Waaay back in 2021, I wrote a blog post here about a time in my childhood when my brother told me he saw elves in our yard ( like, real live gnomes or elves or whatever) that he saw coming out of a burrow in our yard. Obviously this was fiction, which I eventually figured out. (Hey, I was four years old!)
In that post I mentioned that my brother was friends with a neighbor boy whose family owned an old farmhouse that was across the road from where we lived, a house they didn’t actually live in, and I tossed out the intriguing tidbit that there was more I could say about this house but it was a story for another time. Well, I guess now is that time! Aren’t you feeling so special and lucky right now???
First a brief background about where I grew up. Yeah, yeah. I know. But it will make the picture of this place all the more vivid if you know how small and remote and utterly boring the town I grew up in was.
To call the place I grew up in a “town” would be quite a stretch of the imagination . Even calling it a village is probably a bit much. It was literally one narrow road that contained a handful of houses, a bar, a small park, a town hall ( why it had a town hall I have no idea) a church, an elementary school ( grades 1-4) and an old slaughterhouse that had been converted into a dance hall, which sat at the end of the single road. In fact, the buildings were lined up along the road in the same exact order I just listed them. It took literally all of a minute to pass from one end of ‘town’ to the other. Probably more like 30 seconds. (The former slaughterhouse later gained some fame amongst true crime junkies for being the location of a double kidnapping and murder which went unsolved for nearly 30 years). At any rate, my home town was just a bend in the road, like many other small unincorporated bend-in-the-road towns, set in the middle of a rural county that was mostly farms. My family moved there in 1973 after my parents bought 13 acres of old farmland on the extreme west end of the one road that I just mentioned. (Less than a quarter of a mile away, next door to the elementary school I attended, was the former slaughterhouse now dance hall where a young couple would be abducted seven years later.) My parents had wanted to live in the country, and after buying the land a couple years earlier, built a house that we moved into in 1973. Nowadays, nearly 50 years later, the area has become more built up and there are more houses out there than there used to be, including a few subdivisions that were built in another small neighboring town about 5-6 miles away, but back then in the 1970s most of our ‘neighbors’ were farms and we were surrounded on all sides by farm fields, cow pastures and woods.
Across the road from us, and slightly north ( so, kitty-corner more or less) was the remnants of an old farm. All that was left was a single low-slung barn and a rundown farmhouse that sat upon a little hill. The house itself had, at some point , been separated from the barn by the one single road that I had mentioned earlier , which apparently had bisected the small hill the house sat on, so the house and barn were also now located on opposite sides of each other on the road. It always seemed strange to me that they would have put the road right down the middle of the the farm, but I know next to nothing about the town I grew up in, and it’s history, or how it was laid out. I assume that the farm used to be at the end of the road and the house was built on the little hill overlooking the barns and outbuildings but then, at some point, the farm was abandoned or no longer in use, and when the county highway was built, it was decided to continue the east-west road to directly connect to the highway, which ran north-south, and they just cut right through that hill, leaving the house standing alone on a weird little hill, while the barn sat on the opposite side of the new road.
I don’t know who originally owned the farm or whether in my time it was owned by the descendants of that original family, or if the people that owned it in the 70s acquired it later. All I know is that by the time of my memory the house had been empty probably for decades, with one single remaining barn and a weed-filled overgrown field right next to the barn. The hill the house sat on was overgrown with weeds and tall grass and the house was partially obscured by trees and bushes that had overgrown and covered up a lot of it, but you could see parts of it from the road. We never called it the Hippie Hoarder House, by the way ( that’s a new moniker I gave it for this post); it was always called by the last name of the people that owned it, but I have refrained from mentioning it here due to privacy, so I will just refer to it as the “B House”.
When I was a kid, the B House mostly sat quietly through the days, slowly weathering and falling apart, a familiar object in the landscape of my life, but occasionally in the summer there would be signs of life; a volleyball net would be set up in the scrubby, weedy field next to the barn where someone had mowed the grass in a large square. One summer a large speedboat on a trailer was sitting in the field with a “For Sale” sign on it. When the volleyball net appeared, there would usually be a large group of people who would show up also, and there would be a bonfire and music and general partying over the entire weekend. Who these people were I never had an idea. My dad used to refer to them derisively as “the hippies” and he and my mom would look annoyed at their presence even though our house was set very far back from the road, so we couldn’t really hear much of their music or noise, though sometimes we caught a little of it. I got the impression that these were family members and friends of the B family who owned the property, or that they occasionally allowed other friends to use the property for this purpose. The partiers were often young people and they mostly slept in tents or just out in the open in the field, total hippie style, like a miniature Woodstock.
