War, as they say, continues to take its toll long after the last shot has been fired. In Lowell’s case, the house on Abigail Lane was instrumental in his undoing.
V
After trying and failing to make Katrina Lowell responsible for the mortgage payments on the abandoned house, the property was foreclosed, then rehabbed (without incident) and prepped for resale in March of 1975.
The realtor charged with reselling it was a forty-three-year-old woman named Sandy Radcliffe from Dayton, Ohio. Sandy worked for Dominion Realty, and was known, not just for her high turnover rate, but for taking a keen interest in the history of the properties she was tasked to sell. She had always thought it prudent to know what she was selling beyond the scant details provided her by the office.
From the beginning, Number 56 gnawed at her. Much of it was Lowell’s suicide. Even though it hadn’t happened inside the house, he had still been the last to live there, and she wondered what might have driven him to such a tragic end.
Her own younger brother George had died in Vietnam. Her older brother Graham had also served in the marines and had come home changed in ways she struggled to comprehend. Gone was the quick-to-smile gangly kid who’d once pledged to be her “forever protector”, who’d given her away at her wedding, and had never failed to call on her birthday and on Christmas. He was so unknown to her now it was as if he’d died over there too. He spent all his time listening to old jazz records and writing lyrics in journals. His room was stacked full of them. He was sour and sallow and seldom left their mother’s house. At Thanksgiving, she’d offered, in the most tactful way possible, to get him a deal on a place of his own. His response had been to upend his plate of turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy on her dining room table before throwing his wine glass against the wall.
They hadn’t spoken since.
Thus, when she was assigned the listing of the house on Abigail Lane, Doug Lowell’s story had a profound effect on her. She couldn’t help but dread a similar fate for Graham. The light in his eyes had gone out and she felt powerless to protect him the way he’d sworn to protect her all those years ago. “Leave him be, he’ll figure it out on his own,” was her husband’s advice, but that was his answer to everything, and in this case, ignoring the problem seemed like a terrible mistake. But what else was she to do?
With no easy answers, she distracted herself with research, and was intrigued by the information she uncovered. How, she wondered, had the house avoided closer scrutiny with all that had happened there over the years? She continued to dig, and thus, became the first person to connect the disappearances of Elmore Washington, Harold and Bud Wilson, the peculiar incidences of people and animals awaking to find themselves on the yard outside, and the Lowell family’s abandonment of the house, even if the full scope of Doug’s experiences hadn’t yet been published. Had she not shown more interest in the house than was necessary to sell it, I doubt we’d know anything about it today.
A lifelong believer in the mystic, Sandy balked at her boss, Lou Terry’s suggestion that she forget all she had learned, and countered that, while skeptics would be chased away by a house with a mysterious and possibly paranormal past, the more open-minded would love it, and might be willing to pay more than it was worth in the hope that they would experience something themselves. Though unconvinced, and unenthused by the idea of the property becoming a ‘magnet for weirdos’, Lou let her run with it.
Before submitting the listing to the customary venues, Sandy intended to write up a piece for Fate Magazine, but first, wanted to get a sense of the place herself. It’s hard to know whether she genuinely believed there was something unnatural about the house, or if she just got a kick from the idea of selling it that way, but the article never happened. When the house eventually got sold, Sandy did not make the sale, because on the night of April 16th, 1975, she too vanished off the face of the earth. She’d argued with her husband Jack earlier. It would emerge in the subsequent investigation into her disappearance that the cause of that argument was her decision to return to the house after sharing with him what had happened three nights prior, an account he’d considered the first sign that maybe her big brother was not the only lunatic in the family.
“She came home on the night of the 12th in a frenzy. Manic in a way I’d never seen,” Jack told reporters, and it’s hard when you look at that news footage to not be repelled by the fame-hungry glint in his eye. A good actor, he was not, and his eagerness to be someone of note shines through despite the gravity of the situation. He was like a man who finds out his neighbor has won the lottery. He has no claim to it, but figures if he plays his cards right, he might end better off than he started. True to form, he milked the media attention from his wife’s disappearance for the better part of a decade before dropping dead of a heart attack outside a movie theater in Chillicothe. He’d been waiting in line to see Police Academy. “But she wasn’t scared,” he said. “I mean, maybe a little. If anything, she was excited. Shaking. She had this look, like she’d...I dunno, seen God or something, or a magic trick.”
Rather than test your patience with the rest of his rambling account, I’ll summarize it for you here.
It was not God that Sandy Radcliffe saw that night in Number 56.
It was a lighthouse.
THE POWER HAD NOT YET been turned back on. That wouldn’t happen until the house was ready to show, so Sandy brought a flashlight. It was close to seven p.m., but at that time of year, the sun was a distant fire suffocating under the smoke of encroaching dark. She did not feel apprehensive as she made her way up the driveway to the house. Instead, she felt the first latent strands of the unbridled excitement Jack would see in full bloom later.
