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my father if he’d ever seen anyone adding new paint to the house, and he hadn’t. The house stood empty for most of my boyhood (and all those Halloweens) after the mysterious disappearance of its owner, but the funny thing is that the family who finally bought the house didn’t repaint it a new color. I intend to find them and ask them if they ever added a new coat. Maybe they liked the color, and didn’t want to change the personality of the famous Yellow House. The young yuppie-type couple living there now must think it’s neat, and they put up new black shutters and painted the door black. It looks quite striking, like a big plastic toy house. I’ll have to talk to them, too, now…see what they may have learned, if anything, by living inside the Yellow House.
    They must have heard the stories; you can’t have lived in town a year or two without having heard them. And it was for these stories more than because of its strange color that the place had become our town’s official haunted house.
    First of all, the town’s all-time prize loony had owned the Yellow House, and painted it himself, as the town was very much aware at that time. It was no quaint town tradition or landmark then, but a plain old eyesore. So kids began rapping on the door and running away laughing on Halloween night even back then in the forties. Supposedly one kid got shot with a BB gun by the owner—at least my mother seems to remember that story.
    His name was Edwin Phillips, the town dog officer. Another great reason for banging on his door. One time, my mother has never forgotten (the reason she curses him to this day, obsessive animal lover that she is), three dogs were found shot in Phillips’s back yard—two of them still clinging to life, a mother and pup. The mother died, the pup was saved. The dogs had been picked up by him only the day before, not held for the proper amount of time before humane termination. It reached the papers, death threats came even from out of state, and Phillips was out a job. At that time, cages were found in his basement—his own kennel—though, oddly, no one had ever complained of undue barking at his house. There was talk of digging up his yard and some pressure from humane society people but it was never done.
    He never worked again, apparently, and how he sustained himself I haven’t as yet determined. He was well known as an amateur inventor, however, so maybe one of his inventions had become successful somewhere down the line and he lived off that. For lack of a town witch, the kids called him a mad scientist, or Dr. Frankenstein. Maybe he was assembling a Frankencanine out of various parts of dogs he’d slaughtered, they no doubt joked.
    It was because of the dog stories that Crazy Ed Phillips became the suspect in town gossip when those two old men disappeared in 1950. Both were boozers with no real family and they lived in the rooms over the little center pub my father still frequents today. The first, Gregory Hitchings, vanished on or about January fifteenth. The second man, old Frankie Allen, the town drunk of the day, was discovered missing (a funny expression) February seventeenth. Gone without a trace, both men, no clothes packed, and both boarders at the little center pub…two streets over from the Yellow House.
    There was another funny story about Ed Phillips and the two missing men, but first a little background. Phillips himself occasionally visited the pub for some brews alone in the corner, and the other men would taunt him a bit. Kill any dogs lately? How’s the mad scientist business these days? Well, apparently several times Phillips had lashed back at the men, his tongue loosened by beer, and cursed their stupidity and ignorance at not recognizing his greatness, for not respecting his important work, which would change the world forever. The standard mad scientist lines. So the men would laugh harder, send him over some beers which he would drink in brooding silence.
    But in