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THE EARLIEST KNOWN DISAPPEARANCE IS THAT of fifty-eight-year-old Elmore Washington during the construction of the house in June of 1956. Then, as now, there was little to distinguish Number 56 from the twenty-two identical houses that comprised the newly built neighborhood of Abigail Lane. And on that fine summer day sixty years ago, it was starting to come together nicely. The air was punctuated by the bark of hammers and the growl of saws, of machinery grumbling, of trucks grinding their way over the as-yet unpaved streets and driveways. A haze of dust hung over everything. The rough framing had been completed, the plywood sheathing applied to the skeletons of the houses, and the doors and windows had been installed.
According to his coworkers, Elmore, who’d been working primarily on the roof that day, hadn’t exhibited any noticeable sign of preoccupation. He was known as a jovial, quick-witted sort, slow to anger unless raging drunk, in which case, Jeb Foreman said later, “He’d pick a fight with a chair and probably lose.” He was not given to moods or depression. If there were demons nestled in the folds of his life, he kept them to himself. All of which made it even more of a mystery that he, in the middle of an ordinary work day, vanished, and was never seen again. His co-worker Jeb Foreman (who was not the foreman, because that would have been a little too perfect) says the last time he saw Elmore, he was entering the house to retrieve his lunch pail, which he’d left somewhere on the second floor. Jeb claimed he saw Elmore mount the stairs (“saw those big size elevens of his clomping up the steps”) and didn’t give it a second thought until close to quitting time when Ronald Mayhew (who was the foreman) asked if Elmore had left early.
Figuring maybe he’d snuck away for a quick nap, they looked for him. On the stairs in Number 56, they found his lunch pail, the bologna sandwich and apple rotted as if it had been sitting in the sun for two weeks, and another item everyone was pretty sure Washington wouldn’t have left behind on purpose, which was when it was decided that the police should be called.
All anyone knew was that wherever Washington had gone, he’d traveled there without his car, a 1953 Packard Clipper, parked at the construction site, and eighty dollars’ worth of savings he’d kept in a Mason jar beneath his bed. He had never married, wasn’t known as “a ladies’ man” on account of badly pockmarked skin and a glass eye, so he left no broken hearts behind, only a mother who suffered from dementia and likely died never knowing he’d disappeared.
What he did leave behind, was the eye, which Jeb and Ronald discovered sitting on the second to last step of the stairs. “That thing put the fear of God into me,” Ronald said. “Like that Poe story about the fella with the big eye, looking at that man like it knew all he’d done.” Jeb said he felt sick after emerging from the house. “For some reason I can’t figure, I couldn’t stop clenching my teeth. The air was all wrong in there. I smelled fresh cut grass, and there ain’t a thing wrong with a smell like that, but it made me sick to my stomach.” Before he lost his lunch on the bare earth of the soon-to-be lawn, Jeb told his wife he could have sworn he saw sunflowers there, just for a moment, right where someone in the future would undoubtedly put them. He made her promise she’d never share what he said. “The men will think I’ve gone soft in the head.” And she didn’t, until the documentarian Mike Howard came calling some six years after lung cancer made her a widow.
Of all the theories put forth at the time to explain what had become of Washington, which ranged from the possible (he’d been suffering from depression and, to spare his mother, had committed suicide somewhere the body was not likely to be discovered), to the highly improbable (he was a Communist sympathizer who’d been called back to Mother Russia for an important assignment)—nobody blamed the house.
II
Despite the dilapidation, Number 56 does not appear sinister at all, at least, no more than any house that has fallen into ruin. Of course, for those who want to characterize the building as a Seething House of Evil, the missing shingles, boarded up windows, and the sagging roof is ample fodder. Similarly, the smoke stains on the façade and the smudges of soot around the windows—testament to an attempt to burn the place to the ground back in 1988—make it look sad, tortured, cursed, to those who wish to regard it that way.
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 stormed 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!
These were animals, something worthy of remark and little else. Like a murmuration of starlings, it was an eerie sight but indicative of nothing, and certainly not worth obsessing over. After a period of three hours and twenty-six minutes in which none of the animals so much as blinked, they snapped out of whatever paralysis had held them in thrall and wandered away. In the years since, many people have brought their pets to the scene in the hope that something similar will happen (surely a form of abuse), but it never has. It seems it was a one-time only party trick, at least as far as the animals are concerned, for we can’t forget the Fourth of July weekend of the following year in which seventeen people snapped awake to find themselves standing on the lawn outside the house. It was 2 a.m., most of them were in their pajamas or slips, two were stark naked, all of them were horrified. And now, because people were involved, theories moved into the realm, not of the supernatural, but of the sinister. Whispers of Soviet mind-control experiments, of Communist infiltration, of chemical agents being tested on suburban neighborhoods, of hallucinogens in the water. The Thalidomide tragedy had yet to be forgotten. Who was to say what nefarious experiments the pharmaceutical companies might have moved on to? Perhaps something to make people forget? Mass hypnosis? Doctors were brought in, virologists swept the neighborhood, men in radiation suits with Geiger counters clickety clicked their way from Holden Avenue down through Abigail and out the other side and found nothing untoward. If there was a commonality to be found, it was that the afflicted had nothing but good health, both mental and physical, in common. Everything from abrupt changes in temperature to the proximity of that night to the first of the year’s two lunar eclipses was floated as a possible explanation for the sleepwalkers.
Cut to May 21st, 1973. The war is over. Nixon is four months into his second and final term and staring right into the maw of the Watergate scandal. Soldiers come home, not to parades, but suspicion and scorn. Monsters roam the country abducting and murdering children. There is a sense of disorder to the country, of pieces no longer fitting. The relief at the war ending quickly turns to economic anxiety and a distillation of old enmities and grievances. That the president of the United States may be an inveterate liar and all-around archvillain is not a reality for which the nation is prepared.
The external war has become internal, found a way to crawl inside.
And the house comes back to life.
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IV
DOUG LOWELL RETURNED from Vietnam, where he had served as an information specialist, in April of 1973. On May 21st of that year, he moved into the house with his wife Katrina and their three-year old daughter, Serena, who had been born eight weeks after he was deployed.
