New Book Excerpt: DORM RATS, A Neighborlee, Ohio book

"You have got to be Lanie and Harry." Emma stood up to greet us when Harry and I approached the building at that end of the street.

I honestly to this day have no idea what to call it—house, shop, office? Hut, headquarters for interdimensional visitation? Intergalactic bus stop, tea shop? After all, it was reputed to be haunted, and people from all different disciplines or theories of haunting and visits from the "other side" (whatever that means) had investigated it. My folks had access to all the historical documents and records of the weird goings-on through the years. How many times the building had burned and even been bombed out during various invasions and revolutions in England's history, how many times it had been added onto and then renovated down to the foundation, and the multiple uses it had been put to. House, store, jail, apothecary, hospital, morgue, schoolhouse, barn, and multiple combinations and variations of the previous uses.

Pop remarked, our second night in the village, that the building wasn't haunted so much as it had grown a personality from all the uses and turmoil it had endured through the centuries, and all the Human energy that soaked into it. It just wanted a vacation. Proof that his theory was probably closest to the truth? People's reactions to the building varied depending on their personalities and beliefs. Five people could go into it at the same time and hear a noise, and everyone would hear a different noise, interpreting it as a different cause. I know this is true because Harry and I went exploring the first time we got inside. We found out later that nobody knew the attic was there until we found it. How could people not see the door and the steep, really skinny stairs all these years? We found them because maybe the building liked us? Who knows?


More proof: We were climbing around in the attic and our folks were downstairs, going through boxes of crumbly historical documents, when a delegation from the village came in to speak with them. They wanted a progress report on what we had found, only our first full day there, after the welcoming party/luncheon. I heard the door creak-bang open and signaled Harry to be quiet. He was in the middle of leaping from one rafter support beam to the next. Kind of hard to land on the next beam without making noise, but he managed.