![]() When the flashlight is off, the gasket cools and contracts. When the flashlight is on, heat from the bulb causes the gasket to expand. Flashlights-most flashlights, anyway-have a rubber gasket where the lens cap screws into the body of the flashlight, which stores the batteries. The simplicity of it made him groan and slap his forehead the trick was common knowledge among séance types. So that more or less explained how Mark wound up down a ghost-hunting internet rabbit hole at 2 a.m., where at long last he happened upon the secret of the flashlight trick. Things wrapped up and Greg and Amy retreated to Greg’s bedroom, no doubt to decompress by quietly mouthing all manner of hurtful things about their rude friend. If you want me to stop rolling my eyes at this shit, then do not hand me a fucking transcript of your conversation with a dead person. A wave of self-loathing washed through Mark, followed immediately by a flare-up of indignation at being put in this position. The smirk that night was the worst yet-it was the fucking transcript-and Amy’s face burned red and things got awkward. This curdling was also a fairly common ritual, and no one hated it more than Mark. That smirk was a killer: Amy’s face would turn red and her eyes would go from a sincere sparkle to darting and flustered. He also knew and hated that this resentment often made its way to his face. The disconnect was, itself, grating: Greg and Amy seemed to think that Mark required these debriefings, but in truth he resented the time he had to spend nodding and lifting his eyebrows and saying “oh cool” to another credulous romp through some crumbling ruin. This was a fairly common ritual, but this time Greg had produced a typed-and-printed transcript of the flashlight session and presented it to Mark with maybe just a little too much enthusiasm, perhaps a hint of that awful, oppressive expectation that your listener will reflect your own excitement back at you. They’d borrowed his Olds for the Blue Ridge trip and felt some obligation to account for their time, which they did over beers in the living room of the apartment Mark shared with Greg. Possibly Mark had heard too many of their stories. To Greg and Amy, there are Haunted Places simply because there are haunted places. To Mark, the raison d’être of a local Haunted Place is to challenge bored teens, who must confront their fear as a rite of passage. ![]() They called it the Darrow House, and local kids for decades had made October pilgrimages up the gentle slopes of this range in order to scratch their names in the woodwork of the house’s upper floor or huck rocks through its dust-smothered windows, or, for the bravest among them, even to spend the night. ![]() He’d figured it out after Greg and Amy came back from a mid-September hiking and camping trip along the Blue Ridge Mountains of western Virginia, full of details of a long chat they’d had with a spirit that had been haunting a local Haunted Place for as long as anyone could remember. ![]() Mark, Greg’s roommate for two years and a reliable lender of a piece-of-shit Oldsmobile, had happened upon his own thrilling secret knowledge: He knew for a fact that the flashlight trick was bunk. Whatever thrill was left in the exercise came from their secret knowledge of it, and their unblemished record of success. The conversations themselves were infuriatingly limited, even same-y. That a person could reach across the permeable plane separating the real world from the spirit world was becoming a downright mundane fact of life. For Greg and Amy, the world was practically overfull of talkative ghosts. The trial was still a triumph-they’d seen two blinks, which was enough to know that they’d established contact with one of that town’s many spirits, perhaps even Madame LaLaurie herself. They got two questions in before the tour guide moved the group along as politely as she could. On a ghost tour of the French Quarter, they had pulled out the flashlights right there on the sidewalk in front of the LaLaurie house. They brought flashlights on certain of their adventures for just this purpose. Greg and Amy had done the flashlight trick many times, in many places. You will need two flashlights, you will need a dark room with a flat surface, and you will need a series of questions that can be answered with a “yes” or a “no.” What you will not need, not exactly, is a ghost. There is a cool little thing you can do if you want to feel you are communicating with ghosts. So, just to be absolutely clear: the following story is fictional. note: Chris wanted to write a scary story for Halloween, and we thought you might like to read one.
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