Many neighborhoods have that one house all the kinds on the block think is haunted. Mine was no different. The house, though, was a bit unique. Many so-called “haunted” houses look creepy right off the bat, but this one looked perfectly normal - so long as you were standing still. You see, it was when you moved your head or walked past it that it got a little strange.

There was something about it that was… wrong, when your perspective shifted. I recently picked up photography as a hobby, and I would best describe it as that the field of view on the house was slightly off from everything else around it. The perspective shift was a bit exaggerated, just enough to be noticeable, but not enough for you to immediately put your finger on it. Everyone was spooked by that house - kids, parents, even the dogs.

I remember one Halloween, my friends and I were trick or treating, and one of them (I forget who) dared me to go up to the house and ring the doorbell. As dares are a contract signed in blood, I obliged and nervously walked up to the porch as my friends watched anxiously from the sidewalk. I’m not sure if it was the most scared I had ever been, but I had that horrible sense of anticipation you get when you’re about to do something that you know is going to hurt real bad, like get pinched by a crab or something.

I rang the doorbell. I was half-and-half on whether something would actually happen, but the porch light was on, implying that there was candy to be had. As I waited, I seriously considered fleeing, and weighed the cost of being called a chicken by my friends. Before I could make a decision, however, the door opened to a couple holding a bowl of candy.

The man and the woman looked normal just from an anatomical standpoint, but something was clearly off. It didn’t take long for me to realize it was the lighting; the lights hitting their face were from different angles than you would expect from the space around them. There was something not quite right about the way they stood there, too - I was looking at them from a slightly different viewpoint than I was the rest of the world, like a bad greenscreen come to life. I peered into the hallway behind them. Again, normal at first. But, as I moved my head, I realized their hallway… might not have been real? There are some sets in movies and amusement parks and the like that use forced perspective to make a short hallway seem long, but the illusion kinda breaks down when you move your head around or get close to it: it was like that.

The couple greeted me, and gave me my candy, as normal. It was an average Snickers bar in appearance. I thanked them and ran off. Once my adrenaline wore off, I considered the candy bar. It was like, twice or thrice as heavy as those bars usually are. Later, I opened it out of curiosity, and it looked normal, even when I broke it in half. But it was heavy. I even compared it to other Snickers bars I had gotten that night. Part of me wanted to taste it, but my self-preservation instincts forbade me from eating it, so I threw it out.

I don’t think I was in any actual danger, but none of us ever went near that house on Halloween after that.