Okay, Who's Got a Stamp?

Dear Mr. McCorkle,

Thank you first of all for submitting your proposal, and your patience while the committee deliberated. We can appreciate your desire to bring this matter to a conclusion, especially with the people in the house wounded to various degress, slowly going insane with fear, and your very life possibly at risk. What we did was analyze situations similar to yours as depicted in thirty years' worth of horror films, true first person anecdotes, and floorplans of various crawlspaces around the world to compile a database from which experts in the field of crawlspace investigation drew up a statistical profile of the results of past moments when someone decided to track a mysterious thumping sound up there. We're sorry to say that the numbers are not indicative of a pleasant outcome to your specific scenario. Three different computer simulations suggest there is a 94 percent chance that the lifting of the board which will reveal the heretofore unknown area above your ceiling will result in the ghoulish death by supernatural forces of every remaining person in your household within sixty minutes, with a 22 percent chance that you and your family will have your bodies turned inside out (see Data Table F-4). While this may happen anyway, our data shows that if you refrain from the slightest peek into the crawlspace, you will at least have made the phantasmagorical terrors above you do some legwork to track you down before having their accursed way with the souls of you and yours. In the haunted house field, we call this a "Lose-lose" situation and recommend that the priest within your group---whose recent attempted exorcism of the child's doll you mentioned in your cover letter is most likely responsible for the demonic orgy of horror you are currently ensnared in, if Graph A-3 is accurate to within even four percentage points---administer last rites to all as you cower in the northeast corner of the basement. Please note for the future that advance knowledge of a spooky crawlspace within your home provides a twenty percent increase in survival chances against vengeful ghosts, though our guidelines still suggest that living on a single level, without stairs, and vacating your house every night when the sun goes down are still the surest ways to avoid the costly unpleasantness of a mind-ripping, throat-clawing fatal haunting.

Happy Holidays from Ellsworth Haunting Solutions! Please confirm your billing address below and use the prepaid envelope to send payment, making sure to write your phone number on your check.

Sincerely,
The Staff