Doug was a good guy, and smart. He’d seen the kind of horrors most people only see in their nightmares and somehow managed to come home intact. Experts (if it’s possible to be an expert on the unknown and unknowable) have nevertheless retroactively diagnosed Lowell with PTSD, a postwar psychological affliction that wasn’t recognized as legitimate until after the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study in 1980, seven years after Lowell took possession of the house. It’s hard to argue with this stance given that much of what Lowell documented fits under the umbrella of PTSD: hallucinations, paranoia, agitation, hypervigilance, emotional detachment, and fear. Viewed outside the lens of the house’s reputation, the papers Lowell wrote only bolster this conclusion. He appears manic, unhinged. Inside it, though, it provides remarkable insight into one possible, and relatively recent theory about what might be going on in the house, put forth, if you can believe it, by Arthur A. Windale, noted conspiracy theorist and UFOlogist, whose book They’re Already Here: Aliens Among Us caused outright panic among devout believers back in the early seventies. Even if it reads at best like science fiction and at worst, like an anti-communist manifesto, I must confess I found it unexpectedly engaging. I bought none of it, of course, but Windale certainly had an authoritative, declarative style that made it easier to see how those who might want to believe, would. And though we can’t pretend his interest in the Abigail case wasn’t motivated by money and a need to revitalize his flagging career, Windale’s contribution to the fray nevertheless proved intriguing. While his contemporaries were on cable news blathering on about long debunked mysteries like The Bermuda Triangle and the Marie Celeste, Windale took the time to research the house.
“When reading back over the history of this place,” he wrote in his blog, “certain things stand out in my mind. The smells, for one, a detail that has gone bafflingly unstudied. It sounds like phantosmia, which suggests some manner of magnetic anomaly in the house that induces symptoms more commonly associated with a stroke, or schizophrenia, but my compass remained unmoved, and none of the afflicted subjects developed complications typical of these conditions once they left the house. Jeb Foreman died of cancer, yes, but he was in his nineties and a heavy smoker for two-thirds of those years. Harold Wilson went mad with grief typical of anyone who’s lost a son. And while magnetic interference (as suggested by my dear friend Trish [Patricia Burr] scrambling the brain could result in the kind of hallucination necessary to make a man appear to vanish, where then, did Wilson go? Something you think you see should not be so easily written off as a trick of the mind. A man did vanish, did he not? When you open and shut a door in the summer, do you not smell the fresh cut grass, or the heat of the asphalt? That’s the conclusion I keep coming back to, as impossible as it sounds. A door opened and closed behind these people and we smelled what was on the other side. They are over there, those poor souls, wherever there is. Now all we need divine is how to find them.”
Like so much of the speculation surrounding the house, and taking into account his record of outlandish claims (such as his theory that the colonists at Roanoke were spirited into a wormhole engineered by aliens and likely deposited on some distant planet), Windale’s should have been just as easy to dismiss. And it might have been, if not for Doug Lowell’s account of something that happened to him on the night of May 1st, 1983, not even four months after he moved into the house. The following is an excerpt from one of the four essays he wrote for Marita Hopkins & Karun Venkatesh’s nonfiction study of combat shock:
I thought I must be dreaming. I remember waking up, bladder full and aching. Katrina was asleep next to me. I could smell the conditioner she uses in her hair. I love that smell and that night, as it so often does, it grounded me in the safe here and the real now. I left her and quietly made my way to the door to Serena’s room. So often I’ve dreamed I would wake up one night and she’d be gone, stolen from us to settle whatever debt I accrued in the jungle. But she was there, safe too, breathing soft and slow. Goaded by my bladder, I moved on, thankful despite the hummingbird hammering of my heart that told me something was awry. Was there someone in the house? The hair prickling all over my body suggested so, but I couldn’t trust that alone. My instinct tells me there’s always someone there who shouldn’t be and there never is. It will pass, I know it will, that certainty, the suspicion that there are people watching me from the walls and that my shadow wishes me harm. I went to look. I did not take my bat. If someone made it past me, I preferred Katrina to have it close by. And I didn’t want her waking to see me wielding it. She’s already worried enough about me since I got home. I’m worried too. The nightmares. Jesus. It’s like someone planted screws inside my head that are slowly worming their way back out. That’ll pass too. I have faith, and God owes a debt of his own.
I reached the top of the stairs and braced myself in the dark for whatever might be waiting down there with a gun, or a knife. I slowed my breathing, demanded my pulse slow too before my heart exploded. I hurried downstairs into the living room...
...and the living room was gone.
Immediately I smelled chlorine, that strong summertime pool smell when they put too much of it in the water and it burns the hell out of your eyes. And that pool was in my living room, or rather, where the living room used to be. Now, I found myself outside in a daylit courtyard, the glare of the sun being slapped to pieces by the waves as children laughed and splashed and hollered at their parents, those patiently smiling bronzed-bodied adults lounging in chairs on both sides of the pool. None of them had faces, only thin-lipped mouths, and their hair, all the same light pink color, moved sinuously as if underwater. The dappled light from the pool animated their faces in place of expressions. It felt entirely reasonable to scream when I looked up and away from these impossible monsters and saw misshapen black birds with half a dozen silver dollars for eyes. Their beaks were like bruised human hands snapping from the air insects the size of my fist. I stepped away, my body tensing to run, and collided with a child, who cursed at me in a language I don’t know, and then giggled. I did not look at him. Couldn’t. Had I seen his face, or the lack of one, I might have lost my mind. I did not look when he called “Olop Ocram!” at me. And I did not linger on the fact that the sinewy faceless man who dove into the pool scattered into a school of pink and silver fish as soon as he went under. No, I kept backing away and whispering the same prayers that went ignored during the war when men caught fire and screamed until their lungs burned and a headless child tumbled from the back of a truck on its way out of a razed village. I backed away now as then and only opened my eyes again when my spine rammed into an obstacle that felt too real to be a dream.
I was home, in the dark, but not alone. The living room was a conspiracy of shadows and among them I could hear a man speaking backwards in a low voice. I did not care to hear him, so I jammed my fists against my ears. I could still smell the chlorine, could only watch as the man rose from behind the armchair where he’d been hiding. Arms outstretched as if for balance, he took one step, then another, and on the third his thick silhouette split in half and then there were two men standing in the room.
A scream barreled up my throat and turned to a mewl in my mouth. My heart pounded against my ribs, a tribal drumbeat demanding an end to this horror before it split in two like the guest who’d followed me home.
I shut my eyes and knew when I looked again, the men would be gone.
But they weren’t.
