 Shown above is a spooky, mangled old house in Delhi, New York, owned by the family of one of my friends. I don't know much about Delhi, but it's this mostly desolate farm town full of every stereotypical farm town thing you could think of -- from cows to long abandoned smashed barns to every deli selling homemade beef jerky. Our circle of friends have been there many, many times over the years. It's a shitty house, full of dead bugs and a toilet that laughs at you if you think it will flush your piss. It's also one of my favorite places on the planet, and this boring article is all about why. Formerly, the House was only a cheap getaway. I'd tag along on my friends' trips once or twice a year, take the four hour drive, complain the whole way, drink a lot and want to go home way earlier than everyone else. But I wasn't really "working" then, and part of the charm of a lazy getaway is lost when you can do the same shit at home, anytime, all the time. As you've probably noticed by the dwindling amount of X-E updates, I've become busy. Way busy. Many would say "too busy." But that's okay -- I'm making up for lost time spent doing...well, nothing. Still, to have this glorious House out in the middle of nowhere, cut off from society, from work, from life at large...izza a beautiful thing. This time, I didn't go to the House just to get drunk for lack of anything better to do. I went to the House to get drunk because I damn well needed to. This article is my tribute to the House. To everything it means to me. It won't mean as much to you, obviously, but I do hope the busier folks out there learn some mildly valuable lesson about the benefits of just getting the fuck away from everything, even if only for a weekend. It's good for the soul. The House is something to behold. My friend and his family swear it's haunted, and they're totally not the type of people who'd say these kinds of things just to out-converse everyone else. Indeed, it is a little scary, for a few reasons. First, it's a big god damned creepy place in general. There's rooms of odd shapes, a terribly dungeonesque basement...just a whole bunch of weird crap going on. Second, it's in the middle of nowhere. Total Texas Chainsaw revival. Anybody could come in, kill us, walk out and never get caught. We figure the same theory applies to ghosts. If a ghost wants to fuck someone's shit up, this would be an excellent place to start.  The House's innate creepiness adds something to the experience, but we'll get to that later. Primarily, this is a place for consciously seeking out life's simplest pleasures. You know, like crusty tire tree swings and the like. Card games, bad movies and barbecue chicken rule all. At home, these activities usually equate to the kind of nights we complain about to our other friends the next day. While at the House, nothing is more welcome. What you'll see down below is both too long and majorly disorganized, but I feel I have to do it. Bear with me. If I promise to show you a really big picture of a pile of dead, dried out bugs, will you bear with me? Good. Read on. Be vicarious.  Up first, the kitchen area, our secret haven of evil. It's also the entrance to the House -- not the only one, but the one we use. The table seen at left hosts our many card games (Asshole mostly, with a side of Uno.), dice-driven Shotzee rounds, or if we're so fucking bored that everyone's starting to get that "someone piss me off so I can be justified in how mad I am at all of you" look on their face, Scrabble. The games are universally played amidst an incredible boozing blitz, ushering in an extreme level of bloated, blurry drunkenness that lasts for a good twenty minutes before everyone falls asleep on the couches and coffee tables covered with pillows. The beer isn't kept in the fridge seen here, but rather a much older model found in an always-dark room in the back, near another door to the House. The vast emptiness of everything around makes fetching beer from this thing a hassle and a half during nighttime. No one wants to ask for a hand-holder, but we're all pretty comfortable with being absolutely petrified of going back there alone at night. If the stories are true, that's where the little girl died.  The living room is probably my favorite room in the house, as it plays in to my current favorite pastime: Getting toasted and watching bad horror movies in the dark, with the windows pouring in alarmingly cold breezes shielded only by a filthy yellow throw blanket and the thin caress of a bag of Fritos. Though there's three bedrooms upstairs, we're all terribly afraid of them and the spiders they may host, thus, everyone usually sleeps down here. Unless they're getting lucky. We all pile in, grabbing whatever blankets we can find (towels must sometimes suffice), throw on an old Friday the 13th flick and let the sleepytimes roll. It's like camping, with benefits. The mornings after aren't much different, save for coffee replacing alcoffee and the sun being up and in our damn faces. Everybody's hurting big time from the previous night's partying, and even if they went light on the limbo, they're hurting from sleeping on hard floors and recliners permanently caught in the patented break-your-back position. Nobody's in the mood to move, let alone able to. The only solution? Throw another movie on.  