It was on a cold October day that I got a letter from Goron Lennard inviting me to speak

to him about my request to spend the night in one of the more obscure haunted houses

in the world.

Lennard had purchased the Poldricked House 18 years before and it had set mostly ignored

and disrepair.

In Albany, New York ever since.

In November, I flew to Sarasota to see him.

I had heard plenty of stories about Lennard, stories of how the seven years he'd spent

attempting to exercise a dock worker and an algeeers had ruined him and turned him into

a physical shell of what he had once been.

The thirty seconds after he opened the door to his little house to let me in, it was

pretty obvious that most of the stories were true.

A wave of heat, not air conditioning, flowed over me and immediately apologized for it.

He'd been suffering the sensation of always being very cold since about 2008.

On that 80 degree day he was wearing a heavy sweater, a scarf, and thin gloves over

his hands.

He moved very slowly, a fifth-year-old man who looked seventy and he wasn't shy about

describing his physical ailments to me.

Occasional blindness in one eye and inability to eat for days at a time insomnia, constant

bronchial infections, arthritis, numbness in his feet that sometimes rendered him unable

to walk.

He hadn't left his home in four years.

...