They were right in front of me, standing so close I could smell the sunscreen on their skin. “Ereht rehto eht morf er’uoy,” one of them said, his words sluggish bubbles in a clogged sink. “Yats thgim ew.” Self-preservation took over and I lashed a clumsy fist in the direction of the nearest one’s head. I expected resistance, collision, meat against meat, but realized I should have known better because nothing was normal now. My hand passed through what felt like warm wet jelly that spread across the air in an arc and then stayed there like a swipe of paint on a windshield. “Yllis,” said the undamaged one, and then both fell to the floor like dropped coats.
My breathing sounded like the last exhalations of a snared jackrabbit. I did not dare move even when the sun rose and filtered through the blinds, even when Katrina found me, her face pallid with concern, even when I finally looked down and saw the puddle of piss on the floor at my feet. I did not move.
I still don’t want to.
* * *
LOWELL SOUGHT OUT A therapist after that. She assured him his imagination was to blame for the incident he described above, that he’d experienced a night terror, an expected consequence of his exposure to the horrors of war. As he could hardly argue with the definition of what he’d experienced, he embraced it as the diagnosis. His doctor prescribed diazepam, and when six months passed without incident, he was happy to accept his therapist’s version of events. The conjurations of a haunted mind, and nothing more. Nevertheless, on Christmas Eve of the same year, the night he would pack his family into their Country Squire Station Wagon and drive nonstop until they reached his sister’s place in Madison, Wisconsin, the house delivered onto him another unpleasant surprise, and this time Doug’s wife was there to see it:
That last night, the last good night, Katrina and I were on the sofa, watching a Christmas movie. I can’t remember which one, only that it was an oldie. We were happy. I remember that because it was the last time. The fire was blazing and though the weatherman told us not to expect snow, we did anyway. We wanted it to. It was all that was missing. The house was profusely decorated. Tinsel wreathed the tree. The multicolored lights blinked slowly on and off. We were looking forward to the morning and the small selection of gifts we’d wrapped for Serena, and each other.
Then, my ears popped, and Katrina wrinkled her nose. “What is that smell?” she asked. I started to tell her I didn’t know what she was talking about, but then my nose filled with the odor of popcorn and sawdust. She sat up and looked around, and I told myself it was nothing to get worked up about. Popcorn, for goodness sake. What kind of a man loses his nerve over that?
The knock on the door made Katrina scream, and my heart became a cold hard rock in my chest. Her smile chased it away. “Carolers,” she said. “It must be.”
“This late?” I asked, but she was already up and moving toward the door. Dread fell over me like a shroud. That feeling was back, the same one I’d had on that night when The Backward Men followed me home. “Honey, don’t—”
Despite the paralysis threatening to turn my limbs to stone, I rose as she opened the door onto an absence of carolers. She turned to look at me, questioning, and then her gaze moved past me to the stairs. I didn’t want to look. Seeing the color drain from her face and her eyes bulge in horror was enough. We needed to go, to run, to hide, to be as far away from here as we could get before the gas ran out.
“Oh...” was all she said, and I watched her back into the door, slamming it shut behind her, trapping us with whatever was in the room.
“What is it?” I asked, but didn’t want to know, even though the not knowing was even worse. Was something bearing down on me with claws raised to flay me?
Unwillingly, I glanced over my shoulder.
On the stairs was a ten-foot clown. He was dressed in a tattered costume and stooped over to avoid cracking his head on the slanted ceiling. In one hand he held a smoking umbrella, the edges burnt black, as if it had been struck by lightning. In the other hand, he held a dog collar.
“You see it?” I asked my wife, and from the corner of my eye, saw her nod.
“What...is it?”
I had no answer. Nobody would ever know what that thing was. Its hair was electricity, arcing and sparking and dancing around its raw red peeling skull. At first, I thought it had bandages wrapped around its face until it looked toward my wife and I saw the hands and the little fingers moving against its cheek, and realized what I was looking at was a mask made of tiny arms. I needed to look away because I was more frightened than I had ever been before, but I couldn’t. Instead I glanced down, looking for a way to rush past it, and saw that beneath the filthy cuffs of its baggy blue polka dot pants, its legs ended in brown serrated spikes, like the leg of an insect.
What should have been comforting, but wasn’t, was how it seemed confused by us, confused to find itself here in our house, but ascribing human reactions to such an offensively alien thing would have been a fatal mistake. It looked this way and that, though how it could see anything at all with no apparent eyes was a mystery. Maybe it couldn’t. Then: “Peekabooooooo,” it said in a voice like a fistful of pennies being dropped into a glass jar.
“Serena,” my wife said, voice strained by tears, and I knew the time for inaction was over. Though petrified, and yes, afraid of dying at the hands of the monstrosity blocking the stairs, I refused to let my own fear keep me from saving my daughter. And if I failed...no, I couldn’t fail. I would tear it asunder if it got between me and my little girl. I didn’t truly believe this, of course, but the thought was enough to get me moving, even as I registered the chittering sound and the undulating motion beneath the thing’s silver and blue jumpsuit. And now there was another sound too: static, repetitive, like a record spinning on an empty groove.
With a hastily whispered prayer, I stepped forward, and an orange light blinked on upstairs, drowning me in the creature’s shadow. The clown straightened in surprise and bonked his head against the ceiling. “Oof,” he said in that same terrible voice. The electricity bowed and sizzled and sparked. He grunted and looked back over his shoulder at a studio warning sign which had been affixed above the door to our bedroom. In dark red letters it read: CLOWNMANTIS LIVE IN FIVE. He gave a sigh like an autumn wind, looked back at us, those fingers on his face drumming his agitation, and then he turned and lumbered back down the hall. Incredulous, we watched him leave, until the door that only moments before had led to our bedroom, creaked shut behind him and the light went off.
We got our daughter and went to the car, with just the clothes on our backs. I don’t care what explanations you might have for what happened to us. Say I imagined it. Say we both did. It doesn’t matter. We were never going to set foot in that house again, and I will forever curse the day I bought it.
* * *
FOR A WHILE, LOWELL kept his story to himself. No media, no police reports, no sensationalism. He just upped and left his home, without a word to anyone. But no matter the circumstances for leaving one’s abode, mortgage lenders expect to be paid. Lowell would have gone broke paying for the house that had almost driven him insane if not for the kindness of his sister and her husband, who let him stay with them rent-free until his situation improved. He took a part-time job tending bar. Such situations can fracture a marriage, or make chasms of existing ones, and by the fall of 1974, Katrina moved back to Columbus to live with her parents. Doug pleaded with her to stay so he could be with his daughter, but she felt him an unstable influence, and no matter how desperately he wanted to argue, he knew she was right. He let them go, as much as he’d let go of himself.
