Story #1 — Part 1 The Room Nobody Wanted

This happened in my family back in the 1990s, when I was about ten years old.

We lived in Muncie, Indiana, in one of those older working-class neighborhoods where most of the houses had been around forever.

Our family was crowded.

My grandparents, two uncles, an aunt, my parents, and me were all trying to make limited space work, and people argued about it all the time.

That’s why one thing never made sense to me.

There was an extra room in my grandparents’ house.

It wasn’t a closet or some tiny storage space. It was a real room. Big enough for a bed, maybe even two.

But nobody used it.

The door usually stayed shut.

When I was little, I asked about it more than once.

Why didn’t Grandpa sleep in there?

Why didn’t one of my uncles use it?

Why leave a perfectly good room empty when everyone was already packed into the rest of the house?

The answer was always basically the same.

“Just leave that room alone.”

Nobody ever explained why.

A few years later, my uncle Ryan was getting married and needed somewhere to stay.

He wanted that room.

My grandparents immediately said no.

Ryan thought they were being ridiculous.

He wasn’t the superstitious type, and the more they tried to stop him, the more determined he got.

After arguing about it for days, they finally gave him the key.

Ryan started cleaning the room out and fixing it up.

Then he decided to tear up part of the floor.

At first, nobody thought much of it.

But he kept digging.

And digging.

Way deeper than you’d expect for a normal renovation.

I remember standing in the doorway watching him work.

At one point, his shovel hit something hard.

Not concrete.

Not a pipe.

Something wooden.

Ryan stopped.

He called my grandfather into the room.

Grandpa walked over, looked down into the hole, and his whole expression changed.

He didn’t look confused.

He looked like he already knew this was bad.

Ryan kept clearing away the dirt.

A few minutes later, enough of it was exposed for all of us to see what had been buried under that room.

It was a coffin.

To be continued.