My brother became friends with one of the children in the B family and occasionally this boy, who we’ll call “D”, would invite my brother over to the B House and I was usually allowed to go with him. I was very young, probably kindergarten age, my brother and D would have been in first grade. Everyone knew the family didn’t live at that old farm, they actually lived “in town” ( which town? I am not certain, but there were a few actual towns that were not that far away), but D would often accompany his father and/or older siblings when they came out to the abandoned farm to do whatever it was that they did out there, so when he was there, he would come over to our house and ask us if we wanted to come over and play. One play date occurred during the time the speedboat was in the field and the three of us climbed up and went inside the boat, which had a galley and a sleeping area down below. It was the first time I had seen a boat like that or been on one and we had a lot of fun pretending we were ‘out at sea’. Another time we were over at D’s house was the time I mentioned in the post about the elves; we were playing in the overgrown ‘yard’ of the house and D showed us the weathered garden gnome statues that were hidden amongst the tall weeds and overgrown bushes and then proceeded to pee on one of them which we thought was extraordinarily funny. During these play dates we never went inside the house except for one time, which must have been a Sunday afternoon after one of the ‘party weekends’ . We were playing outside the house and D said we had to be quiet because ‘people were sleeping inside’. I got the impression they were older siblings of his, and I remember being amazed that he had siblings who were adults. I do recall we decided to sneak into the house for some reason and I remember tiptoeing around the people that were laying around on what sparse furniture there was in a room that had been darkened by hanging dark blankets over the windows and that there were empty beer cans and bottles everywhere and the hot air was heavy with stagnant cigarette smoke. The scene later reminded me of some of the day-after-the-party scenes I saw in the movie Animal House.
I’m kind of surprised, actually, that my parents let us go over there at all, considering.
Later in life when I was older I often wondered what they did for bathroom facilities during these party weekends since the house didn’t have running water ( or electricity, I’m pretty sure) anymore. Yikes.
At some point I either heard or asked someone about the B family and I recall being told that the family was very large, that D was the youngest in a family that had many children. My father always made a face when he talked about the family and I got the impression he didn’t think much of them for whatever reason. By the time I entered first or second grade, D no longer attended the same school as we did and I was told they had moved to a different town, so he was in another school district, and thus the play dates came to an end. The family continued to own the property, however, and as I grew older, the empty house and barn became somewhat of a fascination for the local youth. The weekend parties ( the ‘hippie parties’) came to an end at some point in the mid 70s and so from then on the house and barn remained quiet and deserted most of the time. Occasionally a truck would be seen there, presumably belonging to someone in the family, parked next to the barn, but I rarely ever saw anyone there. Other kids in my class at school said the B family were “junk collectors” and that the barn was full of ‘old stuff’. It wasn’t until my classmates and I were older that the curiosity about what kind of ‘old stuff’ there was began to get the better of us.
I was probably twelve or thirteen before I braved a peek inside the barn. It was set very close to the road and I rode past it constantly on my bicycle every time I went to the park, to school or to my friend’s house ( which was next to the school). The elementary school only had four grades, so I no longer attended that school, now I rode a bus “to town” to attend the junior high school there, but the kids who lived in my home town who were my age, that I palled around with sometimes, liked to hang out in the school playground sometimes instead of the park. Other kids said there were old magazines in the barn and old TVs and lots of other stuff. The first time I peeked in there I was by myself. I felt like a criminal, sneaking into the barn, which wasn’t locked, by the way. The doors were all functional but had no chains or padlocks to keep people out. Also, there was a big sliding door on the side of the barn that was never shut all the way. It was always half open. I felt kind of like a criminal but also I felt the thrill of doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing and also found I really liked snooping.