A few months later, he accepted the offer from a publishing house for a series of essays documenting his experiences with postwar trauma (An Affliction Without a Name: Combat Shock in the Vietnam Era, by Marita Hopkins & Karun Venkatesh, Veteran’s Day Press, 1976), from which the preceding excerpts were taken. The week after he received his contributor copies in the mail, he left a note tucked inside one of them thanking his sister and her husband for everything, told her to ensure Katrina and Serena knew he loved them and had tried so very hard to be the husband and father they’d needed him to be, and then hanged himself from the limb of the oak tree in his sister’s yard.
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 aluminum 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 inaudible 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.
In that time, only two unusual incidents occurred, and those would not be uncovered until an author named Jay Anson wrote a book about an apparent haunting that made another house synonymous with the supernatural. The house was, of course, Amityville, and once Anson’s book hit the bestseller lists in 1977, haunted places were suddenly a phenomenon worthy of global attention. By the time the movie adaptation scared the living hell out of audiences in 1979, armed with all manner of pseudoscientific equipment, self-proclaimed paranormal investigators and demonologists actively sought out alleged hauntings and made a respectable (and often absurd) living from books and articles written about their findings, few of which were ever independently verified, most likely because it was all fabricated. But nobody cared. Hauntings were big business. Hollywood ached to replicate the box office success of The Amityville Horror. Publishers wanted more bestselling books about bad places. And with Elvis Presley still fresh in the ground and Three-Mile Island serving as a reminder that any of us could wink out of existence at any minute, ghosts were in fashion.
Thus, when an article about the house on Abigail Lane appeared in Odd Things, a short-lived paranormal newsletter out of Bangor, Maine, one of the more prominent teams of paranormal investigators (if prominent is the proper word for ascendance in a field that relies almost entirely on not finding anything) took note.
Despite notable omissions and inaccuracies, the article in Odd Things was the first piece in print outlining the history of the house, from Elmore Washington to Sandy Radcliffe, and concluding with the two most recent events.
The first was neighbor Maggie Sundersen’s claim that for four days straight, she could hear music coming from inside the house, a single song repeating on an endless loop, a song, she added, she used to love but now would never be able to hear again without feeling sick. It was “Dream a Little Dream of Me” by The Mamas and the Papas. After two sleepless nights, she reported it to the police, who arrived at the scene to absolute silence, only for the music to start up again once they were gone. Frustrated, Maggie asked her husband if he heard anything, but each time she brought it to someone’s attention (the police, twice, three neighbors, and the mailman), the song stopped. Convinced someone was messing with her, she went to the door, but when she tried to knock, her fist plunged, not through wood, but some kind of gelid amber, honey-like substance. At the same time the music grew so loud (“Say nighty-night and kiss me”), Mary’s ears began to bleed, and with all the strength she could muster, she yanked her hand free and ran screaming back to her house. The next day she sought out a doctor, who diagnosed her with tinnitus and advised her to avoid loud sounds, music especially, for the next few months. He didn’t refer her to a psychiatrist, because he didn’t believe a word of what she’d told him.
Jim Dancy the mailman, who’d been unable to corroborate Maggie’s claims, had an experience of his own two months later.
“Three-thirty on a Friday,” he said. “I never thought anything funny about the place. Never heard nothing, never saw nothing. I knew about those people going astray, but that happens, don’t it? I don’t believe in nothing but god himself and I ain’t never seen no aliens or bigfeet or ghosts, just so you know I’m not some loon. And it was probably just somebody playing a trick on me. I don’t know who’d do that. I know everyone on that street, even the kids, and I can’t figure who might think it funny, but you know kids. They get strange notions. What I’d like to know is how they did it.”
The “trick” to which he refers was the figure in the living room window looking out at him while he was placing a flyer for the new Korean restaurant The Jade Pearl into the mailbox. “Peeking at me through the curtains,” he said. “Kid with a face like a stained and half-torn piece of yellow paper. He were dressed in a funeral suit, too. Upside-down he was, like he were standing on the damn ceiling. Now you tell me how someone, how a kid, could pull that off.” It was probably for the best that Jim forgot that no curtains had hung in that window, or in any of the others at Number 56, for years. Jim continued, “I walked away, as you do when you’re not sure what the hell you’ve just seen, but I looked back. I wish I hadn’t, because there was another boy, or the same one, looking at me from the small window above the kitchen at the side of the house. I beat feet after that, because my momma didn’t raise no fools, but I couldn’t keep from thinking later that if I’d looked, I’d have seen the same thing in every one of those windows. But like I say, I guess it was just a prank, but I don’t know why they’d want to scare an old man like that.”
The Seekers were Julian and Julia Corman, an affable brother and sister team from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Like many of the paranormal investigators who came before and after them, they used real science to distance themselves from the charlatanism so prevalent in the field. Here there were no crystal balls or Ouija boards or seances, only thermometers, VHS cameras equipped with jury-rigged thermal sensors, Geiger counters, and tape recorders. Neither of them would be standing in lightless rooms demanding the spooks show themselves, because the Cormans didn’t believe the house was haunted, or at least, not by ghosts.
In her fascinating book, Notes from the Other Side, Julia writes: “I knew from the available facts that we weren’t going to be facing restless ghosts or vengeful demons, or anything so outrageous. The house on Abigail Lane was not built upon an ancient burial ground or possessed by the spirits of the dead. One must always assume the dead have better things to do than exist just to pacify our fear of death. Everything we knew suggested a metaphysical aberration. We stepped over the threshold of an ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood and over the threshold of modern knowledge. It is not a place steeped in old evil. It’s a calamity of physics. There’s a fissure, a gaping cosmic wound, a door to places we can’t begin to fathom. Somehow, something we weren’t meant to see is there in plain view, but only sometimes, and it’s my theory that the door which opens at the top of the stairs was there before they built the house. It’s probably been there longer than the earth. It was just dormant when they constructed the house around it, and now that house is like the building around an elevator, only we don’t know which floor it will open onto at any given time, or what conditions it needs to do so.”
