The house I grew up in was a little unusual…  It was built by the neighborhood developer for his daughter, and was the carpenter’s version of the mechanic’s car.  It was the smallest house on the largest lot in the neighborhood, and seemed like it was built using leftovers from the other homes.  My parents told stories about the piles of crap they had to haul off when they bought it, and strange behavior of the lady who lived there before them — including letting a Shetland pony wander in and out of the sliding glass door that opened from the basement into the back yard.

The basement of our house was generally unfinished, but there was one room that was nominally habitable.  The room had drywall on the walls, complete with about an inch gap at the bottom where baseboard should have been that was usually full of spiders, dust bunnies, and cobwebs.  The closet was under the stairs and had no door or even door frame… It was a black hole into a place of mystery (at least to young kids).  Because of it’s partially finished nature and thrown-together construction, we had a name for the basement room… the “ugly room.”  I seem to remember my mom even using time-out in the ugly room as a punishment and fearing going in there.  For the first several years of my living memory we didn’t really use that bedroom.  In fact, some of my earliest memories are pulling a couple of old couch cushions out from under my sister’s bed at night to make my bed on their floor rather than use the ugly room.  Eventually, sharing a room with my sisters wasn’t a viable option, and we moved a couple of the kids into the ugly room full-time.  By the time I was about 12, my brothers and I shared the room.

Throughout my youth, my brother and I would toy around with electronics, usually stripped from garage door openers our neighbor’s dad brought home after installing new ones.  One of our innovations was to reconfigure the remote control circuitry to switch on and off almost anything we felt like hooking up to it.  I decided it would best be utilized as a remote-control light switch and wired it into the wall-switch in the ugly room.  I could sit in bed and switch the bedroom light on or off.  Not only that, but I could do the same thing from anywhere in the house so long as I had the remote control.

During the time when I had this magical power over the ugly room, my uncle Kenneth brought his two boys over to stay with us overnight.  Since there weren’t any extra rooms, they would be sleeping on the floor in my room.  Neither Tolon nor I relished the idea of sharing our room with a couple of snot-nosed kids (they were probably 4-5 years younger than us) so we decided on a plan to add some entertainment value to the situation.  That afternoon, we entertained our cousins with stories about the ugly room.  We told them that the previous owner had locked her crazy daughter in there, and that she had died in there.

The ghost of the ugly room, as we described it, would occasionally make noises and tell us that if she ever turned the lights on and off it was because she was going to kill anyone who was in the room.  By the time the boys went to bed, we’d filled their head full of all kinds of crazy stories about the house, the ugly room, and the ghost who haunted it.  My cousins laughed it off, at first, then went to bed on-schedule.  Tolon and I, however, stayed up for another hour.

About ten o’clock, I picked up my remote, waited outside the ugly room, and switched the lights on.  The boys laughed nervously and started to get out of bed.  I switched the lights off.  They rushed back to bed.  I started flicking the lights on and off in rapid succession… they came screaming out of the room, terrified that a ghost was about to kill them.  Tolon and I couldn’t stop laughing, and no matter how many times we showed them the remote and how it worked, my cousins wouldn’t go back in the room.  My parents weren’t amused, but we had our room to ourselves for the rest of the night.