The old barn, like most barns, had a large central open area with a hay loft and then various smaller rooms or areas throughout. It was 1982 and I had never heard the term “hoarder” and the A&E TV show American Pickers was 28 years into the future ( the TV series Hoarders was 27 years into the future), but if you’ve ever watched an episode of that show, you’d probably get an idea of what the barn looked like. There was stuff everywhere. Literally packed in everywhere, with barely room to get around it in some places. There were old TVs, indeed. Dozens of old TVs of all shapes and sizes and various vintages. There were also radios. I couldn’t even count how many radios. Big, small, transistor, you name it. And bicycles, dozens of bicycles and tricycles, leaned up against walls and other things, in layers, everywhere. There were also magazines and books. Boxes and crates of old books and magazines, magazines stacked four feet high. There were probably newspapers too, but it was hard to take it all in. I could see why some of the magazines had piqued the interest of some of the neighborhood boys who had come in the barn to snoop– a great deal of them were vintage Playboy magazines. To my recollection, the cover art hairstyles and clothes seemed to point to the majority of the magazines being from the 1950s and 1960s. There was A LOT of other stuff too. Some of it was just junk and garbage, some were obviously things bought at auctions or salvaged, like several round-shaped red leather upholstered banquettes that likely came from a defunct restaurant or nightclub that were up in the hay loft with about two dozen naked store mannequins ( which made it extra creepy).
I recall there being other things like car parts, furniture, old vending machines and what I assumed were probably old motors and motor parts and tools, maybe a half-taken-apart snowmobile or two. I wasn’t particularly mechanical at age 12 ( I’m still not) so a lot of what was in the barn was stuff I had no clue what it was. All I could tell you is that there seemed to be tons of stuff, and tons of just junk. None of it was particularly organized very well either, nor was much of it protected or kept clean. The barn was old and dusty and extremely dirty, with big gaps in the roof and sides which let all manner of weather in. And a lot of the items were covered in pigeon poop too, so it wasn’t like this ‘collection’ was being kept pristine for resale.
As for the house, it sat upon it’s little hill like a hulking derelict, the blank windows peeking out from behind overgrown trees and shrubs, looking more drab and dreary with each passing season. I knew little about 19th and early 20th century architectural styles when I was a kid, but an interest later in life led me to occasionally draw upon the fragments of my childhood memories of the house to try and pinpoint a time frame of when the house might have been built. Unfortunately my memory fails me of what a lot of the exterior details of the house looked like, other than the porch and the front door, and that the house was once painted white and was quite tall. I do remember the house had a rather generous porch off to one side and the front door had panels of colored glass on either side.
The photo I found above, of a Queen Anne Farmhouse Style house built c. 1912, is the most similar to what I remember the house looking like. The B House was very like this one, it had a porch off to one side and rounded column porch posts like this one. The B House had a similar window arrangement too, except I recall there being a very large window to the right of the door, like a picture window. This leads me to believe that the B House was probably built during a very similar time period. The Queen Anne style was exceedingly popular from about 1880 to 1910, with Farmhouse styles continuing in popularity up until probably The Great War. Inside the house, I most remember there being a very wide, sweeping front staircase, with a curved banister that led up to a small landing, then the stairs continued at a right angle to the landing, which seemed quite elaborate and fancy for a farmhouse, which leads me to believe the family who built the house were quite prosperous in their day. So, you might be wondering now, how did you know what the staircase looked like? Well………..here’s where I admit to being a bit of a criminal again.
Fast forward to about c.1984. It had been a couple years since I had snuck into the old barn to snoop around, but I hadn’t walked up to the house itself since I was five, when I was an invited guest. In the nearly ten years since then, I had walked and bicycled past it many times, but had never climbed the weird, almost perpendicular cement stairs with an old iron pipe hand rail that led up from the road to the front yard of the house. The house was spooky and people said it was haunted. Other kids had said they had tried to get into the house before, but the doors were either locked or barricaded. In 1984 there wasn’t much for a 14 year old who lived in the sticks to do in the dog days of late summer when boredom began to set in. We didn’t have cable TV in the sticks. There was no such thing as the internet yet or streaming services. We had an ATARI but playing video games inside, in summer, was a total alien idea to us. We at least had a swimming pool, but even that got boring if none of my friends could come over to swim and it was just me and my siblings. I always had chores; mostly in the summer my chores consisted of weeding, watering and picking in my parents’ gigantic garden and our fruit tree orchard, mowing our giant lawn or doing laundry, which in the summer meant hanging it all out on the clothesline. I also babysat in summers, which I hated. Looking for fun new things to do was hard to come by, especially given a lot of the kids my age in my home town lived on farms and had endless farm chores in summer.
One day I got the brilliant idea to snoop around the B House. A cousin of mine was at my house that day and she joined me, as did a couple neighbor boys who could always be counted on to be up for getting into trouble.
