I imagine it looked anything but sad back in the winter of 1957 when the Wilson Family took up residence.
Harold Wilson was an insurance salesman from Skokie, Illinois. Due to a shift within his company (he would have died before he’d admit it had anything to do with his own poor performance), he was relocated to Columbus, Ohio. To ease the sting of what was essentially a banishment, Sun Life & Liberty Provincial provided him with the house on Abigail Lane. Had they foreseen the consequences of this action, or had Wilson been aware of the disappearance of poor Mr. Washington eight months earlier, an alternate residence might have been arranged. But without knowing what had become of the construction worker, and with nobody left behind to ask questions, Washington’s vanishing was relegated to one of those things.
Thus, unburdened by disappearances past, Harold moved into Number 56 on January 1st of that year with his wife Alison and their children, May, who was eight years old, and Bud, who was twelve.
Despite the circumstances that forced Harold to uproot his beloved family and haul whatever belongings they could fit into his father’s old Dodge pickup truck three hours south to a city he didn’t know, Harold quickly warmed to Columbus. He bonded with the neighbors over football, and Alison, never the social butterfly, suddenly had more friends than she knew what to do with. Visitors to the house were common, and their calendar quickly filled with events to keep them occupied and ingratiate them further into their new surroundings. Even more surprising, Harold thrived at the new office, a development he put down to the clean slate in a place in which he felt less jaded. Customers seemed more responsive to him and his sales improved.
The kids too seemed happy, though Bud had some trouble at school, whereas May, ever the precocious one, slotted right in as her parents knew she would. Shy and reserved, “a thinker rather than a talker” as his father was fond of telling the neighbors, Bud continued to keep to himself, except when challenged. After the resident bully made fun of Bud’s prominent front teeth and shock of ginger hair on the second day, Bud gave him a black eye and a split lip and was henceforth left alone. Bud weathered the inevitable lecture the same way he always did in the wake of these curious outbursts of violence: he stared down at his lap and rubbed his hands together as if washing them. Alison found Bud impenetrable and worrisome, but Harold was secretly proud. He himself had never been a fighter, only a victim (the relocation being just the latest in a long line of humiliations at the hands of others), and it buoyed him to know that in that regard at least, his son was not going to follow in his footsteps. As it turned out, the only footsteps in which Bud was destined to follow were those of Elmore Washington, because on the night of February 10th, 1957, a little over six weeks after they moved into their new house, young Bud clomped upstairs to bed and was never seen again.
Nobody would have sold the house to the Wilsons if they’d known that something was wrong with it. Or perhaps they would. Greed is a great motivator, and the real estate market is loaded with houses of ill repute and unscrupulous realtors, because at the end of the day, to anyone who doesn’t believe in the supernatural, a house is just a house, and people will always need someplace to live. Besides, Number 56 had not yet earned its dark reputation. It will come as no great surprise given certain realities at the time that the disappearance of Elmore Washington, a black man, never made the news. To the few people who knew him, he was just a lonely unremarkable man bound for a lonely, unremarkable end, and that’s exactly what he got, however he came upon it.
However, because he was white, and because he was a middle-class child with a bright future ahead of him, the disappearance of Bud Wilson got plenty of attention. Less than a half hour after Harold—never Harry—checked in on the kids and found Bud’s room empty, a pair of policemen were at his door. An hour after that, a search was underway, but all they turned up was one of his shoes, which he could have kicked off on the way to bed, though the absence of the second one did raise questions.
Bud would forever be convinced that someone had been waiting in the boy’s room and had snatched him, though to do so, the would-be abductor would have had to sneak a struggling kid downstairs and through the living room where Harold and his wife were watching The Ed Sullivan Show, which Harold insisted (perhaps because he’d never have been able to live with it if it were true) was not the case. But the single window in the boy’s room was still latched, which ruled out egress via that route. The theory favored by police was that there had been no abductor at all, at least not inside the house, and the boy had simply snuck past his parents and out the front door. Where he’d been going or what he might have been up to would remain a mystery, but as time went on, most everyone agreed that whatever the boy’s plans had been, they did not lead him to a benevolent end.
