My name is Christian Barrett. For the past two years I've put out monthly episodes

of a video podcast called Creaky Footsteps. A casual tour of various supposedly haunted

houses in my general geographical area, the eastern part of South Carolina. It's consisted

of little more than me shooting some footage of an abandoned house somewhere and narrating

it with text based on dubious local legends, some of which I must admit I created myself

to bolster my content. I began to get more and more subscribers over the course of the

podcast, though I was never more than a one-man operation. For the second anniversary episode

I decided to do something a little more ambitious. Last Friday night I got off work at my

small IT company in Charleston, and after grabbing a quick dinner I started driving North,

and in 90 minutes I'd crossed the state line. In another two hours I'd entered a part

of North Carolina I'd never been to and was wholly unfamiliar with. My destination

was the town of Lenore, on Enzlo Bay. The town was considered the shame of Pamlico County

if not the state itself. It was a suffering backwater connected to civilization only by

rural route 78, called Loonsneck Road. Once long ago it had received cargo boots at its

rundown docks, but that had stopped in the 70s. The town had less than a thousand people

left, and in fact it had become the largest incorporated area with the fewest citizens

in all of North Carolina. Every part of it had fallen into neglect judging from the

few photos I'd seen. Not helping matters was a book published by some hack in the late

90s called The Town With Many Eyes, a collection of allegedly true campfire tales ascribing

all sorts of supernatural upheaval to the place. I'd never read it. It was only because

the town had developed such a reputation in fact that I had refrained for so long from

doing some sort of episode of the podcast there that almost seemed too obvious. I was

...