If you go alone, don’t bring a flashlight. You’ll see things you don’t want to.

Don’t bring groups bigger than 12.

Bring water and some snacks, but no wine.

If you have to sleep there, sleep in the sanctuary, but not on a pew.

If you try to read the hymnal, the words won’t be english anymore.

The Bibles will be blank until you confess.

Don’t go into the confession booth. The man talking to you is not the priest, and you don’t want to know what he really is.

The cross on the wall changes locations, don’t look at it for too long.

If you see someone praying at the altar, don’t approach them. If they approach you, don’t talk to them. Leave immediately.

If you hear the organ playing while you’re in the basement, know that your time is running out.

If it plays while you’re in the sanctuary, your time is up.

Take whatever you want, but if you find that one of your possesions is missing, don’t look for it. Let them have it. It’s not worth your life.

If you find a rosary, don’t put it on. It won’t help.

The water isn’t holy anymore. Throwing it on the demons in the shadows won’t work.

Drink the wine if you wish to never leave.

Don’t get seperated from your friends.

If you spend the night, leave at sunrise otherwise you’ll enter another plane of reality with no way back.

If you don’t spend the night, leave through the doors you came in.

You might look behind you after leaving and see that the church isn’t there anymore. It means that they took what they wanted.

Waffle House is one of the few chains in America that’s open 24/7/365, and where you can get both breakfast and lunch/dinner options at any time (I have had so many Breakfast Cheeseburgers at Waffle Houses). The food is really good, and people eat there at all times of the day or night, but it’s particularly popular as a late-night post-drinking spot because it’s all that’s open and it’s the kind of food that tastes especially good when you’re hammered.

Part of Waffle House Protocol is that all the servers and cooks greet every single customer as they come through the door. It sounds lame, but I’ve never been to a Waffle House where that greeting didn’t feel completely heartfelt. My mom is a health nut who could barely find anything on the menu she was willing to eat and yet she describes the Christmas Day lunch we had there one year as one of the nicest meals she’s ever had because everyone was so warm and welcoming. That sense of camaraderie gets turned up to 11, of course, at 2 a.m. when everyone’s shitfaced.

The jukeboxes have Waffle-House-themed songs on them (once you have heard “Raisins in my Toast” you will be earwormed forever) and there is an arcane system of hash brown ordering: scattered, smothered, covered, chunked, topped, diced, peppered, and/or capped. The hot sauce bottles say “Casa de Waffle.” 

Once, in Oxford (UK), my husband and I walked past a kebab van very late one night and he said “why do I smell Waffle House”

The location of most Waffle Houses means there’s some… classism that tends to get tied up with Anti-Waffle House Discourse, which is probably lending itself, in part, to this being such a fraught topic. (I’m looking at a map and apparently I was born and raised right in the middle of the Peak Waffle House Density Zone)