At the time, nobody mentioned that the boy was not the first to go missing from the house. Without knowing the fate of Washington, who for all anyone knew had simply quit to go on a bender, raising that connection might be seen, per the notorious statement of Detective Alan Hopper, as “muddying the waters.”[Much has been written about the history of Abigail Lane, specifically how racial bias and outright prejudice plagued the investigation from the first, so I won’t rehash it here, but if you can find “The One You Didn’t See”, Margaret Haywood’s terrific NY Times article on the subject, it makes for a compelling, and depressing, read.]
But now, the young son of a stalwart nuclear family was missing and the police left no stone unturned in their search. So many flyers were tacked to poles, you couldn’t travel a hundred miles in any direction without seeing the kid’s black and white mug grinning back at you. The media were all over it, and why wouldn’t they? The way they saw it, a wholesome freckled-faced young white boy, emblematic of the hope of our great nation, had gone astray, and Lord, oh Lord, must he be found.
Well, he wasn’t found. Not only that, but two years to the day Bud vanished, his father did too. By itself, this development might not have been so sensational, except that someone was there to see the house take him. Thus, it’s here, with Harold Wilson, that the supernatural angle finally comes into play, because people go missing all the time, but rarely do they literally vanish into thin air while you’re looking at them. Which is, according to Officer Miles Dietrich, exactly what happened. Dietrich would later use the incident as the basis for his book Cursed House: My Encounter with Abigail, which was poorly written and full of inconsistencies and false claims. Not that Dietrich cared. All the negative reviews in the world couldn’t dampen the appeal of yet another in a long line of “case studies” about supposedly haunted houses. He made a bundle of money when it was released back in 1987, and it’s set to become a limited series this fall on Netflix. According to Entertainment Weekly, the eighty-seven-year-old is currently working on the sequel, Return to Abigail House. [Somewhere along the line, the house stopped being known by its number—56—and instead became “Abigail House”, though that’s actually the name of the street, not the house itself.]
But back in 1959, many years before he realized how much he could benefit from embellishing and publicizing his account, here’s what he said when interviewed by a reporter from The Delaware Gazette:
“I got the call from Mrs. Wilson at about...oh, nine o’ clock maybe. She said he’d been drinking. Harold Wilson, that is, and that he was going on and on about the house, saying that it took his boy. Said that the more he thought about it, the more he started to remember. Told her that right before the boy went missing, there’d been a feeling in the air, like someone had opened a big heavy door in the earth beneath the house. He asked her if she remembered that the TV had acted funny right around that time, that there’d been some kind of disruption on the screen that caused Ed Sullivan’s face to disappear and made headlights of his eyes. Asked her if she’d smelled the engine oil in the air. She said she thought she might have recalled smelling something, but it was more like smoke. When she pleaded with him not to drink any more because the look in his eyes was scaring her, he sto
rmed out into the cold without a coat and jumped into his car. He was yelling about the boy, saying he was going to go take him back. That’s when she called us. She was afraid he would get himself into an accident. They weren’t living but twenty minutes from the house on Abigail. I guess they couldn’t bear to live in it any longer but wanted to stay close in case the boy ever found his way back. She figured that’s where Harold was going, so that’s where I went.”
If you’ve read Dietrich’s book, you’re about to see just how much that account diverges from the one recorded on the night in question. Here there are no Poltergeist-like flashes of light around the house, no seismic tremors or disembodied voices, no feeling of illness once he crosses the threshold. There is nothing but a broken man on the stairs. And that was enough.
