Crazy will always be one of my favorite books I’ve written.
First of all, how it was written is different than anything else I have ever done.
In 2006, I was personally asked to come to an old truck stop restaurant on Old Route 66. The Tri County Truck Stop in Villa Ridge, Missouri. They were dealing with what they could only describe as a haunting.
Growing up in Franklin County, that place was part of your life. Late night breakfasts. Sunday dinners. It was part of the community for years. And I found myself walking back into it, not as a kid, but as an adult with my team, stepping into a truck stop people now believed was haunted, a place that had never been investigated before.
There was a lot of press around it. TV news. Newspapers. People paying attention.
But that is not what stayed with me.
Everywhere I went in Franklin County, someone had a story about that truck stop. I was stopped constantly. And they did not just tell stories. They told them like they had been holding onto them for a long time.
Those stories mattered to me.
That is how Crazy was written.
It came together through those local stories, police reports, historical research, and paranormal investigation. In the end, it became a tribute to where I grew up and to that truck stop that was part of all of our lives.
And behind it, all of it, there is truth.
There was a young woman who ran from an abusive husband into the arms of an even more abusive truck driver. There was a hermit who lived in the basement of the restaurant and became an urban legend in his own right. There was the hitchhiker on Highway 100. The waitresses people still talk about to this day. The boy who saw something on that staircase that terrified him. I sat with him. That happened.
Every character in Crazy is based on someone real.
The investigation happened. The way it ended happened.
I brought all of it together to tell a story about the place I grew up and the lives that passed through it.
Crazy is a tribute to a historic truck stop that, in its day, had people coming and going whose lives intersected there in ways no one stopped to think about at the time. It is in those intersections that the book grew from.
And there was one thing that kept coming up, over and over again, whether it was in the history or during the investigation.
Be careful how you treat other people.
Because in the end, like Sartre said, you may find that hell is other people.
Revenge is not always left to the living alone. There are things that do not settle. Things that do not end clean.
And maybe some of what we do does not stay behind.
Maybe it follows.
Maybe it waits.
And for some, it does not stop.
Steven LaChance Blog 
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