Unlike many in their field, the Cormans were not out to exploit anyone for fame or personal gain. They were, like all the best scientists, curious, and wanted to try to understand how and why so many people had disappeared from the same place. The not-knowing maddened them, as did the lack of prior investigation, and they resolved to uncover the truth once and for all. They didn’t, of course, not completely anyway, and it’s unlikely anyone ever will, but along with the speculations of Arthur Windale and Patricia Burr, they ultimately contributed a great deal to our understanding of the Abigail House phenomenon.
“I’d like to think,” Julia says in her book, “that the world into which my brother stepped that night was one in which he was welcome. On good days, when I recall the pair of crimson suns blazing above that field of sunflowers, I tell myself it was, but those days are rare, especially when I remember the tremor that shook us both, as of a colossal footfall, and then Julian’s face when he turned to look at me. It was not the excitement that had been there a moment before, when the air at the top of the stairs seemed to pucker and then bow outward like a bubble, nor was it awe. It was horror, and then he was gone in the dark that rushed back in to seal the rift, a single incisor tumbling down the stairs behind him the only testimony that he’d been there at all. On my worst days, I think some manner of god stepped down from the sky into that field, but I can’t bear to think of what it might have done to him. I pray I am wrong, or I pray it was quick. And to you, dear observer, I pray you don’t judge me too harshly for what must sound like the diary of a madwoman. I grieve and thus cannot restrain my honesty. My whole life, my interest in all things has been scientific, but I find it difficult, in this instance, when reason is needed most, to apply it to what I’ve seen.”
Julia Corman’s book is not, as the title might suggest, about her experience with the paranormal, and only tangentially invokes the metaphysical. It’s about mental health, specifically her battle with depression in the years following Julian’s disappearance.
“I still wake up some nights and see him standing at the foot of my bed. I can’t see his eyes, only his mouth. He is smiling at me in a way he never would, in a way I’d never have let him. What’s worse is that I look too much like him to ever be able to escape the accusation I see in the mirror.”
Julia’s book went on to become a New York Times bestseller, lauded for its openness about un- and misdiagnosed medical disorders, grief, PTSD, and the stigma surrounding depression. In it, Julia admits to misleading the police when asked about the night’s events not just because she knew the truth was too farfetched, but because she worried her mother would have her institutionalized, given Julia’s history with bipolar disorder and her mother’s tendency to either ignore or punish her for it. Meredith Corman held that mental illness was a convenient and overused excuse for weakness of character. Until her death from breast cancer in 2008, Julia worked tirelessly as a mental health advocate and women’s rights activist. Director Mike Howard intended to feature a clip from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno from 2001 in which she discusses Abigail House, but his efforts were successfully blocked by her mother’s attorney, who did not want to endure the embarrassment of having that old nonsense trotted out again.
Her legacy, however, extends far beyond the limits of this story.
VII
A few books were written about the house (among them Miles Dietrich’s Cursed House: My Encounter with Abigail, Ghost Town Books, 1987), most of them nonfiction, blatant efforts to cash in on the still lucrative haunted house subgenre. One of the fictional efforts, House of Death, by Scott Tiller (Zebra Books, 1985), is trashy fun if you can detach yourself from the awfulness of the tragedies on which said fun is based, and the inexplicable cover illustration of a skeleton in a prom dress. Tiller at least had the decency to dedicate the book to the real-life victims he was exploiting. It was later turned into a terrible NBC TV movie called Death House, which aired only once before being buried, though some Internet sleuths have turned up the commercials for the film, which you can see on YouTube, assuming NBC/Universal haven’t issued a takedown notice out of sheer embarrassment.
On June 5th, 1986, all the grass died in the yard outside Number 56. It had been fine, if too long and unruly, the evening before. Within a week, it turned completely black, as if it had been burned in a fire. Some say the house knew what was coming, but those are the same people who persist in ascribing the house a consciousness.
April 1987, and the new mailman, Bertrand Weems (Dancy retired a year after seeing the kid in the window), opens the mailbox at Number 56 to find it packed full of teeth, which rain down around his feet like ghoulish dice. They are later determined to be premolars from the mouths of horses. Weems did not bother to count them, but the police did. There were three hundred and sixty-seven of them. Like Jim Darcy before them, they deemed the incident a hoax, a morbid attempt to perpetuate the urban legends which had risen around Abigail House. They were summoned to the house again on Halloween night that same year, though this time the event was relatively normal. The neighbors had called them to report what appeared to be a coven of hooded figures encircling the house and chanting gibberish by candlelight. They fled at the sound of sirens, though three of them were apprehended. They claimed to be Satanists from The Church of Belial, their mission “to summon the demon from the hell beneath the house.” They were freed without charge, though they would not be the last of their ilk to visit the house, for as much as Satanic Panic had parents throwing their kids’ metal albums into the trash, there were those who saw catastrophic events like the murder of John Lennon, the advent of AIDS, the Challenger explosion, Chernobyl, and Black Monday, as signs of the impending apocalypse, and if God wasn’t listening, maybe the devil would. After all, it’s much easier to believe in Hell if you can already feel the flames.
On the 5th of September 1988, someone set fire to Abigail House. Authorities were alerted at three in the morning but arrived to find the conflagration had already burned itself out or had been put out. Bafflingly, the house remained undamaged but for extensive smoke staining on the exterior walls. Even the windows were intact. The arsonist, assuming there ever was one, was never apprehended.
February 1989. Researchers from OSU investigate the house at the request of the state. The investigation takes six weeks and is deemed “inconclusive”.
In the footage from Mike Howard’s documentary, researcher Shannon Hayes claims some of their findings were repressed by the university for fear of ridicule. “A prestigious institution could not be seen to endorse the radical beliefs of a small segment of the population to whom the paranormal is a viable substitute for logic,” she explained. “We were there to disprove the claims of supernatural activity, not authenticate it.”
When pressed by Howard to share some of what was removed from the report, Hayes is visibly uncomfortable.
“We were measuring temperature fluctuations and Dan [Moorehead], for no reason we could explain then or now, went blind in his right eye. He was on the third step of the stairs when he freaked out. I went to him and he shoved me away. ‘Don’t come up here,” he said. ‘Stay the [bleep] away, the air is wrong.’ For eight months after that he claimed he saw things differently through that eye—other places, another way—and it made him happier than he had ever been in his life. But we examined him. There was a yellow cataract occluding his sight. There’s no way he could have seen anything through it. He was legally blind in one eye. But he insisted we were wrong. He even refused surgery, rejected the idea of an intraocular lens. He said he didn’t want to risk ‘poisoning the view.’ We were concerned it might be the result of a tumor, which would explain his inability to process the loss, but he seemed so [bleeping] happy, we quit trying to convince him he shouldn’t be. Now of course, I wish we’d tried a little harder.”
