Bloody Reminder
After purchasing our house, my wife and I learned that it had been the
site of a very violent murder, a result of a drug deal gone horribly awry.
The victim was stabbed repeatedly, and his body left to rot in the
basement of our happy home. After the murder, the police and several
cleaning crews were unable to remove the dark stain that had been left as
the blood oozed into the porous concrete. To this day, the stain remains.
The first night in our house was pretty uneventful, but our dog, a
notoriously heavy sleeper and none-too-alert watch dog, was unusually
restless, and continued to whimper throughout the night. The next evening,
during the characteristic "dark and stormy night" of scary-story lore, the
electricity went out. I went down to the fuse box, located where else? -- the basement. This is when I first noticed the dark stain on the floor.
When I bent down to touch it, I retracted my hand immediately. The floor
where the stain lay was extraordinarily cold. For an instant, I thought
that there was blood on my hand, but thought the better of it, and went on
my way to the fuse box.
It was a few months later when we learned of our basement's atrocities
from a neighbor who had assumed we knew. I was not shocked to find out
that the murder had happened in our basement, and the wet stain was the
exact location where the body lay. To this day, the stain remains, and
every once in a while, it does appear to be wet, and is always extremely
cold -- a reminder of that one terrible night before the house was ours.