Steven LaChance Blog

I see the Screaming House brought up in groups, pages, and podcasts from time to time, and it always gives me pause.

Not because I am eager to revisit it, but because it is a strange thing to watch your own life get discussed when you never said a word. That happens more than I ever thought it would. I have heard entire podcasts about that house. I have seen people analyze it, debate it, and build theories around it. Sometimes they get pieces of it right. Sometimes they miss it completely. And sometimes they are talking about moments I remember very clearly, but through a lens that feels slightly off. Not wrong exactly. Just distant.

It is an odd feeling when you are the story.

I lived in that house with my kids. I did not just pass through it. I wrote The Uninvited because I wanted the details preserved before they turned into something else. Years later, I wrote Blessed Are the Wicked because leaving the house did not end the experience. The aftermath stays with you in ways that are harder to explain. It shows up later. In sleep. In how you listen. In how you measure a room without realizing you are doing it.

What I think about most now is not even the screaming.

It is how uneven the experience was. How the same space could affect people so differently. Some people felt it immediately. Some never did. Some carried it with them. Others walked away untouched. That difference matters more than most people realize, because it tells you this is not a clean story with one answer waiting at the end.

There is also a human side that often gets lost in retellings. Stress. Grief. Exhaustion. Family tension. Fear. Those things are not footnotes. They are part of the environment. Whatever was happening in that house did not exist on its own. It collided with real lives that were already carrying heavy burdens.

I do not correct every version of the story. I do not jump into every discussion. I mostly watch how it shifts as it travels. What gets repeated. What gets simplified. What turns into legend. What turns into entertainment. And what quietly disappears.

But I will say this.

If there is ever something you want to know about it, you can just ask me.

I answer the best I can. If I know the answer, I will tell you. If I do not, I have no problem saying that too. I have never pretended to have all the answers, and I am not uncomfortable sitting with the ones that never came.

Some experiences leave a mark on your life without ever fully explaining themselves. I carry those memories with me, marked more by questions than answers.

That house did that to me.

And sometimes, late at night, it is still strange to hear people talk about it as if it were something distant, when for me it never completely was.