After thanking them for their time, Jimmy led Mary back to the truck. “Indian burial mounds and funeral homes? You’ve gotta be shittin’ me.”
Mary shivered, unable to believe it herself.
Her daddy went on a tear when he got back to the house. “Start packin’ Jenny,” he bellowed before he was even all the way inside. “Go get them boxes we were gonna burn from the barn. We’re leaving.”
“Why?” Jenny jumped up from the couch where she’d been taking a nap. “Where we going?”
“I don’t know yet,” Jimmy admitted, “but I’ll figure it out. Don’t worry. Just get the kids started.”
Once they’d all hauled the boxes in from the barn and had sorted through them Jimmy left again. He was gone for awhile but when he got back his face was grim.
“Well, the good news is that Brian has a place for us, that trailer in town he rents out. People just moved yesterday and he hadn’t even put it in the paper yet. Bad news is that the landlord’s pretty pissed and won’t give us back our deposit.”
Jenny’s face fell at the thought of going back to another trailer but anywhere had to be better than where they were. “How we gonna move without the deposit?”
“When I told him what was going on he said to just move on in, that we’d worry about paying him next month,” Jimmy said. “To be honest, he wasn’t shocked. Said he and Sherry had gotten a bad feel from the place themselves and almost said something to us. Wish they had now.”
Mary and her sisters were upstairs throwing their clothes and toys into boxes from Kroger and Walmart when they heard the car pull up out front. A skinny man in a baseball hat and dirty jeans got out and marched up to the porch. Within minutes they could hear their father’s voice ringing through the walls.
“What’s he saying?” Brenda asked, walking to the bedroom door and straining her ears.
“I don’t know,” Mary answered back.
With Mary leading the way, the kids tiptoed down the stairs and stopped at the bottom. Their father was standing in the middle of the living room floor, gesturing wildly to the man in front of him. The man’s face was red, like it might explode, but he wasn’t saying anything.
Mary slid down and sat on the bottom stair, pressing her face through the spindles in the bannister. The others did the same. Nobody seemed to notice they were there.
“A funeral home!” Jimmy was shouting. “You put a bunch of little kids in a goddamned funeral home?”
“It was a house before it was a funeral parlor,” the man said weakly, unable to match Jimmy’s temper. “It’s a good house, big enough for you and all your babies.”
“Yeah, and whatever the hell else lives here. Big enough for the kids, big enough for the haints, big enough for the damned demons. Hell, it’s big enough for all of us. One big happy family!”
Mary bit her lip to suppress a giggle.
“Look, nobody’s ever complained before,” the man argued. “Others have lived here.”
“Yeah, for how long?” Jimmy demanded.
When the man didn’t answer right away Jimmy laughed, a dry brittle sound. “Ha! That’s what I thought. And you never stopped to think there might be something wrong with it?”
“Look, I ain’t giving you your deposit back. You signed a lease for six months. You ought to be glad I’m not gonna charge you for the next five months, as is my legal right. We have a contract,” he said prissily.
“Well I’ll tell you what you can do with your goddamned contract,” Jimmy sputtered. “You can shove it up your–“
Brenda coughed then and both men looked over at the staircase. The sight of the five young children with their hollow eyes and pale skin sitting bunched together on the stairs must have done something to the man because the red drained from his face and he managed to look ashamed.
“Well, it don’t matter,” he said at last. “I’ll find somebody to rent it. It’s a good house.”
And with that, he sailed out the door.
“Keep packing kids,” Jimmy said. “Keep packing.”
They didn’t stop.
Back with Laura
“And then we left,” Natalie said. “We got up real early that next morning. Uncle Brian and Aunt Sherry brought a U–Haul and their pickup and we left. We didn’t even go to bed that night.”
“Fastest move I ever done,” Jenny muttered. “Didn’t even get a chance to clean it.”
“We needed out of there,” Jimmy explained. “Just as fast as we could do it.”
My mother and I, who had sat there in silence while they took turns telling their tale, didn’t know how to reply. We were speechless.
Laura left to get something from the kitchen and when she came back Jimmy pulled her down to his lap and gave her a squeeze. “So you can see why we wanted you to keep this one. No need for her to suffer along with the rest of us.”
Laura snuggled into her father’s shoulder and sighed.
“Daddy, we don’t never have to go back there do we?” Brenda asked. Bobby’s little face filled with horror at the thought and he shook his head vehemently and covered his eyes.
“I can promise you we will never ever go back. Or live in anything like that again,” Jimmy swore. “I will always protect my babies.”
The kids all gazed adoringly at him, trust in their eyes. The gold cross above the couch glittered in the sunlight.
Now
Fifteen years passed from the moment they moved out of the house to the next chapter of the story.
Although the children never returned to the house, not even for the few things they accidentally left behind in the rush, we continued to talk about it. As the years went by Natalie and Brenda forgot many of the things that happened. Candy, of course, was thankfully too little to remember her ordeal and can recall nothing of ever having lived there.
I didn’t forget.
When I thought of being scared, I would always think of Laura’s house and what went on there. It seemed to affect me as much, or even more than it did Laura who tried to move past it all and consider it nothing more than a bad dream.
For Laura, the majority of those two weeks were spent with me. That time for her was trying on bathing suits, walking to the mall to get banana splits, sneaking into “Far and Away” and giggling at the bowl over Tom Cruise’s private parts. She didn’t live the horror the rest of her siblings saw, but I believe a part of her always felt guilty that she wasn’t there to protect them. Laura was, and still is, a mothering type.
Why didn’t the others come home with me? I don’t know. Perhaps at that point it was because Laura had seen the most. She’d felt the push from behind while carrying the mattress. She’d seen the woman in the bathroom, had been locked in her own bedroom…The younger ones might not have had a good grasp of what was going on until much later.
At the age of twenty–six I lived two counties over from the farm house in the country and was working as a family therapist. On one particularly slow afternoon a group of my co–workers and I were sitting in my office, swapping stories about our childhoods.
Dena, a woman my age and not someone I knew well, caught everyone’s attention when she spoke up and said, “Well, when I was a kid we lived in a haunted house. Anyone want to hear about that?”
Of course everyone wanted to know the details so we sat in rapturous attention while she told us of the disembodied voices at night, the plodding of men’s work boots up and down the stairs, their Bibles and crucifixes destroyed or covered with pieces of paper...
A small bell began ringing in the back of my head but I ignored it. Laura’s house was more than two hours away, in a tiny town that nobody had ever heard of. Dena wasn’t even from that county. Surely most haunted houses had the same stories anyway. It had to be a coincidence.
“And then there was the embalming table in the basement,” she shuddered. “I mean, how were we to know we’d rented a funeral parlor?”
There was no denying it then.
“Dena,”
I began with excitement, nearly falling out of my chair. “Can you tell me anything about the kitchen?”
“Sure,” she shrugged, looking at me a little oddly. “It had a trapdoor going down to the cellar and this big red stain that we couldn’t get clean. My mom always thought it was blood. Probably was.”
In stunned silence I let the memories of Laura’s house wash over me. Somehow the house had come back around to me, more than fifteen years later and through someone I barely knew in a county that didn’t even contain the house.
I then proceeded to describe the rest of the floorplan to her, the best climbing tree in the front yard, the barn in the back…
As Dena listened her mouth dropped open slightly. “So you lived there too?” she asked in bewilderment.
“Not me, but my friend. They only stayed two weeks, though. The ghosts were too much for them.”
“Well thank God,” she swore. “You know, part of us always wondered if we were overacting and just hearing things. Finally, after all these years, I can go back to my mom and tell her that we weren’t crazy after all.”
Several years later I posted bits of both of their experiences online. Although I didn’t offer the address, I did give the name of the small town it was in and described the house. As luck would have it, someone who lived in a farm nearby saw my posting. Excited, he traveled over to his neighbor’s house and knocked on the door, ready to tell the owner stories about their home.
They were not amused.
There was something else about his visit that perplexed him and he felt he had to share it with me.
“What year and month did your friend live there?” he asked me in an email.
When I told him the dates of Laura’s residency, he wrote me back. “It can’t be that house, then. The person who lives there has been there twenty years. She’s never rented it out.”
Figuring he must have gone to a different house, I had him take a picture of the one he visited. He did so and sent it to me. There was no doubt about it, it was the same house. We continued to write back and forth, trying to solve this frustrating mystery.
“Maybe it was the one next door,” he finally offered. He took a picture of it and sent it to me as well. Although there were some similarities, the house next door had certain architectural elements that I didn’t remember Laura’s house possessing. In addition, it lacked a front porch and there was no barn in the back.
Still, it had been a long time ago and my memory wasn’t what it had once been. I sent both images to Dena and asked her to pick out the one she’d lived in.
“It’s definitely the first one,” she said in her reply, picking out the one I believed it to be as well. “The other one looks like a barn and I would definitely remember having lived in a barn.”
I showed both images to Laura as well and she also picked out the same house.
I didn’t press the issue with the gentleman any further but the exchange continues to bother me. Was the woman lying, forgetting when she moved in, or was something else going on? If she had indeed lived there for twenty years then neither Laura nor Dena could have rented it. Yet they both had. I knew Laura had lived there at least; we’d been to the house several times and watched them move in.
A few weeks later my husband and I went for a drive to see if I could find it again. As we neared the main road I had him slow down. “What’s that sign marker say?” I asked, rolling down my window and straining my eyes to get a better look.
“There was an Indian village here,” he summarized. “One of the only ones in the state. This whole area was a Native American town, more or less.”
“I didn’t think Indians really lived in Kentucky,” I mused. “I thought they just came here to hunt and stuff.”
“More and more evidence supports the fact that there were at least two main settlements here,” my Anthropologist husband confirmed. “This was apparently one of them.”
I thought about that as we continued down the long stretch of country road. A settlement meant Indian burial grounds, maybe even a skirmish. Who knew what all had gone on in the area.
Soon, we passed the house the man had thought it could be, the one with the barn–like roof. “That’s not it,” I said as we slowed down in front of it. “Laura’s house had a big yard. This one is almost touching the road.”
On down the road I had him slow down again. “There,” I pointed, “that’s it!”
The house had changed very little. It still had the barn in the back, the long gravel driveway, the big front porch, and the big yard. The climbing tree, however, was gone.
As I whipped out my camera to take a quick shot before we sped away I could see a large black Labrador. He was digging frantically by the small window at the side of the house, clawing at the dirt as though his life depended upon it.
Why?
Everyone wants “answers,” including me. Why was the house haunted? What was haunting it? Was it a disgruntled ghost? A demon? Leftover energy from another time? How have other people been able to live in it with presumably little spiritual activity? Why was Dena’s family able to live in it longer (a year) than Laura’s?
I have several theories about the conditions surrounding the house that led to spiritual activity. Some of them are well documented.
Both families were informed that the house had once been a funeral home. I haven’t been able to find any information to verify this, including through property records. The house as an alleged former funeral home probably had something to do with the negative energy that surrounded it, however, if that is indeed true. If it wasn’t a funeral home then the table in the cellar remains unexplainable. I ventured to the cellar myself and saw the table and up close it definitely didn’t look like a regular work table up close. It had a hole at both ends, with a sloping floor underneath, and two drains in which to catch liquid runoff from the table. Both families were convinced it was used for embalming.
Still, taking into account that it very well could’ve been a funeral home at one time you have to figure that when you have a place that sees so many souls passing through it, you’re bound to get the good along with the bad. And, as the world goes, the hunger of the darkness is insatiable. Positive energy dissipates quickly without having a willing conduit but negative energy will grow claws and dig in, unwilling to let go. There may have been a few lost souls hanging onto the place, trapped inside the walls of the last place their earthly bodies knew.
During my research I continued to hear additional stories about the satanic rituals that allegedly took place there but I give these little stock. This was the late eighties, after all, and a time when the great devil worshipping scare of Eastern Kentucky was going on. (A very fascinating phenomena that I write about more in–depth in my book Haunted Estill County. What it basically comes down to is that most empty buildings at that time were rampant with rumors regarding satanic rituals and those involved with the counterculture movement were often dubbed as “Satanist,” usually based on nothing more than their clothing and music styles.)
Still, if the house was indeed empty for long periods of time then I have no doubt teenagers and random mischief makers hung out there. That’s just what happens. Maybe some partied, and maybe some really did bring in Ouija boards and candles. But I take the satanic rituals story with a small grain of salt.
The Native American history of the general region is true, however, and well–documented. The state has now even placed historic markers in several parts of that end of the county to denote the Native American settlement and history.
According to my research, the area was home to the largest, and perhaps even the only, permanent Native American settlement. The village’s original name is even what gives us our state name. Daniel Boone was once captured and kept prisoner there. It’s suspected that thousands of Native Americans lived in the vicinity off and on for years. They hunted, traded, and made their homes there. It was a beautiful, fertile valley and had plentiful resources. The village co
vered more than three–thousand acres. Everyone wanted it, including the settlers. The settlement was eventually burnt to the ground and the only proof that it was ever there are a few of the burial mounts that haven’t been disturbed. Unfortunately, many were disturbed over the years.
Not only did the inhabitants die of natural causes, but settlers talked of seeing a fire pit with a locust pole, a place where occupants were burned after committing dire crimes. And then, of course, there were the killings committed by the settlers themselves.
Are there some unsettled natives roaming the lands long after their deaths? Perhaps. A farm house (not Laura’s former house but another one not too far away) was built on top of one particular burial mound. The bones were disturbed and discarded as the walls went up. This was, of course, back before we attempted to preserve the burial mounds for what they are and took more care with the Native remains. This particular spot is on record for the remains that were uncovered. It’s highly possible that there are others out there underneath structures that we aren’t aware of.
I’ve continued to conduct research on the valley and frequently cruise the internet seeking stories from those who might be familiar with the house. Nothing has ever come up. I hope that in a future update I’ll be able to talk more with Dena’s family and gather more experiences regarding their time in the home.
Author’s Note
Although the preceding story is true, it goes without saying that I wasn’t there inside the house at the time of the events. I am going on the words of ten witnesses. I have no reason to doubt them. There are many aspects of the story that I can verify myself. The house did have a peculiar vibe to it. My mother and I still talk about how unsettled we felt during our brief time there.
Two Weeks: A True Haunting (True Hauntings Book 3) Page 8