A Local Haunt

I'm pretty sure that Star lives down the street from a legitimately haunted house.  It exhibits all the classic signs of a haunted house--that is to say, it was once luxuriously beautiful, but has descended into a foreboding disrepair.  It is secluded and desolate, mysterious and ominous.  It is the House of Usher, transplanted to Utah. 

I have spent a fair portion of this evening unsuccessfully attempting to adequately describe the house, at last deciding to turn to a description from one of my favorite spooky books, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables.  This book just seeps Gothic gloom, perhaps never more pronounced than in the author's portrayal of the title property:

Halfway down a by-street stands a rusty wooden house... a little withdrawn from the line of the street, but in pride, not modesty.… Its white-oak frame, and its boards, shingles, and crumbling plaster, and even the huge, clustered chimney in the midst, seemed to constitute only the least and meanest part of its reality. So much of mankind's varied experience had passed there,--so much had been suffered, and something, too, enjoyed,--that the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart. It was itself like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of rich and sombre reminiscences.

Needless to say, I am enthralled.  I want to know who lived there, why they no longer do, and what sort of murder/witchcraft/poltergeist drove them off.  I want to know if the ancient fence (with its bewitching person-sized gap) is for protecting the property from me or vice-versa.  I want to know what the fine for trespassing really is.

Amityville has nothing on American Fork.

Hopefully more to come...