we intentionally choose places that are rumored to be haunted or look like they could be haunted and then fill in the blanks ourselves.
We have people in town talk to us, edit what they have to say during their interviews to be as eerie as possible, or set them up to give us quotes we want, and then construct our own ghost encounters.
We usually have full control over the situation.
But here, someone isn’t just saying, Yeah, it’s definitely creepy here .
Lo is explicitly telling us ghost stories.
But I can only give him so much of a pass considering he’s the one who wanted to take a chance on Lo. And he also willingly signed on to be on a paranormal investigation show.
“Okay, great,” I say. I start heading back toward the house, walking backwards with my eyes on him. I make it a few paces up the driveway before turning back toward him. “Are you coming?”
Andrew scrunches his face in reluctance.
“I literally can’t do this show without you. We’ll be done in, like, an hour, and then we’ll go to the library to film and then wrap tomorrow. We’re so close to being done.”
“We haven’t even gotten to the actual ghost stuff in the house.”
“You and I both know that’s not bad. We’ll film for a few hours tomorrow night and edit it to look like we’ve been there all night, and it’ll be fine,” I say.
When Andrew doesn’t budge from the street, I sigh.
“This job isn’t any different from the other ones we’ve worked.
I promise. If all it takes for you to believe a place is haunted is that things flicker and go missing, you’re so gullible I can’t believe you’ve made it this far. ”
Andrew groans and rolls his neck. “Alright. Whatever. Fine.”
“Great, thank you.” It comes out sounding more agitated than grateful.
But it’s valid of me—I can’t deal with this shit right now.
We have a job to do. And we have a whole season to go.
I can’t have my guys starting to think that ghosts really exist. All of these—admittedly creepy, but definitively not haunted—places that we typically film are about to be a lot less straightforward than they have been in the past.
In the time that we were standing outside, the sun quickly began setting on us. Every fall and winter, it surprises me how suddenly the daylight fades. As we’re inching toward November, every day feels shorter and shorter, getting darker and darker earlier each day.
I know the sudden dark isn’t going to help my case with getting Andrew to calm down, but it’s not my fault he’s falling victim to an actress.
If anything, she’s not even being particularly convincing.
She could definitely go harder if given the opportunity.
I would bet money that there will be hundreds of posts about this episode online, saying that Lo is a terrible actress and no one believes her house is actually haunted.
People love to poke holes in our episodes; it’s part of the gig.
When we step up to the front door, the outdoor light flickers and fades. It takes a long time to finally stay fully lit up. Andrew lets out something like a whimper behind me.
“See, faulty wiring,” I say, gesturing up toward the light. “Nothing weird.”
I push open the door and am immediately swallowed up by a weird feeling—a cold breeze, a swirling in my stomach that tells me to get out. Goosebumps bloom over my arms.
“Jesus Christ,” Andrew mutters from behind me and I don’t have to ask to know he just experienced the same thing. What I can’t tell is if he meant that as an expletive or as a prayer.
“I’m sure the air conditioning is on, whatever,” I say, brushing it off again—this time a little less certain than before. LA stays warm well into October during the day, but the evenings cool down significantly. There’s no need for air conditioning right now.
Now that the warm sunset is fading, the house has gone mostly dark. The little light left comes in through the windows. In the living room, Lo had turned on a few random lamps around the room.
“You don’t believe in overhead lighting?” I ask.
She wrinkles her nose. “I’m offended you’d even ask,” she says. Ah, go it. She’s one of those the big light is evil types.
I scoff. “No wonder you think there’s a ghost living here.
The vibe is…” I look around at how the lamp creates shadows around the room.
Again, that feeling like I just stepped into a horror movie sets in.
This time, it’s Scream —a killer peering in through the windows from the outside, motion detected at the front door, and then the back door, and an unwelcome phone call. I see you .
I shake off the thought. This house is just like any other house. There’s nothing weird going on. Nothing has changed inside just because the light is fading.
“It’s meant to be cozy,” Lo says. “But it doesn’t really feel that cozy here for some reason.”
“I have to agree. The vibe is pretty abysmal,” Annalise says and finally puts her phone down. “There’s a reason no one wants to hang out here after dark.”
Lo gasps with offense. “You told me the house didn’t scare you!”
“I didn’t want to scare you more by telling you that the house definitely has a fucked up energy,” she says. “I love you too much to ruin your new house for you. But now that you have these guys here, hopefully we can figure out a solution.”
“You know that we don’t, like, get rid of ghosts, right? We just monitor to figure out if they’re here?” I say.
Annalise waves me off. “It’s fine. If we find out that there definitely isn’t anything weird going on here, we can move on. We’ll just chalk it up to the house feeling a little off-putting and buy Lo some more furniture.”
