Every town has one.
The house nobody wants to go near. The road you avoid after dark. The place older kids point to and say, “You know what happened there, right?” Usually, they tell you that story with the kind of grin that lets you know you’re about to sleep badly.
Where I grew up in Odessa, one of those places was The Old Hughes Place.
It wasn’t some gothic mansion sitting on a hill with lightning flashing behind it. It was a modest 1950s brick house on the edge of town, not far from where I lived. The bricks were different shades, some tinted red, others faded and worn by years of West Texas sun. Two square windows faced the street, framing an old brown wooden door with peeling paint and cracks that made the house look tired. A shallow overhang ran across the front of the house toward the garage, held up by decorative wrought-iron porch posts with metal leaves worked between the rods. Around the roofline ran a muted reddish-brown trim, faded by time and dust.
Even the address looked wrong. One number was missing. Another hung loose, swinging when the wind came up.
The place felt old. Weathered. Watched.
That last part mattered most.
In the summers, there were five of us who ran around together: Rusty and Granger, my neighbors who stayed with their grandmother next door, and Ricardo and Anthony, who lived down the street. We spent those summers doing what kids did back then: raising hell, getting into trouble, and pretending the streetlights were merely suggestions.
Ricardo was the biggest goofball among us, which is saying something. One evening, we were bored, and boredom is a dangerous thing when a group of boys has no supervision and too much imagination. Ricardo had packets of sauce from a restaurant that “has the meats,” and he decided to make it look like blood was coming out of his mouth. He laid half on the sidewalk and half off, while the rest of us hid behind cars and bushes, giggling like idiots.
A car stopped. A woman and her daughter got out. Another car pulled over, and an elderly man joined them. The three stood over Ricardo, staring down in horror.
Then Ricardo jumped up and shouted, “Boo!”
The little girl screamed and ran back to the car. The woman screamed. The elderly man somehow teleported from Ricardo’s side to his own car door. One second he was standing there, the next he was across the street staring back like he had just seen the devil wearing tube socks.
The woman gave Ricardo the tongue-lashing of his young life while the rest of us laughed so hard we couldn’t stay hidden.
It was that evening that Rusty and Granger told me about The Old Hughes Place.
The story was that an elderly couple had lived there. The wife had dementia. One night, she woke up confused and terrified, convinced her husband had kidnapped her and meant to kill her. She stabbed him with a butcher knife. Then, when she recognized him, she believed someone had broken into the house and murdered him. Unable to live without him, she called the police and hanged herself from the shower rod.
After that, people said no one stayed in the house long.
I remember watching people move in, then move out. Sometimes after a couple of months. Sometimes after a week. Maybe there were ordinary explanations. Bad plumbing. Bad wiring. Bad landlords. Bad luck.
But as a kid, ordinary explanations never stood a chance against a haunted house.
Was The Old Hughes Place really haunted? Who knows. But it felt wrong. There were times I walked past and felt watched, like someone stood behind those drawn curtains, peeking out at me.
Naturally, because boys are dumb and apparently allergic to survival instincts, Rusty and Ricardo dared me to knock on the door one evening. No one lived there at the time, so I thought it was harmless.
That was my second mistake.
When we got to the porch, Ricardo held me down while Rusty tied my leg to one of the wrought-iron posts. Then Rusty knocked on the door, and both of them ran.
I was tied to the damn haunted house.
That’s when I heard something move inside.
Just one thump.
That was enough.
I screamed, tried to run, forgot about the rope, reached the end of it, and went flat on my face. I scrambled to get loose, and as I stood up to run, I thought I saw movement at the door.
After that, I never went near the place again. I walked past it on the way to school, but after that night, I started going a block out of my way just to avoid it.
Odessa had plenty of stories like that. There was the kid in Skunk Valley killed by a dirt bike coming over the hills. There was the house people said belonged to devil worshipers because everything they owned was red: the cars, the brick, even the trim. Then there was the girl on the loop, the ghost of a teenager who supposedly broke down on prom night and was hit by kids racing along the road. The story went that if you picked her up and drove her to the nearest gas station, she would warn you not to drive too fast. When you looked over, she was gone.
Those stories were everywhere when I was growing up.
Odessa was an oil town. Blue collar. Dusty. Slower in some ways than life feels now. My parents left the front door unlocked most of the time. I only remember needing a house key once, and even that lasted maybe a week. The world was not safer in every way, but it felt more open. More connected. People told stories because stories were how places remembered.
Men on oil rigs told stories about friends and coworkers who fell. Families carried stories about tragedy, bad luck, strange sightings, and things that happened out where the roads got dark. My cousin watched his best friend fall from a rig, and it changed the path of his life.
As a kid, I absorbed all of it.
Then I retold it by candlelight, or I just made things up as I went. I used to be good at that. These days, my brain may not move quite as fast as it used to, but the old machinery still works when the shadows are right.
That life crept into my writing. The slow towns. The old houses. The roads with stories attached. The sense that a place can hold onto grief longer than people can.
Bastrop, in a way, reminds me of that slower life. Austin is its opposite, louder and faster, the way Midland and Odessa always felt like two sides of the same coin.
Much of this I had forgotten until Costa Rica.
Then, outside Grecia, standing near a rental house with a river behind it and an old barn across the water, I felt it again. That Old Hughes Place feeling. That sensation of being watched by a story that had not decided whether to introduce itself.
One night, I thought I saw someone walking along the riverbank.
Maybe I did.
Maybe I didn’t.
That’s the thing about haunted places. They don’t need to prove anything. They just have to make you wonder.
And sometimes, when I’m sitting at my desk, deep in a scene about some dead spirit moving through a house, and a picture suddenly falls from its perch, I know perfectly well it isn’t a ghost.
But it could be.
Evil Grin