I have never actually seen a ghost. I tend to believe in the whole science track.

The other thing you should know about me is that I’m actually fairly even-keeled. I can count the number of times I’ve been really angry on one hand. Fourteen years ago, I was a young, impressionable student attending the University of Washington. I lived at a house on 47th, and it was cheap because I was a student. The paint was peeling off the walls, there were shingles coming off the roof. The back porch was rotted in some places and sometimes, when we were trying to sleep, you could actually hear rats scurrying through the walls. I was there for a year. What's your favorite color sweetheart? 'The blood' One evening, I was outside by the side of the house, and I started feeling a little weird. Something didn’t strike me as quite right.

I figured it was the windows. There were four of them, about 10 feet up, all in a row. And then I got it. There were only three windows inside the house. I went back inside, turned on the lights, ran back out. And sure enough: One of the windows was dark, all the other windows had light in them. And I could see behind the dark window that there was a room behind it. I had been living in this house for a year, and I was like, there’s a secret room in there. This is so cool. Ghost story: How my dad bid me farewell I went back inside and spent about half an hour knocking on the walls, like in the movies, but I couldn’t find any sort of secret door or passage.

And then I had this flashback to when I'm 13 years old, watching "The Amityville Horror," and they're trying to convince the dad that these weird things are happening, and they should move. And the dad says, "No, no," and I'm yelling, GET OUT OF THE HOUSE. Which means that if there was a way in, it had to be from above or below. There was a small attic, so I shimmied up the walls and I popped the door open. I reached up into the darkness and pulled myself up. Judging by the cobwebs, no one had been up here for a decade. I was a little afraid of spiders, but I really wanted to see how to get into this room. I shimmed along the beams of the attic, shoving my hand down into the insulation looking for some sort of trap door. I had been up there long enough that the hairs on the back of my neck were starting to come up. I worried about all these spiders in spaces that I couldn’t see. Eventually, I decided there was no trap door.

As I came down, I heard a knock on the door – strange because no one was expected. But it was my girlfriend Jen. I told her, “There’s a room in the house, and we HAVE to get in.” She was not all down with the whole have to get in, but she was supportive. We thought about this. There was a basement that’s divided in half – one for us, and one where the owner kept old furniture. We were not supposed to go down there, but they had left a key in case of emergency. I didn’t even pause. I ran to get the key and ran outside to the basement door.

It squeaked as it opened into this darkness, to the top of the stairwell, which went straight down. Straight ahead was the word, “LOVE,” written in red. There were no lights, just my trusty flashlight. Around me were cobwebs that were comically thick – Halloween cobweb thick. In them were these half-dollar sized things – I didn’t know what they were, but they were covered in webbing. As I descended into the basement, I saw old boxes and furniture – what you would expect. I tried to figure out how to get to the far side. I looked with the light to watch my step and I noticed these black rings around the bottom of my stock. And I realized that the black rings were writhing up and down. I freaked out, sprinted out and tore off my shoes and socks. Hundreds of fleas had attached themselves to my foot. It was getting dark, and I realized that the house was trying to warm me: Don’t go in that room. But I didn’t believe in that stuff. I believed in overactive imaginations, so I put that out of my head.