A man pays coin, good coin, to walk through a house he already knows is cursed.
I have spent all my days keeping the dead in the ground and the dark out of doors. We salt the threshold. We ring the bell at dusk. We do not go where the wailing is, for a wailing house is a house the Lord has turned His face from, and a wise man burns it and moves his beasts to safer pasture. But here they queue. They pay the toll and go in laughing, that they might be frighted worse.
Inside, the walls breathe cold and moan. Chains rattle where no prisoner is kept. A dead woman rises up shrieking, and the young man beside me does not cross himself, does not run, does not pray. He shouts with a strange glad terror and grips his woman closer, as one grips a rail in a storm. It is play to them. They have made a feast of the very fear that would send my mother to her knees till dawn.
I did not laugh. I know what it means when a house groans and the cold comes through the boards. It means the winter is in the walls and something has died and not been buried right. It means work, and prayer, and fear that earns its keep.
These folk have never gone hungry. That is the whole of it. A man who has buried children does not pay to be haunted. He is haunted for free.