Ah, Ghostbusters 2. So much hilarity, so much anticipation of the movie industry's clear opus achievement: The scene where the fucking Statue of Liberty prances into the city via a supernaturally charged NES Advantage controller. Hell yes. Though everyone brings a few DVDs and ultimately argues over which one deserves to be played, it's much more fun to dig through the House's stock of old VHS tapes, many of which were just taped off television years ago. In fact, three X-E articles came from materials found on tapes here: Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, those weird anti-drug PSAs, and of course, my tribute to WPIX's Shocktober. See? You've felt the House's powers, and you never even knew it. On the first night, we watched Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter. I've reviewed this baby before, and have seen it many million times, but the House was such a perfect setting for a Jason flick. Heck, with a camera and a killer, we could've been a Jason flick. My friends weren't too into it, though the scene where a young Corey Feldman reacts to seeing naked people by having an epileptic fit won a strong ovation. Halloween II was also sampled, but we all fell asleep within minutes, exhausted from imitating Donald Pleasance's voice every time he walked onscreen. Batman was one of the morning movies, because we love that Joker. There's also a draw full of old Nintendo games, and I can't believe I didn't take a picture of it because now nobody believes me. They were there. I saw them right there.  Barbecued food plays a big part in every trip to the House, mainly because it's the only place we're privy to where one can start a car-sized fire without any concern over police, angry neighbors or cartoon bears who advise against such endeavors. Years ago, my friends created this ridiculously dangerous barbecue setup, made with cinderblocks, corn cobs and sturdy twigs. The fire underneath is fueled with everything from whole glasses of gasoline to burning plastic soda bottles. What we eat is irrelevant, because when you're smoking meat over burning plastic, everything comes out tasting pretty much the same. I rarely go near the stuff, because as we're in the bug capital of the world, I can't shake the notion that there's flies or gnats all over everything being cooked. It's a personal problem I deal with everyday, but my friends only make it worse by choosing some of the most untypical outdoor dishes ever. Like, they'll decide to make plates of tomatoes and mozzarella, and they'll just leave it sitting uncovered outside for a few hours while every bug in a five mile radius samples the wares. I can't eat something knowing there's a strong chance flies threw up on it. Instead, I spent the weekend where it's safe -- junk food.  And a whole lot of it. A disgusting amount, actually. Not just the junk food people manage to sneak into their everyday life, either -- we go for the criminally unhealthy stuff. By the end of a weekend spent at the House, everyone must be rolled to the car. Adding to the enticement is the rarity of some of the snacks offered in this fair backwoods community, like Tato Skins, the Poore Brothers' bags of two-tone megachips that haven't been sold anywhere near where I live since childhood. Tato Skins always held some magical appeal for me, though only on this most recent excursion have I realized that the brown sides are just dyed that way. There's potato skins in the mix, but I'm pretty sure every potato chip on the planet could say the same. Once again, the Poore Brothers have played me like a big fat fiddle.  Oh boy. It's occurred to me that some of you may not believe me about the bug issue. It's no lie, son. They're everywhere at the House -- indoors and out. Though spiders are of constant concern while laying down to rest, flies and ladybugs have the strongest populations. I'm not just talking about outside and near the entrances, either. The living room is usually crawling with bugs, to the point where nobody outside of a special alien robot could possibly count all the ones seen. We're all raised to consider ladybugs as "cute," so even though there's 50,000 of them swarming over everything, nobody seems to mind. It's really about the flies. The disrespecting, soulless bastard flies. Repulsive in their everything, this Amityville-nodding amenity of the House proves to be its most mentioned flaw. There are just some weekends where you're not in the mood to eat flies, sleep with flies and find flies on your toothbrush. It's one of the reasons these House visits are so infrequent. The bugs are always there. Somehow, even the winter months don't kill off the ones in the House. The only thing available here in greater numbers than bugs are dead bugs, a pile of which can be seen laying in the top of the lamp shown above. I didn't want to overly freak anyone out, but if interested, click here for a closer look. The photo is almost beautiful in a way, in part because I'm such a skilled cameraman, but mostly because it means there's less live ones to ruin our salad.  