At the corner of my street sat a stereotype. A large blue house with a yard full of weeds and unmowed grass. It was littered with old, yellowed baseballs, sun faded frisbees that were once brightly colored, and a football or two that had long since lost their air. There was even a model plane with a broken wing trapped on the roof.

It had looked abandoned for as long as I could remember. Now at the time I was only ten, but it seemed like an eternity. If you believed the stories around the neighborhood, it had been decades since someone lived there. The rumor was that an old witch had once lived there and cursed the place, damning anyone and anything brave enough to venture into it to a life time of torture in hell with no television or candy.

In retrospect, it was about that time you’d think that Scooby and the gang would show up and prove that it was just the local football coach running a meth lab, but damned it that story didn’t keep my childhood interesting and the local five and dime in business.