In truth, she did not expect to encounter anything mysterious inside Number 56, for while she believed in the supernatural, she had never directly encountered it, and this was, after all, not the first house she’d represented with a strange reputation. She recalled a previous client who’d sold his three-bedroom ranch over on Beaumont Street after claiming he could hear voices taunting him from the basement. Those voices turned out to be nothing more insidious than antiquated plumbing, which left her more curious about the man than the house. But that was always the way, wasn’t it? Houses are empty shells of wood and brick and plaster, devoid of souls, or intent. It’s us, the creatures that are installed within them, that ultimately define their character. Still, Sandy wanted there to be something inside that house, wanted to brush against the other side if only so she could continue to resist the idea that this, a finite and frequently cruel life, is all there is. Someday, perhaps sooner than she wished, her loved ones would die. Her father already had, and she desperately wanted to think of him as anything other than a cluster of bones buried in the cold uncaring earth. And if her brother didn’t get the help he so desperately needed, his story would probably reach a premature conclusion too. She wanted to see them again, somewhere, somehow, wanted some sign that we go on.
As she stood on the stoop fishing through her keys, a soft light washed over her and then was gone. At first, she assumed it nothing more than the headlights of a car reflected in the living room window, but she hadn’t heard an engine. Curious, she looked to her right, toward the deserted street, and a moment later the light flared again, drawing her attention back to the window once more. The blinds were partially open, and as she watched, the light flashed a third time, a glow from somewhere upstairs, as of a flashlight beam from inside one of the bedrooms. Sandy hesitated, ground the meat of her thumb over the ridges of the front door key. Was someone inside? It was hardly uncommon for vagrants to seek out unoccupied homes for shelter, a situation that had become significantly worse since the war. But how many vagrants carried flashlights? The possibility of a burglar seemed more likely, except that there was nothing inside left to steal. The notion of stripping copper wire from abandoned homes had not yet become the problem it would decades later, and even if it had, the house on Abigail Lane had been fitted with al
uminum wire, though this substitute was problematic and would soon be phased out as an alternative.
Quietly, Sandy tested the front door and found it locked. Perhaps the interloper had admitted himself via the back door. She considered calling the police, or at the very least, running to her car and getting the hell out of there. She knew it was what a sensible person would do. And later, when a horrified Jack asked her why she hadn’t, why she’d instead proceeded into the house, she gave him a queer smile, her eyes still filled with magic. Her response would become as integral a part of the house’s story as the building itself: “It felt like it was calling to me.”
Sandy opened the door.
Inside, she found only darkness in the empty living room, but cool blue light splashed against the wall at the top of the stairs in ten-second intervals. Turn around, she told herself. He still doesn’t know you’re here. But even as she counseled herself, she didn’t believe it was a man or a burglar of any kind up there sweeping his light around. For one, such carelessness would not be typical of an intruder. No thief worth his salt would allow the light to be seen so clearly from outside the house. And for another, she still did not feel uneasy. Instead, that flutter in her belly had graduated to a steady hum of excitement in her bones. She sensed no danger here. What she sensed instead was the presence of...something else, something different.
Trembling, she crossed the room to the foot of the stairs and looked up.
Darkness.
In a whisper, she counted down from ten.
10...9...
Put one foot on the bottom step. It creaked beneath her weight.
...8...7...
She grabbed hold of the railing and pulled herself up another step. The darkness above remained unbroken, but now the hum she felt in her bones seemed to come from elsewhere, a wave of tangible distortion, like the tension in the air before a violent storm.
...6...5...
Another step and the hair prickled all over her body, like she was standing close to a power line. Breath held, she mounted the last two steps and stood at the top of the stairs, eyes wide, waiting.
...4...3...
In that moment she felt like she imagined the astronauts had as they took their first step down into the unknown. That was only six years ago and until it happened, nobody believed it possible. It sounded like madness, like talk of Atlantis and gods. A man on the moon? Preposterous.
...2...
And yet, by some miracle of science and physics, they’d done it, and now here she stood on the precipice of something equally unknown and terrifying and exciting and—
...1.
Brilliant light exploded in her eyes and turned the upstairs hallway white. She gasped and covered her eyes, but only for a moment, afraid that she might miss something.
The light passed. Sandy blinked to let her eyes adjust to the new dark, and as focus returned, her heart soared, her mouth popping open to allow the exit of a trembling awestruck breath.
She was standing near the edge of a cliff, the long grass blowing in a stiff breeze that carried to her the briny smell of the ocean below. Slowly, she shook her head to deny the reality of what she was seeing, even as the stars, each one binary, emerged from the darkness left in the wake of the light. The light flared again and she shut her eyes, convinced that when she opened them again, this place, this otherwhere would be gone and she would find herself once more standing on the landing of an ordinary house. The possibility of this filled her with inexplicable sadness.