Most of the seedy fun we share at the House occurs after nightfall, so during the daytime, we're pretty much at the mercy of whatever crappy forms of entertainment can be found littered across the rooms -- leftovers from my friend's family's various visits through the years. This time, it was a Super Soaker "Monster Rocket," an unholy, water-powered inflatable missile capable of reaching heights of over a hundred feet. Under no other circumstances would we find an hour's worth of entertainment in such a thing, but at the House, it just felt right. Since I found far more pleasure in watching the action from afar than actually participating, I can't tell you exactly how the thing works -- only that it manages to get everyone within ten feet of it soaking wet. After much concentrated pumping, the rocket blasts up into the air, guided by the wind, often ending its journey in really tall trees. In our efforts to kill as many minutes as possible before it seems "okay" to start drinking, stupid shit like the Super Soaker "Monster Rocket" comes in handy.  The House was purchased decades ago. Property was a lot cheaper then, especially in towns like Delhi. Thus, they have a lot of it. Their lot stretches back further than the eye can see, way back into the creepy woods. The lake-sized pond shown above is actually "theirs" -- though I'm not sure if any wildlife enforcers would step in if they decided to, I dunno, turn it into a hot b-ball court. Not that this would ever happen, because it's undeniably rockin' to have a big ol' pond to call your own. Especially this one, which is absolutely teeming with wildlife. The water is remarkably clear, so much so that it's easy to spot dozens of fairly large fish drowsily swaying to and fro. More impressive are the thousands of newts all over the place. They look to be the same species Petland hocks for four bucks a pop, and it's easy to see why they're always in such strong numbers at pet stores. The little guys are insanely docile, super slow and very easy to catch. It's not even a matter of carefully examining the pond's perimeters for life, either. One hand-scoop in the edges of the water can bring up as many as five or six newts. When you go someplace so nature-filled, it seems criminal to let the whole trip slip by without doing anything that plays into that. Thus, every trip to the House includes a requisite pond visit, so everyone can catch a newt and feel like Mother Nature's half-removed stepson for a few minutes before heading back inside to see what's on television.  Though likely of zero interest to anyone else who goes there, one of my favorite things about the House is how certain spots and elements haven't changed in up to twenty years. Magazines left on a particular windowsill in 1988 may very well still be there today. Likewise, this cabinet of assorted oddities, ranging from auto supplies to bottles marked "bug stuff," looks like it hasn't been messed with in 450 centuries. This theme is prevalent throughout the House, so while it's always stocked with a fair amount of food and drink when we arrive, nobody in their right mind would ingest the stuff.  Pulling some examples from the aforementioned cabinet, take a look at the haul. Very old Pepsi, very old Toys 'R' Us bubbles and a G.I. Joe thermos from the days before Cobra was "re-imagined" as being led by some kind of mutant lion who spouts various phrases of death when kids push his belly. It seems likely that, someday, someone from my friend's family will get really bored and chuck all of this gold into a big black bag and set it out for the garbagemen that don't exist in this town. I really hope this never happens. I've been going here for almost ten years now, on and off, and that stupid Pepsi bottle has been there throughout the stretch. Should I ever head to the House and find the Pepsi bottle missing, I have faith that my head would explode, ricocheting hard skull fragments into my friends' eyes and killing them as well. It won't be pretty without the Pepsi.  