“Hey everyone,” Kyle said in his cocky voice as he started recording with his head mounted GoPro. In front of him was a familiar sight. Everyone in town knew about this place. Everyone he asked said it had always been here. Even his grandmother remembered the house being there, abandoned. No one knew who owned it. No one knew why it had never been torn down. There were, of course, theories.

“This place is super old and supposed to be super haunted,” Kyle went on as he approached the house. The beam of his flashlight scanned across the front of the house, revealing boarded up windows and doors. “Tonight we’re going to go in there and see what it’s all about and then I’m going to be spending the night in there.”

He looked back over his shoulder so the camera could see his backpack.

“I got my supplies with me,” he said, “a couple extra cameras and batteries, and hopefully we can capture something interesting while we’re in there.”

Kyle was hoping to start his YouTube career with this video. He had a few ideas for what he could do for videos but this was obviously the strongest one of them. Everyone loved a good haunted house and what better thing to do than go spend the night there? He didn’t expect anything to happen, of course, ghosts weren’t real, but he could play along and make it look all spooky. He wasn’t half bad with special effects either so he was planning on adding some ghosts if needed to jazz it up a bit.

“Looks like we’re all closed up here in front,” Kyle said as he approached the house.

He made a show of pulling on a few of the boards. He knew from his earlier visit to the house when he was scoping it out that these boards were very secure and nothing short of a crowbar would removed them. Fortunately, someone before him had done the work for him, only not where everyone could see.

“Let’s see what’s around back,” he said and began wading through the overgrown grass. He was careful to go around the right side of the house since he’d previously gone around the left and he worried there’d still be signs of his previous visit in the trampled grass. “Yeah, here we go,” he said as the back of the house came into view.

Kyle shone his flashlight around, making a show of it as though he hadn’t been here before, eventually landing on the window who’s boards were missing.

“Looks like I’m not the first person to come here,” he said.

There was no glass left in the old window frame and he poked his head into the house, shining his flashlight around. As expected, the house was in varying stages of decay. Dirt had collected in a thin layer over the floor and what pieces of furniture there were were broken and moldy. There were a few pieces of graffiti on the walls but not much which surprised Kyle. He’d expected the inside to be filled with evidence of squatters.

“Let’s go in, shall we?”

Kyle pulled himself up and into the house. He was less graceful than he wanted but there wasn’t anything he could really do about that right now. Maybe he’d cut that bit out and just jump to him inside. It didn’t matter in this moment. Once he was inside he could see more clearly that he was in the old living room. Across from him was the front door. The house was pretty small, after all. There was no basement or upstairs, just the one floor.

“Alright,” he said as he tried not to cough on the dust he’d stirred up in his entrance. “Looks like we have an old couch here. I won’t be testing that one out but maybe if we find a bed?”

He walked around the living room, kicking at the detritus on the floor and commenting on it as he went.

“I think we had a fire here at one point,” he said as he found a small charred spot on the floor, surrounded by rocks. “Not a great idea in here. I sure won’t be doing that.”

He came to a door and paused. “This is either the bedroom,” he said, “or the dining room. These old houses all had a pretty similar layout.”

He pushed the door open and looked inside. A tree grew out of the middle of an ancient bed frame. There was no sign of a mattress. The vaulted ceiling above was caved in, explaining how the tree had grown there.

“That couch back there isn’t looking half bad now compared to this,” Kyle laughed.

He walked into the room and looked around but there really wasn’t much else here. The roots were cool in that they outlined where the mattress used to be and there was a slight hollow space within, sort of like a cage.

“I wonder if I can get in there,” Kyle said more to himself than to the camera.

He slung off his pack and started looking for a way in. The roots were fairly tightly packed but eventually he found a wider space near the back. It was tight, but he managed to get in. There was just enough space for him to sit cross legged beneath the roots.

“This is so cool, guys,” Kyle said. “I was hoping to find a spot to sleep, but that’s obviously not going to work. Instead,” Kyle reached up through the roots and grabbed his pack, pulling it into the roots with him, “this seems like a good time to go over some of the theories as to why this place is haunted.”

He opened his pack and pulled out a notebook.

“I’m pretty old school with my pen and paper here. Probably should have just taken notes on my phone but whatever. So, I asked my grandma who was born in this town almost eighty years ago. She remembers kids daring each other to run up and touch the front door so this place has been here and empty for a long time. She told me that back then there were rumors that the man who built the house had murdered his family, buried them on the land, and then built the house on top of them to hide the evidence. There was also a similar rumor saying that the house was built on an old native American burial site. I don’t know if either of those stories are true but it sounds like someone’s buried here.”

He turned the page on his notebook.

“One interesting thing I did find in my research is that this town has had a higher number of missing people than is normal. I didn’t think this was something that they track but apparently it’s considered normal for a town of this size to have one to three missing people a year. But here we average six, and that average dates back all the way to when they first started keeping track back in the nineteen fifties. I know that’s not a lot of people, but it’s been enough that the FBI have done a couple of investigations here. Some people thought we might have a serial killer or kidnapper, but no evidence has ever been found. The missing people simply vanish. The only thing that does come up with the missing people is that a number of them were teenagers who vanished shortly after being dared to stay the night in this house.”

Kyle laughed in what he hoped was a spooky manner. He needed to work on his camera persona but that would take time and he had to start somewhere.

“Alright, my legs are getting cramped sitting in here so as cool as this spot is I think it’s time we go and explore the rest of the house.”

With that, he pulled himself and his pack back out of the roots and returned to the living room.