But when she looked, it was still there. To her left, anchored atop a chaos of jagged rocks, stood an impossibly tall and narrow white column of stone. Around it, raged a troubled sea. From base to peak, the lighthouse was tattooed with dark symbols, jagged hieroglyphs, or perhaps it was just ivy or some other kind of creeping plant. Sandy did not know enough about vegetation to say whether it was even possible for it to grow here. Here. She uttered a small hysterical giggle. And where was here, exactly? Heaven? The Twilight Zone? The languid lighthouse beam found her, as if trying to scrub such foolish notions from her mind, and this time, as the brilliant light blazed into her, her head filled with the sound of old violin music played on scratched vinyl, a small connection to the real world, and then the beam and the music moved on. In its wake, Sandy, eyes filled with tears, fell to her knees. The long grass hissed against her legs. The air blew her hair around her face as she followed a new source a light over the cliff edge to her right, where she saw, perhaps 400 feet below, a long narrow stretch of beach, the cobalt-colored sand glowing as if in response to moonlight. But there was no moon, only a small lonesome bonfire, which, like the lighthouse, felt like a lantern in the night and a lure to her soul. At the far end of the beach, lofty cliffs rose up into the sky, their crowns studded with spindly limbed trees that swayed and whispered in the breeze. There was little to distinguish this place as otherworldly other than the fact that it was here, at the top of the stairs, and the sense deep inside her that if she spent the rest of her life traveling earthly coasts, she would never find its equal.
She looked back over her shoulder, expecting the house to be gone, expecting to see a continuation of this strange maritime plain behind her, but the stairs were still there, the living room an ordinary sight rendered alien by comparison to what she had seen and where she felt she belonged. She looked around the edges of this reality where it met the house but saw no seam, no demarcation where one became the other. The harder she tried, the more a headache started to drum itself up from the center of her skull—Don’t. Concern. Yourself. With. Such. Things—so she stopped and looked back out from the lighthouse to her left, to the roiling sea ahead, and finally back to the bonfire down on the beach. The flames moved liquidly, as if time was different here, but the firelight spoke to her. It suggested that her presence in this place was just the start of something magical, that to truly begin her adventure, she must come to the fire, warm herself, and commit to what lay ahead.
And oh, how she wanted to. How she felt she must, that everything in her life from the turbulent to the quotidian had been a stepping stone to this moment, to this remarkable place. But what of her old life? What of Jack? As terrible as it seemed, in this face of this miracle, those things did not seem like compelling reasons to abandon her journey. Not that she would tell her husband that. Instead—
—SHE TOLD HIM SHE WALKED home that night because she was so (elated) disturbed by what she had seen, she had not trusted herself to drive. This was mostly true, but it was designed to allow her an excuse to return, which she did, and that was the last anyone ever saw of her.
In the weeks after her disappearance, Jack speculated to the media that the whole thing was a hoax, that she was doing it all to raise the value of the house. He even applauded her gumption. But as the weeks turned to months, and it became clear he had seen the last of the woman to whom he’d been married for eleven years, he began to suspect she’d been having an affair and had simply run off, a suspicion aggravated by the discovery of Sandy’s wedding ring on the second to last step of the stairs at Number 56. He held onto this story only until he realized he could profit from the paranormal angle, and then his beliefs changed again. The night she had come home so possessed by excitement, she told Jack all she had discovered about the house, the disappearances, the reports of animals and on that one memorable occasion, people, gathering in the lawn. She described for him what she had seen on the second-floor landing, the world that appeared there, all of which he thought was nonsense, and quite frankly, insane. But in later interviews, once he’d decided to cash in on Sandy’s disappearance, he mentioned something he hadn’t before, and to this day, it’s unknown whether it was actually something she said, or just something he cobbled together to enhance the story. In the interview, he said the more he thought back on that night, the more certain he was that wherever his wife had gone, she’d gone there willingly, and he hoped wherever that place might be, that she was happy there. Then, he muttered something inau
dible which the interviewer asked him to clarify. With a shrug, Jack repeated himself: “I said I hope she’s happy in Valerine.” He went on to explain that that was the name Sandy used for the place she had visited at the top of the stairs. At the time, he’d thought she said Valentine, until she said it again. When he asked her what that meant, she looked puzzled, as if she had no idea what he was talking about, as if it was her first time hearing the word.
Thus, the house claimed another soul.
At the time, the police had a less fantastical theory about what happened to Sandy Radcliffe but didn’t have enough to make it stick. It’s a theory that’s been revisited ad nauseum in books, articles, podcasts and TV shows, despite ample evidence to the contrary.
They suspected her husband might have killed her.
VI
In a just world, a house connected to so many incidents would have been the subject of intense scrutiny by the police and the media, and yet, aside from each individual case and the investigations they merited, few people still seemed willing to look upon it as a culprit. Bad things happen all the time. People go missing for many reasons: depression, dissatisfaction with their lives or their spouses, money problems, a need to hide or start over. Humans are complicated creatures; houses are not. Still, once the Radcliffe case petered out, the house on Abigail Lane stood empty again for another four years. People might not have believed there was anything sinister or otherworldly about the place, but skepticism is always easier from a safe distance.
We Live Inside Your Eyes Page 17