All in all, it's a place where time stands still. Shown above is Mad's Spy Vs. Spy board game, which has never once been played but still finds itself with comfortable prominence right in the center of the piano/dart/fireplace/everyone's-shit-on-the-floor room. Of all the board games in the world, we get Spy Vs. Spy? I'd give this selection a 2 outta 10 if I wasn't sure somebody would take the corresponding hand gesture as a tribute to it. Other items embark on similarly never-ending journey. This koala bank, ugly as sin, hasn't left its spot on the mantle since Reagan inspired APK to build a popsicle ranch. This oddly placed wooden cow, a welcome gesture of some sort, has survived every guest's threat to pull it down out of sheer spite for a good fifteen years. The Halloween season inspires the most interest in the House, what with it being so damn creepy and all. Various Halloween decorations from years past still maintain their holiday hard-sell, like this metal pumpkin candle holder. I even spotted a Field Guide To Demons, meaning that one of the House's visitors took it a step too far on a prior visit. Stuff like this is actually considered taboo by my friend's family, who honestly believe the place is haunted by evil spirits and don't want anyone tempting them with books on the subject. It's not the greatest testament to my maturity, but I so love having a place to go where ghouls are likely to hang out.  Here's that fireplace room I mentioned. It's adjacent to the living room, so during the colder months, we're warmed with flame-fueled heat for our late night horror movie marathons. Awesome. The cabinet full of fine China and porcelain collectibles would provide more class if its legs didn't need to be wedged up with decks of pinochle cards.  As you'd suspect, it takes everyone a few days to recover from a House trip. We've drank too much, ate too much, sweat too much and slept in too many contorting positions for it to be any other way. Frankly, we feel downright disgusting on the ride home, and the feeling sticks with us for almost a week. It's why two-night trips are in many ways preferred over the rare three-nighters. The longer we stay, the more days we must allocate to feeling like shit afterwards. We've slowly learned to avoid mirrors upon our first return home, because the shower up there only trickles out bird spit, and until we spend an hour soaked in boiling water, it just ain't a pretty sight.  And then comes the night. Everything changes once the sun goes down. Our collective sluggishness disappears, replaced with physically-charging desires to get wasted and take advantage of how spooky everything's become. Few have ever slept at the House alone for a night, and I don't say this for effect -- it's absolutely true. There are "real" ghost stories attached to the place, told by people who wouldn't normally relay such tales, and this combined with the very legitimate possibility of a truck full of rednecks storming the castle with shotguns and yeehaws make solo overnighters a huge no-no. Over the years, we've done it all -- Ouija boards, seances, all sorts of goofy crap that hampers our chances of being the next Joe or Jane Cool. Bathed only in moonlight while outside, it's impossible to go for a walk without feeling like something is following you. With all of the cattle ranches in walking distances, we've even faced off against mad cows who -- temporarily believing they were bulls -- charged at us with rage, prompting "SPREAD OUT" bouts of madness that leave some of us injured, some of us lost and all of us shaken up. Two shots of something wet later, and we're ready for another round.  Shown above are the grisly stairs leading towards the House's basement, a place of incredible history and fear. It's difficult to be frightened when you've got six or seven of your friends giggling behind you the whole time, but no, I definitely would not go down there alone. Actually, it's a bad idea to go down there at all, since those who remain upstairs can never resist the temptation to slam the crude door, lock you in and sing made-up voodoo songs until you piss all over the asbestos.  Okay, so there's probably no ghosts up there. Even still, we find ourselves almost challenging 'em to conjure a visible representation. Since so many ghosts on ghastly television specials only turn up in the aftermath within pictures, we'll take a thousand pics of the house and hope for the best. The upstairs window above shows nothing of the supernatural sort, but if you've ever been up there alone at night, you'd understand why it still frightens the kidneys out of me.  