Winning a week-long sunny vacation couldn’t have come at a better time; it almost seemed too good to be true. And to your average person, that’s all it was. Too good to be true. But I’m not your average person.

I had received the phone call three days before I left, during a slow shift at the office. I’d been researching the vacation, curious as to how I’d ended up wining. Turns out, the whole thing never actually existed.

It was just another part of the ghost chase I’d been a part of for far too long. I had been out of leads for a while, and the anonymous tips had stopped coming in. I was at a dead end.

And then the phone rang. I figured it was my boss, telling me to pick up the speed on my case, but no. Instead, it was my tipper. I’d only ever received typed or written messages from him: emails, texts, letters. Never anything that required speaking. But there he was, on the phone, his tone urgent and hushed.

He had told me to come and meet him at 794 Stutter Lane, Conradville in three days, and to come alone. He said he had intel that could help me astronomically on my little “ghost hunt”. I was desperate at this point.

Desperate to finish this up. Desperate to get out of this line of work, constantly thrusting myself in the face of danger just to get to the bottom of something. Desperate to keep going, to solve the mystery so I could sleep soundly after five months of restless nights. Desperate to do something. Anything.

So of course I went. Yes, dumb of me, I know. “Have you ever seen any movies ever??” You may ask. You mean the ones where the protagonist gets ambushed because he’s too desperate or hasty or something? Yeah. Yeah, I’ve seen them. But when pride gets in your head, it won’t come out.

I left my tiny town of Wattsburgh. I drove in my tiny pickup truck all the way to Conradville and found the street I was supposed to be on. The house, however, didn’t exist. Or, that’s what I thought.

But now, as I sit with my mouth gaged and my hands tied behind my back in a dusty corner of the 794 Stutter Lane basement, I am forced to rethink my hastily made conclusion.

This is not how I’d thought I’d be spending my summer a week ago.