I grew up in a small coal town in Pennsylvania during the early 1990s.  The town was emblematic of a single-industry declining town.  Coal was once king but most of it had been extracted from the small hills that surrounded our town.  Our grandparents were all coal miners.  Our parents were handymen, nurses, or teachers if we were lucky.  They were unemployed and addicted if we weren’t.  My mom’s family had moved here to open a bar room.  My dad’s parents had always been here and he swore he would never leave.  The town boasted a population of 5,200 which was a far cry from its heyday when nearly 20,000 people crammed into the borough limits of less than a square mile.  An ever-present reminder of the bygone days was block after block of row homes.  At one time, each home was filled with people who took pride in keeping up their narrow 3-story rectangular piece of life.  Even by 1994, when this story takes place, many of the homes had been abandoned.  It wasn’t unusual to see a really nice home sandwiched between two with failing roofs or busted-out windows.  This story revolves around a house that was somehow both abandoned yet somehow neat and tidy.

Despite the somewhat bleak conditions, my town was a pretty good place to grow up.  You knew everyone who lived on your block.  Elderly neighbors were taken care of by young families without even the slightest hesitation.  My mom liked to joke that I made sure we met our neighbors right away.  We moved to our house on the east side of town when I was three years old.  She says that I was so excited to see the new house that I slipped her grip and ended up running into our neighbor’s house instead of ours.  This prompted the old Lithuanian couple next door to fall for this little boy whom they treated like a grandson for the rest of their lives.

In 1994, I was eleven years old.  My main concerns were the tire pressure in my bike tires and when my next Little League game was scheduled.  A bike was everything to a kid who lived in a small town.  It was transportation but it was also freedom.  It was a status symbol for you personally but also defined the clique of kids you hung around with.  If your bike was kind of rough and had no brakes, you were probably a tough kid (but also poor, which we didn’t realize at the time).  Rich kids (or kids of parents who wanted their peers to think they had money, again we didn’t realize this) had a Mongoose or a Trek bike with mountain bike tires.  Guys like me and my friends rode a Huffy or Giant, respectable but not anything that stood out above the norm.  My friend Jon, who will play a quiet yet prominent role in this story, had one of the nice bikes.  It wasn’t until years later that we realized the brand new blue Mongoose he was so proud of was a present that was meant to ease the blow of his parents’ divorce.

Jon’s cousin, Shawn, lived across the street from him.  Shawn was a tough kid and wasn’t usually a part of our moderately popular group.  By virtue of being Jon’s cousin, however, he sometimes hung around with us.  My friends and I played a lot of wiffle ball.  If you aren’t familiar with wiffle ball, it is baseball played with a plastic bat and ball.  The ball had holes in the top which would cut the air and make a whiff sound as it approached the better; hence the name wiffle ball. Every kid in our league had our own special bat stuffed with newspaper and taped with whatever we could swipe from our dad.  We each established a “home park” and did our best to keep track of records and statistics.  My stadium was the remnants of a burned-down bowling alley that still had the back wall intact.  The smooth concrete floor was great for baseball and the high back wall created our version of Fenway’s Green Monster.  Jon’s park was the parking lot of a local firehouse.  He used the same city-county naming scheme as his beloved Atlanta Braves who at the time played in Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. 

Eleven-year-olds who play a lot of wiffle ball tend to lose a lot of wiffle balls and the nearest place to purchase replacements (for 50 cents a piece) was a drug store a few blocks from my house called Rang’s. Mrs. Rang was in her seventies and wasn’t the most observant shopkeeper around.  Kids who we thought were bad but actually just didn’t have any money would occasionally swipe a little something from the counter when she wasn’t looking.

On one of the days that Shawn was with us, we swung by Rang’s for some penny candy or maybe an ice cream but probably another wiffle ball.  As we walked outside, Shawn said, “Have you guys ever looked at the gun?”  Being moderately-popular non-tough kids, we had no idea what he was talking about.  Our silence betrayed any hope Jon and I had of playing this off.  Shawn told us to follow him.  We hopped on our bikes and rode along the outside of Rang’s which snaked around the corner onto Market Street.  Where the building stopped, there was a small, chain-linked gated alley completed with green plastic so you couldn’t see in.  The row homes picked back up on the other side of the narrow alley.  Shawn stopped his bike in front of a worn-down but livable house.  Like many others in town, the door was all the way to the left with a modest picture window spanning the rest of the front. The house had a wooden porch that had seen better days but was not dilapidated.  Spanning the length of the porch was a once ornate wooden railing made of spindles and thick cross pieces.  The exterior of all three stories of the house was asphalt shingle siding which furthered the impression that it had not been updated since at least the 60s.  “Go look in the window,” said Shawn.  I looked at Jon, who was not interested, and looked back at Shawn who was already moving toward the porch and affirming, “No one is here.  No one is ever here.  You won’t get in trouble.”  So I set the kickstand on my black and neon green Huffy and slowed approach the porch.  Shawn and I climbed the two creaky wooden steps and walked toward the window.  The curtains facing the outside were worn but not dirty.  Shawn stood back like a tour guide waiting for the big reveal.  Jon watched from his bike, didn’t speak a word, and hoped we wouldn’t die.  I leaned toward the window and looked in.