I mean, God damn, there's even a graveyard within walking distance, will all sorts of unmarked, crooked tombstones and the like. We left our love for screwing with the dead's final resting places back in our teen years, but we still take the walk to check the place out every now and again. It's in the middle of nowhere, and the bodies stashed here are by no means "fresh." This isn't an "active" graveyard -- rather one that's been sitting there unnoticed for a generation or more. In complete blackness, my digital camera only took pictures of the same -- expect the one shown above. My friend says it's just moisture, but I've read enough ghost sites to know that I've taken a million-dollar picture displaying a graveyard positively infested with "orbs." Hogwash, I know, but there's a least 10,000 ghostbusters who swear that these light-ball entities are ghosts -- human souls, if you weel. Take this site, for example. If it's to be believed, what I've captured on film is most certainly a parade of the dead-and-loving-it, swarming in a massive group of glowing unrest that cannot be seen with the naked eye-yee-yai. Or, maybe it's just moisture. For the record, I took well over a dozen pictures, and this is the only one that had anything ghoulish present. I don't know if that strengthens or weakens the case, but click here for a super-sized picture of the phenomenon. If that doesn't interest you, click here for a picture of the Black Cherry Kool-Aid we drank all weekend.  As said, nobody really bothers with the second floor of the House. It's creepy by night, creepy by day, and all in all, I just hate the choice of paint. The bedrooms all look like they belong to deranged killers with myriad hobbies, like this one, featuring everything from a drum set to a telescope to a dresser full of rocks-converted-into-runes. Lest anyone think they may be provided privacy at the House, think again: None of the bedrooms actually have doors, and even the bathroom suffers from having eighty-four windows that lend a perfect view of your goods to anyone standing on the front porch. I never noticed it before, but there's an attic-like crawlspace located upstairs, with lord knows what lurking inside. The space seems to extend for distances far longer than the House itself, so this is probably one of those dimensional gateways my 7th grade science teacher always brought up when he feared he was losing our attention. As a side note, that's like the 76th boxed Mr. Coffee machine I've seen at the House, meaning either my friend's family has a relative who works for the company, or that they're using coffee machines for reasons other than making coffee. I hesitate to predict what saucy intentions they may or may not have. We usually go up on Friday nights after work, staying until Sunday morning. Those Sunday mornings are always a bit depressing. The vacation is over, the workweek's about to kick our ass, and we've got to endure a terribly long car drive home to boot. House visits are sort of a crapshoot -- sometimes they're great, other times not. If you didn't have a good time, Sunday mornings are made all the more gross. We try to cram in one more movie before the big cleanup, which can take hours depending on how much we drank or how rarely we threw away shit once we were done with it. Still, there's one plus side to the big cleanup...  Instead of putting our trash in bags and leaving it on the curb, we take it to a homemade INCINERATOR and let the untamed element do its job. Since the fires can be slow burning, we'll sometimes douse it with gasoline to pump up the jam. Slow burning my ass -- we just want to douse it with gasoline. The flames have shot up well beyond safe heights in the past, and if it's windy, there's a good chance one of the disposables will fly from the pile, still on fire, trying to make as many dead leaves and twigs join in its misery before someone stomps all over it. Since the residues of our many binges lay in the flames, it's almost like we're washing our weekend sins away. At least, that's how we justify being this old and still infatuated with big, uncontrollable fires.  On the ride home, a brief glimpse of Delhi civilization manifested itself in the form of a family's Sunday tradition: Selling barbecued chicken on the side of the road. From their wild, pleading screams to our car begging for a poultry purchase, I didn't get the impression that this was a successful business venture for 'em. Regardless, for the kind of weekend we had, it only seemed fitting that our last sight was of a roughly cannibalistic family hocking smoked human meat under a tent. There's a few stores in the area, too, including a tremendously great mom n' pop video store (not a DVD insight), a couple of general stores that make their own honey, a gas station that sells gas "4 cheep," and some shack marked "TOYS" that only seems to sell homemade dragon puppets.  To get home, we have to cross this Sleepy Hollow bridge, made entirely of wood and littered with cautionary signs warning against driving over it at speeds "faster than a walk." Signs really says that, I swear. We're never sure when the thing's going to burst, but the risk of going out Maitland-style compliments the theme of a trip to the House. I probably won't go back there for another year or so. The allure would be lost if we saw the place too often. Just hope nobody touches that Pepsi bottle in the interim -- it'll kill me. This story has no moral; I left those at the house. -- Matt
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