My best friend Lilly and I met in third grade. She and her family (mom, dad, two younger sisters) had moved into the neighboring town, into a huge, three-story pre-Revolutionary home.

Stories flourished about how the house had been used as a hospital in the Civil War, how it was haunted by the ghosts of dead soldiers. But we didn't pay attention to that. We paid attention to the Judge.

Of course, we didn't know him by "Judge" then. We only knew that when we went to the third story to play, chairs were thrown across the room at us and toys were misplaced frequently. Lilly's parents never had a problem with the third floor, but we encountered hell every time we went up there.

Not like that kept us from going.

We were drawn to the room, so drawn that we returned after being locked in the closet for an hour to inspect the latch mechanism on the door. Sometimes it seemed that the rugs reached up and grabbed us as we tiptoed through the rooms.

All this activity affected us to the point that we were afraid to sleep with the lights off, and we eventually stopped going to the third floor after Lilly's sisters were attacked.

It wasn't until our fifth grade year that we found out the legend of the Judge. Apparently, in the 1920s, a harsh town judge owned the house and rented out the first two floors to boarders. He hated children, and he frequently left rooms empty if folks with children wanted to live in the rooms. When he DID lend the rooms to boarders with children, he searched their rooms and meticulously pointed out the perils of progeny. He would yell at the children if they wandered up to the third floor, where he kept his residence in three rooms and a bathroom.

One day, the boarders did not see the Judge at breakfast, nor did he go to work. Concerned, townspeople and the boarders took to the stairs to find the Judge. He had died in one of his rooms, by natural causes.

To this day, children are not welcome on the third floor of Lilly's house.