In my dream, it’s New Year’s Eve. Dad bought some fireworks and he, ████, ████, ████, ████ and I are looking for the perfect place to set them off.

We end up parked at the footbridge outside my old church, but I say it’s been closed off for years. We get out and we find out that I’m right.

We walk to the right of the bridge, to a non-existent path that leads to an abandoned house. There’s trash everywhere on the path. It’s absolutely disgusting.

When we get to the house, a little thing that sort of looks like my house but very run down and it stretches out long, dad asks if I want to explore it. I say no because it’s not that old, but we go in anyway.

We walk around the back of the house to find a way in, but find an entrance in the middle of the side wall. When we get in, we walk to the back of the house and I get a terrible feeling. In my mind, I keep hearing the words, “mass murderer, serial killer, get out,” over and over in a raven’s voice. I express my fears but nobody listens.

We bypass everything in the house and walk to the back room which is a large kitchen with a bunch of spots for windows, but the windows have been broken and are completely missing. We climb through the windows and we end up on a patio like thing that leads to a shed.

Beside the patio is a vat of some kind of brown, stagnant liquid. Dad says he wonders what it was, and I just blurt out, “acid,” as in acid to meld down human bodies.

We decide not to go in the shed but I all of a sudden gain x-ray vision and I can see another vat of acid behind the shed walls, with a body partially melted inside.

We go back in the house and bypass everything again, (although there isn’t much to bypass. We walk down a long, thin hallway, past a few locked doors) and we send up in the front room of the house. It’s a testament to the shitty interior decorators of the 1970’s.

As we leave, I look over to the love seat beside the door and see a person sitting there in a gold colored shirt, a red sweater and black pants. He has no head or neck, but I can clearly see hands and legs. His body is positioned so it’s pointed in my direction, and it almost feels like he’s staring at me.

I run outside and ████ asks me what’s wrong. I tell her that I saw her dad but he had no head, even though it wasn’t her father.

The dream cuts to a younger me and my dad. We decide to explore the house again. It’s not quite as decrepit and it’s not in the middle of the woods like in the first part of the dream. It’s located on a small town’s (but not really ████████’s) Main Street.

We get in through the front door and everything is beautifully Victorian looking but dark. I look around for a while and notice two vents which can open up in the baseboards of a corner of the room. They’re long and gold with little knobs to pull on.

I open them and find someone hidden behind the wall. It’s a boy, probably 17 years old (I’m about 12 in the dream,) wearing a gold colored shirt, a red sweater and black pants. He’s cute and sad.

“Who are you?” I ask.

He says his name but I can’t remember it.

“Why are you back there?” I ask.

“Because my father doesn’t want other people to find me,” he replies.

“I’ve seen you before,” I say.

The boy vanishes and in his place are his sweater and a stack of photos. I pick up the photo that’s on top of his sweater. It’s old. Probably from the 1890s. It’s of him, a boy with a long, sort of sunken face, blond hair and sad dark eyes.

I reach in and pick up the other pictures but I decide I don’t want them because they’re all too new.

I get up and look around. The layout of the house is the same.

I open one of the previously locked doors and find a room filled with pristine and old (yet non-existent) toys from the 1960 to the early 1970s. It ends up being the only room I care about.

There are little plastic pachinko machines still in their boxes, shaped like old robot and dinosaur cartoon characters, Philadelphia Flyers related things on a shelf sort of high up, boxes filled with discontinued but still good smoothie mixes, action figures that don’t look familiar and a lot of other things.

I pick up an ugly, black homemade Flyers hat (not a baseball hat but a crochet hat that comes to a point,) that has the number 3 on it along with NO on the opposite side in big orange letters. They boy calls out from a vent nearby that the hat was his favorite as a kid.

Somehow, I realize that the kid isn’t actually back there. His ghost is stuck there after his father stuffed his body in the wall after killing him.

In the dream I visit the house multiple times just to talk to the boy, who I end up falling in love with.

In my dream, I see a commercial for a chance to win a bunch of stuff, including a bunch of Flyers things. They man in the commercial mentions a “highly coveted, collectable hat by the late, legendary artist (whose name I don’t remember)”

I realize the guy on the commercial is talking about the stuff in the abandoned house so I run to the house in hopes to salvage the boy’s stuff.

I grab most of the toys and realize I’d have to come back later to get the rest. I blow the boy a kiss and leave, but as I walk away from the house, I realize that I left the lights on and since it’s night time, it’s very noticeable

The next morning, dad drives me to the house so I can get the rest of the boy’s stuff. On our ride there, I turn into a boy that sort of looks like the kid from the kid from Two and a Half Men.

As I’m in the house, I notice that the boy’s ghost is gone and all that’s left is the hat.

Outside, dad is parked in the drive way and a woman who looks like Miss ████ walks up. She’s angry with me.

“Where’s your kid?” she asks.

“Inside,” dad replies.

“Why?”

“His class is having a smoothie day and we know that there’s some good smoothie mix in the house, so we figured since nobody is using it, we could.”

“You’re lying,” she says as I walk out of the house. She looks over as I close the door and zip up my backpack. “What’s in the bag, twerp?”

“Nothing!” I reply quickly.

“Really now? Let me see.”

“Why?”

“Let me see.”

I try walking to avoid her but she blocks me.

“Let. Me. See.”

“No!”

“LET ME SEE,” she shouts as she snatches the backpack out of my hands. She looks in and pulls the hat out. “This thing. This ugly fucking thing.”

She begins to walk across the street but I try to stop her. She’s too strong and I fall back. “THAT’S _____’S (boy’s name.)”

“Not anymore,” she says as she opens the barren garage of the house across the street. She throws the backpack inside and closes the door, locking it so I can get in.

She shoves a finger in my face and says in her most violent voice, “that ugly fucking thing is the reason ______ is dead! I don’t ever want to see it!”

“I’ll just get in and get it,” I reply.

“No you won’t. The people who live here put me in charge of taking care of the place while they’re away. Also, I dumped a whole gallon on rancid mayo on the damn hat.”

“YOU WHAT?” I scream as the dream cuts to another view.

It’s Christmas Eve. I’m a girl again. Dad, the ████’s and I are about to leave church. Somehow, ████ and I get left behind. We run after our parents cars but we can’t keep up. Cars are flying by so fast, making it feel like we’re barely moving as we run.

We stand in the median and go over our options, although there aren’t many.

All of a sudden, an olive colored truck that’s being driven like the person inside is drunk pulls up beside us. ████ knows the young man and woman inside. The woman is driving. They’re both crazy young punks. They off us a ride and at first I’m hesitant but I get in anyway.

Before I can even close the door, the truck shoots off like a rocket and I get very car sick because of how fast and crazy we are going.

We end up at the ████’s house. There are two cars, a blue one and an orange one, parked in the driveway. They don’t belong to anyone in the house. Come to find out that a couple rednecks decided to park their friend’s cars in someone else’s driveway which was totally rude.

We get inside and everything is decorated with lights. I look up at the moon from a window and see a weird mass of white lights in the sky. Someone reaches beside me and plucks the lights out of the sky. I look behind me and see the boy. He’s not dead and he’s so beautiful.

He smiles and hands me the lights as if they’re a bouquet of flowers. He says, “do you want to help me hang these up?”

The dream ends.