“I’m buying at my own pace. I’m trying to curate ,” she says.
Even though I’ve never once put any thought into decorating my apartments, I can’t help but be charmed by Lo’s answer.
Annalise’s lips turn up in a smile. “Of course. In the way only you can,” she says good-naturedly. “Should we get moving on touring the house? I’m sure you want at least a little natural light for this part.”
The rest of Lo’s house is about as half-empty as the living room and entryway.
Every room is nicely put together with obvious thought behind the color coordination and a consistent mid-century inspired theme through the house, but there isn’t much to see other than that.
We’ve shot literal abandoned buildings with more furniture than this.
Andrew—holding the camera—and I follow Lo as she gives us an overall tour.
“This is the primary. Sometimes when I’m in here, I can hear what sounds like footsteps outside the door,” she explains, just like I’d asked her to do.
The entire house has been one thing after another—items getting moved from where she knows she put them, a door cracked that she didn’t open, a weirdly cold breeze in a windowless bathroom.
“ Eesh ,” Andrew says in response to her comment about the footsteps, and I turn to glare at him. “Sorry.”
“You guys aren’t very into ghosts for being ghost investigators, are you?
” Lo asks, turning the attention briefly away from the tour she’s giving us.
She stands at the doorframe to her bedroom, which is the most complete room of the entire house.
She has beautiful dark wood furniture and a surprisingly massive collection of books.
It feels like a library she happens to sleep in. “You’re both being weird.”
“Not being weird,” I protest.
“I’m getting the sense you guys are more scared of my house than I am, and I’m not sure I like that.” She crosses her arms across her chest, and I feel a little bit like a kid who’s about to get caught in a lie by my teacher.
“It’s a little creepier here than we’re used to, I guess,” I say, shooting another pointed glare in Andrew’s direction. “Most of the places we tour are abandoned or old or whatever. It’s weird that all of this stuff is happening here , where you live.”
“A little too close to home, too,” Andrew says.
“It’s not like ghosts are contagious. I’m sure there are like a thousand other places in LA that are haunted, people just don’t talk about it,” Lo says. “Or I guess maybe you guys would know those places already. But you know what I mean.”
I turn to her. “You’re really not scared? I know I’m not, but I have experience with this,” I add. A little white lie won’t hurt anyone. “You’re surprisingly pretty…calm.”
“I guess I keep thinking there’s some kind of explanation,” she says with a half-shrug.
“Whether it’s me being naive or what, I don’t know.
But I’m sooner ready to believe that someone is like, playing a prank on me or something, than to believe my house is actually haunted.
Even with all of the weird stuff that goes on here. ”
“Fair,” I say, admittedly impressed by her ability to stay levelheaded through all of this.
Something about it makes me almost believe her more; it feels almost like how I’d approach it if I thought my own apartment was haunted.
I’d think through every logical explanation, and even when logic didn’t seem to offer any answers, I’d still cling to that before I’d jump to believing it’s a ghost.
“But, yeah, that’s the tour. Nothing much else to say,” she says.
Just then, the lights do the same thing they did outside—flicker but in a distinctive way, like someone is dimming them and then turning them all the way up.
It makes the hair on even the back of my neck stand up—it’s almost like it’s moving in a pattern.
Flickering from one end, progressively down the hallway until it’s above us.
The thought hits me like a truck: it doesn’t feel like how a light typically flickers when there’s an issue with the house itself. It feels intentional.
Or like someone—or something—just walked down the hallway, setting the lights off in the process.
“Absolutely the fuck not,” Andrew mutters under his breath.
He looks over at me like he’s waiting for me to give him permission to run.
If Lo wasn’t standing right in front of us, I’d snap at him for being a moron and nearly blowing our cover.
But since Lo is right there—and already seems a little skeptical of us—I keep my annoyance at bay.
“She’s saying hi,” Lo says simply, an amused smile turning her lips upward.
“Does that happen a lot?” I ask. Despite wanting to wring Andrew’s neck for acting like a little bitch, I’m also not feeling particularly cool about what just happened.
My heart rate is sky high, my palms sweaty.
I’m experiencing the kind of post-adrenaline I’d only ever experienced after watching a horror movie.
“I mean, yeah,” Lo says. She gestures to the house. “I’m used to it. Just like I already told you every other time you’ve asked me a variation of that question. It’s my house. I bought it. I’m going to keep living in it and do the best I can to make it feel normal.”
I think through every logical explanation, telling myself that there’s a reason behind all of this. It’s the house. There’s no ghost, no outlandish explanation. I’ve gone a long time without ever truly being convinced the paranormal exists; I’m not about to start now.
“Did you get everything you needed here?” Lo asks.
“Definitely,” Andrew responds for both of us.