Dan Moorehead was found dead in his apartment in Hilliard on April 9th, 1989. He’d gouged out both his eyes with a meat fork and bled to death on the kitchen floor. Next to an uneaten breakfast of sausage, eggs, and bacon, was a note. It was one line, written in his own blood:
ALL HAIL THE SUNFLOWER GOD
It was declared another tragic suicide and Moorehead’s name was omitted from the Abigail House report, before both were buried.
On May 12th, 1989, the doors and windows of the house were boarded up and NO TRESSPASSING signs were staked in the fallow yard. After thirty years of mystery, Abigail House was finally condemned.
That same night, a peculiar sound emerged from inside the house. It woke the neighbors and set dogs to howling. It didn’t last long, but all who heard it recognized it for what it was. It was the sound of trees being felled in a dense wood.
Inside Number 56.
VIII
Arthur Windale noted that the 1990s represents the longest period of inactivity for the house, almost as if it was sulking, yet another example of people’s tendency to anthropomorphize the place. But the house was never truly dormant. It would go weeks, even years without causing someone to blink out of existence, but that didn’t mean other more innocuous things weren’t happening, most of which probably went unnoticed by most, even as they were happening in plain view.
John Boone, who lived directly across the street from the house (much to his regret) woke one morning to the sound of incessant knocking and looked out the window. There was a man in a worn brown suit slamming a fist on the boards of the condemned house. “Let me in, you little peckerwood,” he cried, over and over again. When this continued for the better part of an hour, John, who had tried and failed to keep to himself in a neighborhood gone to hell, got dressed and crossed the street to talk to the man.
“Hey, mister,” he said. “Can I help you with something?”
The man spun around and was somehow still facing the door, still knocking, as if his whole body had rotated around inside itself only to return to its original position. John stopped dead at the curb, unsure of what he’d seen. The man continued to hammer on the boards. “LET. ME. IN.”
“Hey. Hey, man,” John said again, a queasy feeling in his stomach. The air felt heavy and thin, and everything was somehow wrong.
Again, that bizarre optical illusion in which the man seemed to spin around to face him but didn’t really move. It was as if there were two versions of the man and only one of them had turned to look while the other stayed facing the door. John felt sick and decided, whatever this was, it could be someone else’s problem. “I’LL WRING YOUR GODDAMN NECK FOR FOULING UP MY PRECIOUS BABY. OH, YOU BETTER BET I WILL!” the man screamed then, and with one more knock, which sounded like a shotgun blast, he flickered from the door to John like a giant moth, and disappeared into a haze of yellow sparks and black dust.
John leaned over and retched onto the street.
He put his house on the market two days later.
* * *
ON SEPTEMBER 11th, 2001, when the Twin Towers fell, nobody came outside. Those who’d gone to work watched the horror on TV before being sent home.
The house had nothing to say.
* * *
BY THIS TIME, THOSE who believed there was something wrong with Number 56, who’d paid attention to the stories and verified them for themselves, also put their houses up for sale. Even if they thought it all so much blarney, they were tired of the frequent police visits, the media attention, the spook hunters and devil worshippers, the tourists and gawkers, the writers and would-be filmmakers. Their good neighborhood had gone bad. Others were simply annoyed at having a derelict house with a dead lawn bringing down the property values, and either complained incessantly to the housing authority, or started looking for someplace else to live. By 2004, of the twenty-three houses in the neighborhood, only fourteen were still occupied. The value of the remaining homes decreased by 40%, but by then, the happy couples who’d bought them in 1956 were too old and entrenched to move. Despite the economic growth under President Bush, Abigail Lane was dying. Whatever problems the residents had to that point, and there were many, they would soon grow worse as the Internet rose in popularity and people discovered that they could share their thoughts on anything with the whole world. Thus, while it sat there rotting, the mythos of Number 56 continued to build. It was a new era, one that would see the house become famous in a way it never had before. Obsession with the paranormal had never waned, but now ghost hunters had an unprecedented means of finding information and like-minded souls, and of organizing.
In the new millennium, secrets became harder to keep.
The house was about to go viral.
* * *
BY THE MID-2000S, THE neighborhood was a poor sketch of its former self. Like many of its kind, in the half a century since its development as a place for young married couples, it had fallen to ruin. The asphalt was cracked. Trash gathered in the gutters. The streetlights were broken, and illicit activities conducted in the shadows.
In 2008, Arthur Windale started a blog entitled The Things We Cannot Know. He wrote about his various encounters and theories, including his visit to Abigail House. For reasons unknown, the post was picked up by news outlets and went viral. Social media exploded and for a week straight #TheAbigailPortal—the name of Windale’s post—was among the top trending hashtags. Windale yet again found himself in high demand, and unsurprisingly, embraced it. He did the talk show circuit, announced he was in the process of putting together another book, and even began taking small groups of acolytes to the neighborhood, something the local police were less than happy about, but as it was more life than the neighborhood had seen in years, and seemed harmless enough, they relented. In his element, Windale held court on the street outside Number 56, ebulliently reiterating all the most soundbite-friendly parts of his blog post, to the delight of his rapt audience. The local news was there, covering the whole thing, though they must have found it all a little silly. Still, news was news.
Already buoyed by the renewed interest in his work, Windale could not have anticipated just how famous that night would make him. The ABC-affiliate’s footage of the incident had, last time I looked, over 15 million views on Youtube.
Despite being made aware that he wouldn’t, Windale’s crowd were nevertheless disappointed that he didn’t make an exception to his rule and give them a tour of the house, because from the outside, it looked no different than a hundred other abandoned homes in the suburbs. At least places like Amityville and the Winchester House had some sense of architectural grandeur about them. Abigail House just looked sad and defeated. Perhaps the interior might prove more interesting? But on this, Windale was immovable. He had studied the house enough to know that there truly was something off-kilter there. He believed everything he had read about the disappearances and had no doubt the house, or something inside it at least, had spirited those people away. He had no intention of putting his audience at risk to satisfy their curiosity.
As it turned out, he didn’t need to give the people a tour, because that night, while he spoke on the street, a light began to pulse in the window behind him. It was initially dismissed as reflected glare from the television cameras or the audience’s cell phones, all of which were raised in the air, but gradually people started to realize that it was coming from inside the house and that it had a pattern. Following the curious looks of the audience, who he’d noticed had ceased paying him much attention, Windale followed their gazes to the house in time to see the boards fall away from the front door as if pried off by invisible hands.
