199: House on Loon Lake
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From WBEZChicago, it's "This American Life." I'm Ira Glass. The story that we bring you today is a kind of classic mystery story, but a classic mystery of a very particular kind. It's a real life hardy boy's story, or maybe an episode of Scooby-Doo. There's an old abandoned house, some kids stumble upon it, they decide to break in, and then at that point, they kind of hit the jackpot kid-wise. The place is filled, and I mean filled with fascinating stuff. It's also creepy and mysterious, and there are kinds of tantalizing clues about what happened there, which they decide to uncover, and which ends up taking years, decades, actually. We are devoting our entire show today to this one story, "The House Near Loon Lake." We first broadcast this show in 2001. If you're in your car right now as you hear this, I hope you have a long drive ahead of you, so you can stay tuned. If you're at home and it's night, you may consider turning down the lights. Adam Beckman tells the tale. It was my brother's idea to go down to the lake. We'd brought an M-80 firecracker, and we wanted to detonate it in the shallow water where we used to swim. We were 11, and it was late fall of 1977. We were visiting a place called Freedom New Hampshire, a small town of a few hundred people just across the border from Maine. My dad had volunteered to do some maintenance work at a summer camp I'd once gone to. My brother Kenny, best friend Ian, and I went along. We'd been inseparable growing up, but now Kenny had started hanging out with an older crowd, and I'd been seeing less and less of Ian since I just transferred to a new school. I was in a funk about losing touch with Kenny and Ian, and so for me, the stakes for the weekend were a little higher than usual. In normal times, we'd like to go shoplifting or set things on fire. That Halloween, we'd taken cans of WD-40 and gone from door to door, spraying it in the mouths of jack-o-lanterns till flames burst out their eyes and they blew up and balls of fire. This is my brother Kenny. He's now 37, and he's a scientist. I think Ian's mom used to worry a little bit
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