“Oh, don’t tell that one,” Sage said. “We have to walk home that way later.” There was a house that everyone said was haunted, and even before I’d heard the stories, I’d always had a bad feeling when I passed it. Coming off the trail from the tower lot, it was the first house, a standard 1950s shingle-clad one, no different from any others. Except it was different. I had never seen anyone in it, and even on Halloween none of us dared ring the bell. There was one story that a man had killed his wife in the house, another that a man had kept women in the basement as prisoners; they were never found until after he died, and a new person bought it and discovered a false wall. On the other side were the dusty remains of five women. My mother had said there was no truth in these stories, that they were just tall tales told because the house had been owned by a man who was a recluse. “Like Boo Radley,” Marie had said. “You can’t choose to be alone or quiet up here without being turned into a monster.” (I would look for trees with knotholes when passing, imagining I was Scout down there in Alabama, wondering if someone inside was desperate to make a connection but didn’t want to be seen.) The house’s windows were always dark; a house that could only look out. The grass, like ours, stayed uncut. It sat on a plot that the sun never seemed to hit, the woods shadowing it from every angle.

“You guys know this mountain was a sacred site to the Indians.” Abbey was storytelling. “It was their graveyard for the dead, a holy place.” I had heard this before, how our houses were on top of ancient burial sites. People on the mountain had reported unusual noises and blinking lights in the woods, and some people heard screaming voices. “Then, about a hundred years ago, white men came and started mining and quarrying and building houses. They were drilling and bulldozing into the ancient underworld, upsetting the spirits and pushing them out of their resting places.”

Abbey was drunk, but the effect improved the telling. The words came slow off her tongue, she took her time and spoke low. We were all leaning in to listen, our faces lit and shadowed by the fire, which snapped and sparked into the night air.

“You know how there’s quartz all over the mountain? That’s probably why the Indians brought their dead here. You know how it sparkles? It was to help the dead find their way, and also to light a trail for the living so they could return and visit their dead. But then white men came and started to dig the quartz out of the earth, blinding the spirits, who could no longer see their way through the underworld.”