“When I got there, the front door was open. Inside, I found Wilson sitting on the stairs with a bottle of bourbon in his hand. He didn’t look surprised to see me, but he didn’t look pleased either. Just in case, I kept a hand near my gun. He noticed and didn’t much like it. He asked if I was going to shoot him. I told him I had no plans to do anything of the kind. His eyes were gone. I don’t know how else to say it. They were just empty holes. I’ve taken fish out of my freezer that had more life in their eyes. ‘The house et my boy,’ he told me, ‘And I want him back.’ I said I understood, and to pacify him, proposed we take a good look around the place just to be sure the kid wasn’t here. His crooked smile was a terrible thing to witness, like someone had undone a coat hanger and held it up before his face. ‘He’s not here,’ he said. ‘He’s in the stomach of this place. Being digested so he can come back as something else somewhere else. No, we won’t find him here unless we take a walk down its throat.’
“I looked around at the house. Two years without someone living in it had started to take its toll. The windows were busted, the lock on the front door gone, the hallway littered with glass. It was a place of mischief now.[Thus we see the first inklings of Dietrich’s penchant for the same purple prose and melodrama which would permeate his first book almost three decades later, though at this point in his memoir, he’d already encountered a series of ghostly orbs and heard his dead mother speaking to him from between the cracks in the living room floorboards.] It was sad to see what had become of the place. ‘I have to go now,’ Wilson said, and when I looked back—and this is the part you’re not now or ever going to believe—I saw him rise and turn and put one foot on the step to go upstairs. It creaked, and then...poof! He was gone. Just like that, like someone had closed the shades and shadowed him out of being. The bottle he’d been holding in his hand fell from mid-air and smashed against the step. Something else did too. I saw a small flash of light. Heard a faint ting! It was his wedding ring. Even though I’d seen a man vanish, disappear like he’d just become fog or something, I told myself I hadn’t. Told myself I’d imagined it, or that he was pulling a prank on me. I mean, people don’t disappear like that. Not unless they’re magicians, right? So I searched for him, and found nothing, just an empty house. Except it didn’t feel empty. No, the longer I was inside it, the more crowded it started to feel, like there was a whole bunch of people there. So I ran and I’m not proud of it, but I was scared, and anyone who says that makes me a coward didn’t see a man blink out of existence right in front of him. And I remember what he said, what he asked his wife. The smell. There was definitely a smell. Jesus, I can still smell it, only it isn’t motor oil or smoke. It’s roses. I know that smell because my wife grows ‘em.”
III
The more remarkable claims in Dietrich’s statement are, not shockingly, absent from the official police reports. These days you can publish anything and find a receptive audience for it, but in 1959, with neither the Korean War nor the Second Red Scare far enough in the rearview, people were not in the mood for more boogeymen. So the story went that it was not a mysterious unearthly force that had erased Harold Never-Harry Wilson off the face of the earth after all, but grief. The loss of his son had caused the man himself to be lost, and though Alison Wilson refused to believe it, the media, working with information supplied to them by sources within the Columbus Police Department, spun the narrative that Harold had fled his wife in a drunken suicidal rage and Officer Dietrich showed up at the house on Abigail Lane to signs that he’d been there, but little else. The moment Dietrich shared his crazy story with reporters and his superiors, he’d condemned Harold Wilson to death in absentia. The investigation was half-hearted at best, and soon the story went away.
Alison grieved and waited for her family to come back to her. When they didn’t, she packed up and moved back to Indiana. On a bittersweet note, her losses would make her something of an Internet celebrity in later years as documentarians, parapsychologists, and amateur sleuths sought her out. Despite the painful subject, she seemed to enjoy the attention, and made for a funny and fascinating guest. She was asked to attend innumerable paranormal conventions, but declared that she was too old for such things. Nevertheless, she does appear in The Haunting of Abigail House, Mike Howard’s sprawling documentary. When she died in her sleep in January of 2017, over 1500 people showed up at her funeral, most of them fans. Howard delivered the eulogy. He lamented that Alison had died not knowing what had become of her family, and vowed not to stop searching until he found out.
It was a promise he did his best to keep.
