With Netflix’s “Stranger Things” being the most popular television bingefest around, I found this story, originally aired on ‘This American Life’ back in 2001, to be quite timely.

“The House on Loon Lake” is the very real story of how a group of boys back in the 1970’s stumbled upon an abandoned house in Freedom, New Hampshire. What they found inside was a veritable time capsule of untouched items and artifacts of a family who seemed to have disappeared.

Adam Beckman, tells the story of how, at the age of 12, he and his friends went on a mission to find out what happened to the family that vanished.

For storytellers and writers, it’s a wonderful one hour tale filled with mystery, sadness and a twist at the end that tells more about the state of family, rather than revealing a predictable and unsavory crime.

Adam’s Mother

“The abandonment. The abandonment is melancholy. In a way, it’s worse than throwing away, much worse. I can understand one family being obliged to flee or run or abandon, but that nobody else cared. That it was so overwhelmingly abandoned by everybody, that nobody had cared to solve something, to resolve something. That was very offensive to me. It was like leaving a corpse. You don’t leave a corpse. And that’s a little bit the feeling that I had. That here was a carcass, the carcass of a house, of a life, of a private, and nobody cared to pick it up and give it a proper burial.

I thought that it was important that somebody should care. That somehow, somebody was leaning over these words, reading them, unfolding these letters that somebody had bothered to write. It really didn’t matter that it was an eleven-year-old boy who cared. Objects have lives. They are witness to things. And these objects were like that. So I was, in a way, glad that you were listening.”

Listen here:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/199/house-on-loon-lake