h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The large, dingy white house on Edison Street sits on a hill overlooking a highway, and most of downtown Tulsa. Its windows and doors are usually boarded over, and a for sale sign has been rusting away in the yard for well over three decades. It was once a mediocre restaraunt, but lack of business and city council subsidizing remodled it into a home for a widower and his seven children.

One of the youngest, a girl, suffered from polio and was confined to a wheelchair. Her ramps are still in place.

The widower was said to drink often, and it is assumed that drunkeness is what caused the man to load his shotgun one spring night and shoot each of his seven children. The noise was heard by volunteers at a firestation a few blocks away, and the man was captured after a pitiful attemp to flee. He managed to commit suicide three years later in his jail cell.

It was said that the events of this night replayed themselves every now and then, and so it was that with a groups of friends, I broke into the basement of this abandoned wreck, to see what there was to see.

It was spooky in the way of all old houses, but there seemed to be something more around us as we crept towards the main room. We tiptoed our way through the lower levels of the house for twenty minutes with no interferance from the spirit world, and were beginning to relax when we heard a noise like a gunshot from the floor above. We froze, stifiling shrieks. We hadn't actually expected anything to happen!

A figure appeared at the bottom of the stairway, a little girl in a wheelchair. She was indistinct, and didn't speak, but waved her hands at us to leave and shook her head, while mouthing "no, no". We heard the sound of footsteps, a man's footsteps, coming down the stair, and the little girl whipped her head around to look, her eyes widening in fear. Well, who were we to ignore her? We ran.

Imagine, if you will, six teenagers trying to fit through a small hole at a dead run, all at once. It isn't pretty.

We made it out alive, of course, and kept moving until we were all safely ensconced at an all night Denny's. But we found ourselved unable to stay away from the house on Edison Street, and many interesting things happened there. I don't believe we ever left that place walking...we always ran.