Of haunted houses on bright sunny days

There is sun and it's a Saturday so the thing to do is clear: hop on the motorcycle and go where the road will take us in search of new sights and memories.

This time, my husband went on a known road, but to a part of it I'd never been to before, and we suddenly found ourselves right in the middle of Amish country, but still very much in our own county.

You can tell the Amish farms, not only because they are pristinely white in their cleanliness and tidiness, but also because of the black horse buggies with their large reflective orange triangles affixed on the back.

In our travels, we saw an Amish farmer, clad in his typical garb of blues and browns, with his rather stylish straw hat, driving a team of beautiful horses, tilling the ground for early planting. We also saw Amish women, plowing their house gardens, while the men tended to the buggies and the horses. Some of the women stopped and looked as the motorcycle whizzed by, some of them just kept on working, impervious to the busy road noises.

We saw several horse farms and, in one, we saw a mare with her recently born foal, and at another, we saw a cow with her recently born calf. Both were adorable and a true sign that we've finally reached Spring, but there was nowhere to stop to take a picture so you'll have to use your imagination.

We didn't have to use our minds to imagine this haunted house, the most haunted I've ever seen on a contradictorily bright, sunny day, sitting there on the side of the road, complete with a scythe-shaped, broken and dying pine tree on one side, cackling black birds swirling atop its incongruously new roof, dead trees flanking its entryway, and the shadow of a ghostly figure seen passing through one of its opened windows.

The house must have been quite a showcase in its heyday but now stands clearly abandoned, beckoning unsuspecting ghost hunters to vanish into its secrets, like in a Stephen King story.

What would lead someone to abandon such a regal house, I wondered? The evil inside must be so abominable, so unspeakable, that the house stands alone, if defiant, against the beating of weather and the ravages of time, holding onto the murmuring sorrows of its erstwhile grand past, like an immense tomb.

We left quickly and once back home, we found a much more innocent and happy picture awaiting us. That was Magellan, Puerto Rican cat that she is, enjoying the rays of sun that peek through our kitchen window and make a small spot where she can sunbathe.