I got talked into staying there overnight. I ended up sleeping with my Mormon brother-in-law in the maid’s room because we were the only ones who were proactive in getting a room where sleep was possible. It was about the size of a walk-in closet and had a ceiling so sloped that there was only a tiny area where we could stand up straight. There were other, bigger, bedrooms on the third floor — one locked and unavailable at the time and one occupied by people who never went to bed.

The scary part: the people! There was a German tourist couple driving from NY to the Cape who had added it to their itinerary because they knew that a famous murder had taken place there, but they weren’t quite sure what any of it was all about. They had booked the room almost a year in advance but never got around to reading up on it. Bad move, because...

That kind of offended the second couple — a dead-serious, morbidly obese podcaster of the supernatural and his dead-serious, morbidly obese wife (this was actually a good thing, as you’ll see later). He wore a vest with ten million pockets filled with...I don’t know what. Little electronic devices? He took over the room where the father was killed and set up a full Radio Shack aisle complete with microphones and cameras and shushed anyone who got too close.

That greatly offended couple three — two drunk girls who just wanted to (and did) run around and shriek and drink and shriek some more at nonexistent noises and shadows. At one point one of them screamed, “OMG, I LITERALLY JUST PISSED MYSELF!!!!!” That’s when my group, the upright LDS citizens + 1 gay, decided we had probably had enough.

The brother-in-law and I were actually able to sleep pretty well because my group had booked some of the rooms that were in higher demand and Mr. and Mrs. Stoneface were stuck in the maid’s room. I could tell they were disgusted that we would give up the chance to stay in a “good” room but at the same time they didn’t want us to change our minds because, they claimed, Bridget’s room wasn’t “active” enough for them.

That was a lie. It was the stairs. They both sounded like they were about to have heart attacks when they came up to move their bags. I would have preferred to swap with the drunk girls, who had the bigger third-floor room, but that would have meant attempting to have a conversation with them.

The other losers in my party were trapped in the thick of it because when they mentioned they were going to bed, Mr. Stoneface explained that etiquette dictates one must keep the bedrooms open to the other guests until everyone else is finished. Of course, they were too polite and just went along with it.

We only had one knock on the door and it was the drunk girls and the by-then-shitfaced German woman. After about five minutes of trying to get Bridget to give them a sign, one of them screamed at nothing and they all ran out of the room.

Two days later, on our way home from the wedding we had gone to, my sister started whimpering and declared, “I feel so...so...diiiiiirty. Those Lizzie Borden people made me feel so dirty, AND I DON’T KNOW IF IT WILL EVER GO AWAY!”