On a Saturday morning in 2016, the summer after my sophomore year of college, I stepped off the Hampton Jitney, a roller bag and boyfriend in tow, for a weekend in East Hampton. Uncharacteristically, I decided we should walk the mile home, turning right at the Huntting Inn onto Huntting Lane, a picturesque street on which houses can sell for tens of millions of dollars. My boyfriend, a first-timer to the eastern tip of Long Island, bounded ahead between the hydrangeas and historic homes, then stopped.
The crumbling Victorian to our left, devoured by weeds and sloughing off shingles, looked like something out of a Hitchcock movie. I raised my phone to take a picture when suddenly a voice thundered from the house’s turret:
