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This page last updated on 01/26/2019. Copyright © 2001-2019 by Russ Meyer |
My first foray into this house was when Dianne, Lori, and I rescued a trapped
puppy that was crying forlornly in the basement. I remember sitting on a
bench under a rose trellis that framed the front door, picking pears off the
huge pear tree that overhung the driveway, and finding a crocheted doily inside
the house that I still have. In the barn I fingered the harness and horse
collars hanging on the wall, peered inside an old car or truck, and read some
newspapers from the 1920's or 30's that I discovered in a wooden steamer trunk
with a rounded lid. Back in the trees behind the house I explored a one
room school house that still had desks and books in it, and wish now that I
would have taken a few of those books. The grounds must have been pretty
extensive with nearly half of it in woods, and there were several other
outbuildings that I never got around to exploring. One day I saw a For
Sale sign on the front lawn of the 3-story house, and when the new owners moved
in my explorations came to an end. As I wrote this story, I remembered
there had been several old 2-3 story houses in the area (one of them was my
friend’s house). If you can imagine only these houses and the woods and a
single dirt road, I think you would have a fair idea of how this area must have
looked back in the early 1900's. The Creepy House - Washington late 1980's I have been in a lot of abandoned houses over the years, but none of them have ever given me the creeps like the house down the hill from Nelson’s did. Our horse stayed in the corral next to the creepy house for about a year while Mom and Dad were busy selling theirs and building a new one, so I would drive out every afternoon to feed him. Right from the start the pump house gave me horrible creeps. The kids and I explored the upstairs of the house only a few times, but stopped going up there when we all got the heebie-jeebies; I always felt something was sneaking around downstairs peering into the car, examining our footprints in the dust, watching us from outside the house, and listening to our voices from the bottom of the stairwell when we weren’t looking. The house took on an even more sinister air when we discovered dead cats laying on the ground outside the back door. They were just dried up skin and bones, but it looked like they had been deliberately set there. A day or so later, we saw that one of the dead cats had been propped up in the windowsill that hadn’t been there before. I figured whoever was doing this didn’t want to be seen, because we only found the dead cats by the back door which was hidden from view by the woods. I wonder why the pump house seemed so creepy, and why I felt something was downstairs while we were upstairs, and why someone would be fiddling with dead cats and prop one up in the windowsill? This story would make a good plot for a creepy movie! jlb:September 2004 |