With a juddering moan, the door swung open and an old woman stepped out into the harsh white glow of the affiliate’s cameras. “What have we here?” Windale is heard muttering on the video, and the excitement in his voice is clear. He has already realized the significance of the event. He couldn’t take the people inside. In truth, he’s afraid of the house, but by letting something out, it has given him a gift that will see him live out the rest of his years in prosperity.
If you watch the video, the woman’s eyes are such a brilliant ethereal blue they penetrate even the lowest of resolutions. Her skin is dark brown, aged by the sun. She has a pair of small moles above her upper lip. Her head is shaved, and the dome of her skull patterned with intricate loops and swirls of dark ink. She wears wristlets of what appear to be fur, a necklace made of animal bones, and a smock made of tattered leather. It reaches to her knees. Her feet are bare and dirty. From the stoop, she looks around as if she’s just woken up. Her searing blue eyes scan the crowd and Internet memes and viral videos are born of the moment in which she smiles. It is such a genuine, warm, and loving expression of pure joy it brings tears to the eyes of everyone who bears witness to it, even to this day. Like a figure from a dream, she fixes on Windale and walks across the dead lawn to him. Nobody on the street moves. They couldn’t if they’d wanted to. They are in thrall to this woman now. That smile has possessed them, and they would rather die than not stay to see what happens next.
What happens is she stops before Arthur and takes his hand. Perplexed, fascinated, but unafraid, he watches as she places something into the palm of his hand and nods, her eyes moist. She closes his fingers and shakes his clenched fist up and down a few times, a silent acknowledgment of some kind. “What is this?” Windale asks, but she turns, casts the warmth of her gaze across the crowd one more time, and then walks away down the street until she is swallowed by the dark beneath the broken streetlights. The television crew attempts to follow, but somehow, in all the confusion, they lose her.
It was an interesting moment that would have faded quickly from the consciousness of all who saw it because in the end, as magnetic as she proved to be, the woman who came out of the house was still just some old woman, probably homeless, and therefore unconnected to the supernatural mystery which had drawn so much interest. There were even accusations that Windale had staged the whole thing.
In a follow-up video three days later, he silenced his critics and escalated the drama of the whole thing by holding two items up before the camera. One was the object the old woman had given him, a seashell no bigger than a plum, but unlike any shell seen on this earth. It was coal-black and striated with wavy lines of what one would assume to be silver. Depending on which way the shell is held, it gives out a soft sigh that sounds like the heaving of the sea. The genesis of that shell, initially suspected to be handmade, continues to elude modern science, because it’s a composite of materials that, even on a molecular level, are alien. In his other hand, the somber-faced Windale held a large black and white photograph of a blonde woman, much younger than the one who appeared at the door of Number 56 on the night of the tour. Circled in red are the twin moles on her upper lip. They indeed appear to be the same person, separated by thirty years—Sandy Radcliffe.
Despite the immense intrigue generated by Sandy’s reappearance, like all pop-culture phenomena and irresistible mysteries, the popularity and madness both on the Internet and off eventually forced it to collapse under its own weight, and people moved on to obsess over other things. There were those, like Windale, who were reluctant to let the legend of the place die without adequate explanation, and in the two years since Sandy Radcliffe’s return, it’s estimated that over thirteen more teams of paranormal investigators explored the house. Unless it remains undocumented, they did so without incident. To most, it became a footnote in the state’s haunted history, a point of mild interest on the road to better attractions. The Discovery Channel announced a documentary about the house that never aired.
Windale continued to write his book, but perhaps fearing it might not be quite the literary juggernaut he’d once thought, decided to violate his own rule and enter the house in, he said, “the interest of more authentic coverage.”
“Tomorrow,” he wrote on his blog, “I’ll be going alone into the belly of the beast in the hope that it will reveal itself to me. Stay tuned, my fine friends, for a tantalizing report as soon as I have one.”
True to his word, he went inside Abigail House armed with only his cell phone, which he used only to record audio.
It was the last time anyone ever saw him.
The phone was found on the stairs. Following some terse descriptions of the interior, which he clearly meant to expound upon in his book (“squalid” “gloomy” “stinking of cat urine” “shameful symbol, fragility of the American dream”) there comes a sound like a rusty metal door being forced or dragged open. Even on the recording, it’s deafening. It’s followed by a low roar, like a furnace, and when, three and a half minutes later, Windale speaks again, his voice is strained with amazement and fear.
“I asked for this. My God, I asked for it, didn’t I? The answer? I don’t know what I’m looking at. There’s a warm draft though. It smells like smoke. And...I don’t want to go up there. I don’t want to, but I must, mustn’t I?” His breathing is ragged, animalistic. There’s the clomping sound of his boots on the stairs. One, two, three. Then he stops. “May as well be the face of God, and still they won’t believe it. I’m not sure I believe it either and I’m looking at it. It’s...it’s a wall, black obsidian. I can’t see where it starts or ends, but one edge of it is in view. There’s...daylight, I think. Gray daylight. Or perhaps...I don’t know...I don’t know...impossible, look at it. There’s a sound. Do you hear it? Like a flag fluttering in the breeze...Lord save me. It’s enormous.” Clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp. “Yes, a tower. A black tower, I think, leaning away at...at an angle...from...is that the sun or a fire...I can’t tell. My God, it’s so tall, and I’m up so high...The sound again.” It indeed sounds like a flag snapping in the wind, but a moment later, Windale sees the source. “No, no. My God. My God. Not a flag at all. It’s their wings. It’s a host of—” Muffled thumps as the phone tumbles down the stairs and Windale is gone.
Those of a Christian bent have surmised that Windale was ferried to his maker on the wings of angels. There is no way to know that they are wrong. I’m an atheist and I prefer their version rather than think of that poor old man being sundered by devils in some hellish otherworld.
IX
Mike Howard had several short, critically acclaimed documentaries under his belt by the time he came upon the DON’T LOOK message board in August of 2015. As cyclical as the whims of the house, ghosts and grisly things were once again a hot commodity in Hollywood, and even those who specialized in nonfiction narratives were seeking to get in on it. It was Howard’s agent Kassie Loomis who put him onto the message board, which she thought might be fertile ground for ideas. And she was right. Howard spent hours poring over the dozens of sub threads about Abigail House. He’d been eager to make something longer, a feature-length documentary, and even supposing a fraction of what he’d read on the message board had any basis in fact, he’d need that running time, or better yet, a series, in which to tell the story.