When we approached the house, I went to the front door and tried to peer into the house via the colored glass panels on the sides of the door. (Most of the windows on the lower level of the house were boarded over from the inside so you couldn’t get in or see in that way. ) Some of the glass was broken in the panels so there were holes you could peek in. Mostly what I saw was a lot of junk and garbage. I also saw what was barricading the door ( which wasn’t actually locked since the door knob and door mechanism was long gone). The door was blocked from the inside by a push lawn mower that was wedged up against the door. I found that by pushing really hard on the door, I was able to shift the lawn mower enough to open the door wide enough that my small cousin could slip in and then she was able to move the lawn mower enough ( it was very heavy) to open the door wider so I could get in, even though there was so much junk on the floor around the lawn mower that it was almost immoveable. It was a very tight squeeze to say the least. The neighbor boys had gone around to the back side of the house where there was another door, but that one was actually locked, as it always was. They were surprised when they came back around and saw we had gotten in. The interior of the house looked pretty much like the barn, except it definitely looked more like a Hoarder house than a barn full of collected treasures. There was garbage and junk everywhere. It was dirty, dusty and musty. Water stained wallpaper was peeling from walls. There were drifts of dead leaves, dead insects, and dirt in every corner. Plaster had fallen down from the walls and ceilings in large chunks. Broken furnishings, old cans and bottles lay about in piles. The once grand sweeping staircase spoke of the house’s former elegance. Now it looked on the verge of collapse.
We picked our way through the destroyed kitchen and discovered an adjacent room that literally had a mountain of old moldering clothes in the center of the room. It was truly a mountain that took up nearly the whole room and reached almost to the ceiling. I could not fathom how on earth someone could have created such a mountain of old clothes. Or why. Nowadays I am familiar with the term ‘hoarding’ and know that it is a mental disorder, but back then we did not know such a thing existed and we were all astonished. The clothes had been there so long they were faded, stained and smelled pretty nasty. I’m sure there were animals nesting in them too. That pile had probably taken a decade to create.
Though the staircase looked like it was in danger of collapsing, because we were teenagers we didn’t think about dangers like that, and we did go upstairs. The upstairs was as decrepit as the downstairs, but didn’t have as much junk and garbage. In fact, most of the rooms were virtually empty except two, one of which had a large, wildly painted wall mural of a green, pink and purple dragon that took up the majority of one wall. It was a very home-made wall mural and looked like the graffiti you’d find in a back alley behind a seedy club or a 1970s-era crash pad where people were smoking weed and dropping acid. I believe there were also words and other things painted on the wall ( music lyrics maybe) but most of them I couldn’t read because the paint was peeling in spots really bad. The room was empty except for a collection of shot glasses that were lined up in rows across the floor. They were all different shapes and sizes and probably numbered two hundred or more. Their presence and reason for being there, and so precisely lined up, was inexplicable. Same with the one other room that was not empty; while this other room didn’t have a wall mural that looked like something from a fever dream, it did have about a half dozen metal shelving units that contained a wide variety of bric-a-brac which looked mostly vintage–old glassware and figurines, ashtrays, salt and pepper shakers, vases and candy bowls, stuff like you see in large antique malls. These items were extremely dusty also, as if they had been sitting there for years untouched, unlike the shot glass collection, which was not as dusty, and gave me an uneasy feeling that someone had been there in the not so distant past to deposit that collection, despite my belief ( and everyone else’s) that nobody from the B family visited the property anymore, since it had been years since anyone had been seen there. Why, however, and for what purpose the shot glasses had been brought there was a mystery, as was why the collection in the other room had been placed on display shelves in a falling down farmhouse and then left there, was another mystery. So much about that house was a mystery. I’ve often wondered if the B family had inherited the property from a relative who had lived there alone for many years, a family member who also had a hoarding disorder, and after that person had passed away, the task of clearing it out had been too daunting so they had left it as is, occasionally using the property to store their own junk collections and allowing their teenaged and young adult children and relatives to use the property as their own personal party campground/commune.
