Pity the friend or relative who comes to visit me. They don’t get to see the splendor of Thorncrag, the churning power of Great Falls or that cool thong-looking thing draped over Auburn.

My visitors, drawn to the area by the allure of the four stores at the mall, get a unique tour I just can’t save for Halloween.

“If you will look out the right side of the car,” I tell them, working mostly for tips, “you will see the apartment where a Dominican crack dealer was shot down by three gunmen. It was a lonely and violent death. His compatriots fled from windows and down back stairways, leaving the man to die on the living room rug.”

“Wow,” my kin will remark. “Is it haunted?”

No. It’s not. Moving on.

“This apartment was the scene of a murder-suicide. It is the site of unrequited love that ended in dual blasts from a rifle that echoed through the downtown.”

“Holy cow! Is it haunted?”

No, my friend. It is not.

I show them where the crack addict was sliced to death with his own knife. I take them to places where despondent teens died by their own hands, where men perished in fire, where women were strangled and left in heaps.

“Haunted?”

“No. It’s a Rite-Aid now.”

I bring it up only because I’m fairly sure the house across the street from my own is filthy with ghosts.

In the twilight, the overgrown lawn looks dark and dangerous. Shrubs free from weekly trims rise misshapen and unruly. They have come to resemble the beasts of “Where the Wild Things Are.”

Black windows frosted with dirt stare out like the creepy marble eyes of a museum creature. Runaway weeds are devouring a sagging camper at the far edge of the driveway. Next to it, a sagging truck rests on its rusting plow like a dog that has been abandoned and is nearly dead.

Ugly. But that’s not it.

The house has the appearance of vacancy and neglect, yes. But the sinister pall comes from something else. Have you ever noticed how you can tell when a house is empty just by staring at it? Or perhaps just by being near it? It’s not the physical state of it that tells you that no human soul resides there. A house that stands vacant somehow exudes loneliness, as though it aches for company and wants you to know it. It’s almost a vibration.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that houses inherit the personalities of the people who occupy them. The very walls and floorboards absorb moods and memories the way a sponge will absorb spilled blood.

But in the city, people are too transient to leave their psychic marks on the buildings they inhabit. They are here in the steam-heated, third-floor walk-up one day, living in a housing complex a mile away the next. Inner city tenements have no time to get acquainted with the souls they embrace and so no ghosts are ever born.

The house across the street is a different matter. I know of no deaths inside its walls, but it has bleak memories, nonetheless. The man who lived there was old and kind of bent. He lived alone and kept his shades drawn. He had a lot of visitors and they were exclusively children. Wouldn’t you know it? The bent old guy is in prison now, convicted a couple years ago of molesting those kids.

In my way of thinking, the miserable things that occurred inside those walls left an imprint. Feelings of adolescent confusion, of betrayal and shame and rage. Those are the things that leave ghosts trapped behind dusty windows and overgrown hedges that look like wild things.

Do I really believe it? Nah.

One of the darkest things to ever occur in the Twin Cities happened decades ago. A young girl was burned alive when deranged parents stuffed her inside an oven. They chanted and tried to dispel bad spirits and the child died an unimaginable death.

I never heard a thing about ghosts walking the halls of that Auburn tenement or about strange, muffled cries heard in the night. The ghosts of that particular atrocity live in the minds and memories of those who remember it: the police officers called to the scene, the firefighters who retrieved the body, the people who read about the horror in the morning’s paper.

I don’t give my visitors ghost tours because I don’t completely believe in them in spite of dark histories and runaway lawn foliage. I suspect that the real ghosts are the recollections that live unhappily inside your haunted heads.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can e-mail him at [email protected].