We have the race weekend and it’s time to drive all the way back. He asks me if I want to come with him since he had to drive alone the way there. I say sure. Two hours in, he pulls off….I didn’t recognize it at first coming from the other direction, but eventually it occurs to me he’s going to the diner’s exit. He wants to see it for himself.

He stops to pay the toll, doesn’t mention our story; he asks if there’s a diner at the exit to make sure he has the right one (you can’t see it from the ramp). The guy says there was one, but it burned down.

Holy shit. Okay, so there weren’t vampires, but what a fucking coincidence. We just eat there and then right after, in the span of two and a half days, they have a freak accident. This almost intrigues him more than the supernatural bit, and I am one hundred percent on board for checking it out.

We drive over, same humdrum bullshit strip mall, except where we went to eat it’s just this charred mess. Not like with holes in it, it wasn’t a wooden frame in pieces like a cartoon, you just could seriously tell there was damage. No vehicles, no tape (I’d assume they’d at least test it for being a crime) and they’d cleaned the area around it well.

We go to get back on the turnpike, and these poor toll guys are stuck in a booth hardly bigger than they are, so it’s the same dude getting back on….

Anyway, my stepdad’s like, “I thought you said there was a diner there. Guy says, “There was, like I told you, but it burned down.” He asked if they’d figured out yet what caused it, was it a grease fire or what, that kind of thing.

The guy says, “Yet?”

“Yeah, it had to have been in the last two or three days, they didn’t investigate it? It wasn’t on the news?”

Then the guy says, “Oh, we know what happened. It was on the news when it happened eight years ago.”