As a kid hereabouts, my bicycling buddies and I used to do something that has become hugely popular. We’d visit haunted abandoned houses, with which Route 9 was loaded back when. No, we weren’t breaking and entering. Entering, yes. But we never broke a thing. Even the cops would tell us, “You just better not light the place on fire.” That made sense since many old Route 9 original homesteads went up in smoke at the pyromaniac hands of a whole other segment of young kid society.

Virtually any old, abandoned house oozed spookiness – and rotting floorboards that weren’t afraid to give up the ghost…