~5.5~

That was all… little mentions here and there as a side example of various social trends and social ills, but it was never the focus of anything. Once she’d started paying attention, she had seen the city used as an example of so many things that it seemed plausible that it was every city. Her digging on the net had revealed that Jericho was a proven bellwether almost on par with Vigo County, Indiana or Peoria, Illinois, but little attention was paid to this.

There were nicer, more charming places for the networks to send reporters to take the pulse of the nation than Jericho.

The fact that Jericho was so much like other cities could have explained… or explained away… the lack of interest it attracted at a national level. There was just nothing special about it. It didn’t stand out. It was always an example, never the exemplar. But those words stayed with her: Jericho is every city. Its name still caused her to stop in her tracks and listen whenever she heard it, no matter how trivial the mention.

Web searches had been complicated by the sheer number of places called Jericho… there were two in Vermont alone. Somehow it had always been obvious right away when somebody was talking about the Jericho, her Jericho.

Serious paranormal investigators ignored Jericho the same as everybody else did. There were no electromagnetic anomalies, no unexplained video footage, no thermal images showing inexplicable hot spots or cold spots or room temperature spots. Nothing that one could hold up as something like scientific evidence.

Yet scattered here and there were the odd reports, the eerie stories, and the unverified personal accounts that crept in about all haunted places. Familiar stories: ghostly presences, phantom hitchhikers, black dogs, people disappearing, things vanishing from one spot and appearing in another, strange shops that couldn’t be found by day. Stories told everywhere, universal myths… but for Jericho, myth seemed to be the most real thing she could find.