LOL- Love this! And seriously love the photo of the house you based it on.

Nice flow to the story and I love the twist at the end.

My mom and I used to love an old Victorian home that was near us in Venice, California, and joked that we'd love to do it up in early Charles Addams (creator of The Addams Family, which was originally a cartoon series in The New Yorker magazine).

I'd still love to do that one day. ;-)

I used to help fund raise for a local charity in Pinellas County, Florida, and our primary event every year was a haunted house, which was a blast to put on, and became quite popular. All the money raised went toward adopting underprivileged and at-risk kids for Christmas, who otherwise wouldn't have had a Christmas. ;-)

A good friend of ours (our group that put on the haunted house) was both a professor of religious studies and a ghost hunter. For real - no joke. She takes it quite seriously, and has pretty much zero respect for the "reality" shows based on ghost hunting, for obvious reason.

I never did bring my black cat to the haunted house, and tend to keep him close to home on and around Halloween, just in case. He is currently hanging out on the back of my chair. ;-)