Anyway, by this point, the neighbor boys had left. They had been expected home by their mother ( they lived in one of the three houses that were just a slight distance down the road) and they were fearful if they were late she would come looking for them and discover them at the B House, so it was just me and my cousin and I was getting a bit creeped out myself and feeling a bit of pressure to get out of there and not press my luck. My parents both worked, but it was late in the afternoon and I didn’t wear a watch, so I had no idea how much time had passed and I knew one of my parents would arrive home soon and wonder where the heck I was. Kids and teens in the 1970s pretty much ran wild in the summers with little adult supervision, only coming home from their adventures when it started to get dark, but that didn’t mean we were allowed to just go off without telling anyone where we were or who we would be with. The only other thing of note that I recall from my criminal trespass adventure that day was looking into what was once probably the main family room ( the scene of the after-party hangover snooze-fest I witnessed in 1975) and being creeped out by a short length of what looked like a thick barn beam that was hung from the ceiling by two short lengths of chain. It’s purpose was a mystery, but I could now easily understand other rumors and gossip I’d heard from other kids who had probably glimpsed that through the front window; some of the rumors were that the house was not only haunted but that cultists used the house, because of a cross that was hung in the living room. Well, it was not a cross, but it was a big wooden beam, about four feet in length, that hung from two chains from the ceiling, so yeah, it was a little disturbing. I’m also pretty sure this rumor then led to even more elaborate rumors that began to develop throughout my teen years into the late 1980s; that devil worshippers were meeting in the the B House basement!
If you were alive ( and older than a toddler) in the 1980s you probably remember the “Satanic Panic” of the 80s. You can read more in depth about it here but suffice to say, devil worship and the existence of ‘Satanic cults’ were being used as scapegoats for almost every social disruption that occurred during that time, and every crime that seemed unusual or mysterious was filled with conspiracy theories that it had been perpetrated by “Satanists”, and somehow these mysterious cultists had infiltrated every corner of our society. Every rural town in America all of the sudden seemed to have spots that were “known” to be places that devil worshippers were having ‘secret meetings’, though how they could be so ‘secret’ if everyone knew about them was never explained. In the case of the B House, it was claimed that people had seen a “red light” emanating from the basement windows, which is where the ‘meetings’ were happening. While I myself did see the red light a time or two sometime around the time I was a junior in high school ( c. 1987) , for all we know someone was using the basement as a dark room for a photography hobby. Or there was a red light bulb in one of the basement light fixtures for some other completely innocent reason. The house didn’t have electricity to my knowledge anyway, so someone was there probably with a generator. Hopefully not worshiping Satan, or burying bodies, but with the B House one never knows. The B family still owned it, and while it remained mostly deserted, occasionally over the next few years the family patriarch did appear over there and park a car for sale in the weedy field next to the barn or some other item. One year it was a rabbit hutch, which my family bought for my sister’s rabbits. One year they had to cart away anything that was left in the barn because the roof had collapsed. That happened when I was older, in my early 20s. I no longer lived in the area, but saw it when I would go home to visit my mom.
Eventually the barn itself collapsed, but by this time it had long been emptied. One day it was there and then one day it was gone. I don’t even remember what year it was. The house itself was gone also by that time. The house was demolished and then burned down by local volunteer firefighters in the early 1990s. I used to have photographs that I took of that occasion, but I don’t recall what happened to the photos. I don’t know who owns the property now, whether it’s still the B family or someone else. The small square of land that had once been the place where the barn stood is just an empty piece of land. Across the road the hill the house sat on is just a hill covered in tall grass and wildflowers. At the top of the hill is a cluster of cypress trees in a weird semi-circle with a sort of empty spot in the middle, the only evidence there might have been a house there. I always look at it when I pass by that way, which is very seldom these days. My parents divorced in the mid-1980s and my dad went on to build another house in another town. My mom stayed on at the home she and my dad built in 1973 until 2014, and then she moved into a smaller home “in town” so I don’t have reason to go out that way much. I live in “the city” now, which is 35 miles away.
As a last side note on this rather looooooong narrative; that day in 1984 when I trespassed in the B House was the last time I was ever inside the house because I did get busted—by my Dad. He had been looking for me and somehow figured out where I went. He came up to the house and heard me and my cousin inside and he yelled at us to get the hell out of there. He was pissed when we came out. My dad was a former Marine and when he was mad it was scary and when you were in trouble, you were in trouble. He scared the crap out of me by telling me that what I had done was illegal, that I had broken into a house and that I could go to jail! I’m pretty sure a lot of what he said was exaggeration, I doubt I would have been sent to jail; but it worked on me. I was 14 and typically a rule-follower and obedient. I felt like the world’s worst person. I got grounded, my cousin got sent home and I never set foot on the property again. (Not even the barn with it’s wide open door could tempt me). I’m sure other kids went in there and probably helped themselves to things, like vintage porn, but not me.
Wow. This was long. Like the world’s most boring novella. Thanks for reading though, if you stuck it out all the way.