What I saw was a parlor frozen in time -dark wood-paneled walls, a pale green stuffed chair, a floral area rug covering most of the worn wooden floor.  Everything in its place, maybe a little dusty but not disheveled.  Ominously, an open archway was visible into a hallway that connected the parlor to the rest of the house.  As my visits to this porch became more frequent, I was concerned that at any moment someone was going to walk through that archway and yell at me to get away from their house.  But in this first instance, Shawn pointed to a small half-circle end table that was flanked by two small wooden chairs.  “Look at the gun,” he said.  But it wasn’t a real gun.  It was a framed 5x7 picture of a revolver pointed in profile to the right as if to show off the sleek style of the engineering.  It seemed out of place. A framed picture of a handgun would make more sense in a sporting goods store or rough and tumble bar room than on a table in a sitting room in an old house.  Shawn continued and explained to me the legend.  No kid had ever seen anyone in the house.  As far as we knew, it was abandoned yet it never became delipidated like so many other houses in town.  And the kicker, the picture of the gun moves!  “Shut up,” I said immediately regretting it for fear he might hit me.  “How does the frame get set back on the table if it falls?”  He continued, “It doesn’t fall.  The frame doesn’t move.  The image of the gun does.  Sometimes it points to the right, sometimes to the left, sometimes it points forward.”  I shuddered a bit at the thought of peering in the window and seeing the image of the gun pointing forward but ultimately decided this was probably just an urban legend that kids of my town passed down from generation to generation.  Nevertheless, why would you frame a picture of a revolver and why did this house seem immune to the blight that surrounded it?

I made it my routine to check on the picture every time I went to Rang’s for a new wiffle ball or a paper bag of Swedish fish.  It never changed.  The room never changed.  The entire house became a curiosity to me.  I actually started to feel safe looking in the window.  It felt like checking in more than looking for a thrill.  Until one day I parked my bike, climbed the two steps to the porch, and cupped my hands around my eyes to get a look in the window.  What I say startled me.  I jumped back and collected myself as my heart felt like it was going to beat out of my chest.  I gathered my courage and took another look inside and confirmed what I thought I saw upon my first glance.  The picture had changed and the gun wasn’t pointing left or right but directly at me.

I ran off the porch, jumped on my black and neon green Huffy, and peddled away quickly.  I was scared but also excited that it had actually happened.  I went straight to Jon’s house but his dad said he wasn’t home.  1994 was in the pre-cell phone, even pre-internet days so I was pretty sure I wouldn’t see Jon until the next day.  On our way to school the next day, I told Jon what I saw.  He didn’t believe me.  Even at 11, I had developed a bit of a reputation as a storyteller.  We took a detour on our way to our bus pickup spot to the old house but neither one of us was brave enough to peek in the window. 

Looking back now, I wish I would have checked the picture that day.  I have figured out a few of the weird happenings of this story now that I am an adult.  The house never changed because someone lived there.  We never saw that person because we only checked during the day.  The gated alley between Rang’s drug store and the house is the route that Mrs. Rang took from the back door of the house into the back door of the store.  I only ever looked in the window after visiting the store where she was the keeper.  But there’s still the bit about the gun.  The most likely explanation is that I dreamt the whole thing up.  I was interested in the mystery.  I thought about it a lot.  I was also a bullshitter in training.  Perhaps I had a dream they felt real and now, with the passing of time, I’ve begun to question if it actually was.  Here’s the trick.  There are people who say they don’t dream.  Neuroscience tells us that is not true.  Everyone dreams but there are people who do not remember their dreams.  I am one of those people.  I can not recall a single dream I have ever had.  Yet I remember that day.  I remember the room.  I remember my bike.  And I remember that revolver pointing out of the picture frame and right at me.