For almost a decade after Harold Wilson’s disappearance, the house on Abigail Lane was quiet. The neighbors did not fear it. Why would they? Bad things happened in every home, and you must remember that they most likely didn’t know that Harold Wilson and Elmore Washington had also been vanished by the house. Most of them were only aware of Bud Wilson’s disappearance, a tragic event that had left the house an unrentable, unsellable nuisance in an otherwise perfectly put together neighborhood, the one bad tooth in a healthy smile. A few of them even took it upon themselves to keep the yard maintained so it did not become a jungle. Neighborhood kids spun wild stories about the place and broke in after dark. None disappeared, all emerged unscathed, though perhaps not always with their wholesomeness intact.
By 1966 there was a different monster stealing people away: The Vietnam War, and some theorists have speculated that this was the reason the house fell dormant, but I think that’s bunk. First, it presupposes that the house has a consciousness and a conscience, that it somehow felt bad because chaos was consuming the world elsewhere and so it just decided to quit vanishing people for a while. I don’t buy it. Second, we don’t actually know for sure that it ever stopped. During those insane years when every day must have felt like a giant crater had opened up in the world and they were all slowly sliding down into hell, people would have been much less inclined than usual to notice what was happening on their own doorsteps.
Consider the case of twenty-year-old Sharon Grey.
Sharon stole her father’s Studebaker and left her home in Flint, Michigan in the dark of night on September 18th, 1965. She was running away, fed up of her controlling parents. She wanted to be an artist and move to New York. They wanted her to be a nurse. She yearned for hedonism, activism, and the bohemian life she saw nightly on the news. Greenwich village beckoned. So, she took matters into her own hands and lit out for the territories. Maybe she even made it to New York and realized her dream, but if so, she did it without the car, which the police found parked four blocks from Abigail House. But of Sharon, there was no trace. None of the boards had been pried loose from the window of the house, and there were no telltale items on the floor of the stairs to suggest her supernatural removal from the world. The police searched the house, found nothing, and moved on. But all these years later, it seems odd that of all the places to stop between Flint and New York, her car should turn up in a suburb northeast of Columbus, instead of downtown, which would have been the more logical place for a traveler to call it a night. But nobody saw it happen and nobody really cared. The world had bigger concerns. Even her parents didn’t seem all that eager to
learn her fate. It would later emerge that they viewed their daughter as an embarrassment. She was not, they would say, religious. She was headstrong, disrespectful, and unwilling to follow the path they thought best for her, which led to frequent public arguments that reflected badly upon their family as a whole. It mortified them that she had run away. That she had stolen her father’s car to do it rendered her no better than a common thief. Thus, they settled for the fantasy that their errant daughter had found her rightful place among the heathens, homosexuals, and hippies in the cesspit of New York, where if they were lucky, she would stay.
The next notable event occurred on April 30th, 1966, an unfortunate date that would forever after connect it, and the house, to Anton LaVey’s opening of The Church of Satan in San Francisco, which happened on the same day. There are enough websites out there dedicated to forging and discussing theories about these two disparate events, all of them ridiculous, so I won’t waste time on them here, but for would-be Satan worshippers or those of a Gothic bent, the iconic imagery of dozens of dogs and cats camped out on the lawn of the house on Abigail Lane, all of them unmoving, all facing the house...well, it’s easy to see the appeal, if only for recruitment purposes. The animals got a short writeup in the local rags, little more than a sidebar, but in 1982, in one of her nonfiction pieces for Analog, science fiction author Patricia Burr [writing under her nom de plume of J.A. Kennedy to circumvent the sexism so prevalent in publishing at the time], speculated that the animals were lured to the site either by high-frequency soundwaves or a peculiarly strong magnetic field unregistered by humans. She bemoaned the missed opportunity for proper scientific study of the phenomenon, the absence of empirical evidence leaving the door open for decades of preposterous theories, the most prominent and outrageous of them being that the house was recruiting animals for an army to overthrow the human race!
We Live Inside Your Eyes Page 15