For eight months, he researched the house, bookmarking and printing off articles about the disappearances, the animal gatherings, the sleepwalkers, the sounds and the strange sights people had reported over the years. He made a list of the names involved and then checked to see if they were first, still alive, and second, willing to talk. He connected with Jeb Foreman’s widow Martha, retired policeman and author Miles Dietrich, Alison Wilson, Sharon Grey’s older brother Donald, Patricia Burr, Doug Lowell’s daughter, Serena, author and clinical psychiatrist Karun Venkatesh, Sandy Radcliffe’s brother George (contrary to her fears, he sought out the help he needed and ended up opening a successful hardware store in their home town), Cynthia Grant Stiles, former editor of Odd Things, Deputy Carson Sanders, Ohio State Police, neighbors Maggie Sunderson and John Boone, mailmen Jim Dancy and Bertrand Weems, OSU researcher Shannon Hayes, and dozens more.
Howard’s intent was to create the most comprehensive record of the house’s history to date, and in that, he succeeded. Much of what we know is due to his diligent efforts and painstaking research. He consulted with noted astrophysicists about magnetic fields, dark matter, and ‘empty space’. In the film, he comes across as abrasive, argumentative. It’s clear he isn’t there to simply make the case that there was, from the beginning, something amiss with Abigail House. He wants to know why, and his tone demands the subjects, and the world, provide him with the answer. One of the more amusing segments in the documentary is his discussion with field geologist Irwin Cordwell about the land atop which the house was built. If Howard’s hope was that Cordwell would reveal that the site was cursed, he was disappointed. Instead, the geologist told him a local news item from 1918 in which a farmer decries the ongoing theft of his livestock. The field from which the animals were snatched would, thirty-six years later, end up in the hands of Diamond & Halliwell Construction, who used it as the foundation for some of the houses in Abigail Lane, among them, Number 56.
Howard found the history of the house credible enough to be wary, but that didn’t keep him from finding a way to keep an eye on it. Working alone so as not to put others at risk, he cordoned off the stairs and installed in the house three closed circuit cameras, one of which was angled to monitor the inside of the front door. The second was affixed to the living room ceiling and directed toward the stairs. The third was mounted as close to the stairwell as he dared get. “I’ll do almost anything for my art except vanish into another dimension,” he says with a smirk. “Unless the critics are kinder over there.” Because there was no power in the house, he had to rely on battery packs, which required swapping out every few days, but they enabled him to view the house remotely, ensuring not only his own safety but that of everyone on his team. Every day for fourteen months, his crew worked in shifts so that someone was always watching the house from the monitors in Howard’s apartment, but other than periods of distortion and specks of dancing light, they saw nothing of note.
The lack of a compelling result frustrated Howard. He knew it had been a long shot given the number of dormant periods in the house’s recorded history, but he’d banked on seeing something. It was how he’d planned to end the film. The big shock at the end that would jolt viewers out of their disbelief.
His disappointment made him a tyrant. Three of his four team members quit, tired of his outbursts and ego. Only his girlfriend Therese stayed on board. She believed in him, and his film, and told him so in the hope of talking him down, but it was too late. Howard was already doomed. His anger and ambition made him incautious, and on the night of September 16th, 2018, he went back to the house either to retrieve or reposition the cameras, while Therese watched from home.
From her interview with The Hollywood Reporter:
“I didn’t believe in the paranormal, or whatever Mike thought was going on. I’m a realist. I don’t believe houses can erase people, or eat them, or whatever. But Mike did and I knew whatever the reason was for what people thought happened in that house, he would wring an amazing film out of it. It was just what he did, okay? He lived to find the truth behind things, to expose the dark holes in the world. And I didn’t tell him not to go back to that house that night for a couple of reasons. Like, he’d been there dozens of times already and nothing had happened to him, so why would I try to stop him? All these people online calling me all sorts of names, blaming me for not being a better girlfriend, telling me I could have saved him. They don’t know. I get harassed every day. Somebody even posted my address, okay, and I had to move. But it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t. I didn’t see the house the way he did. I just saw the film. And he wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. Don’t get me wrong. He listened to me all the time, just not when he needed to do something for the film, and I thought he should take a different approach. With his work, it was his way or no way at all, and I think instead of harassing me, people should respect his position and the position it put me in.”
The interviewer asks what Therese saw on the monitors that night.
“I saw him enter the house. It was dark and the picture kept bowing in and out like it was struggling to focus or something. Right away I knew something was wrong, because I’d watched him do this dozens of times before. It was always the same process. He never hung around longer than he needed to because he didn’t trust the place. He’d just go inside, take a quick look toward the stairs, swap out the batteries and then get the hell out of there. That night though, he stared at the stairs for so long, I checked to make sure the picture hadn’t frozen, but I could see dust moving past the lens. And still Mike kept looking. At one point he shook his head like he was answering a question or something, and then he turned and looked up at me. He looked like a ghost. I knew he was looking at me, the only other person there with him. He looked up and he mouthed something. We know what he said now of course, but at the time, I found myself shaking my head and raising my hands as if he could see me. Then he pointed toward the stairs.
“I didn’t understand what I was seeing, but for the first time I wondered if this was part of his plan, if he’d pulled the wool over all our eyes, because it looked like he’d installed a big video screen at the top of the stairs. How else to explain what I was seeing? All those images. All those people and places.”
The interviewer asks her to detail some of those images.
“I saw a field crowded with sunflowers, so bright and pretty until something enormous moved in front of the sun and then the image changed, and I saw a lighthouse sweeping its beam over the sea. And then I saw a swimming pool full of fish, a small dusty room with a creepy clown snapping his claws at the audience, who laughed like he was the funniest thing they’d ever seen, a black rock or sharp mountain poking up at a sky full of huge birds; a field full of blind, grazing cows, a movie theater full of mannequins all facing us and not the screen, a big garage filled with cars that looked like they were made of metal, meat, and bone, a river of red roses, a bunch of kids looking out windows. It went on and on and on, a hundred scenes, maybe more, but instead of watching them all, I looked at Mike for explanation. He mouthed the same thing up at me again, desperation in his eyes, and again I shook my head. Eerily, he did the same, then smiled, and this time I did make out his words, though they were not the same ones as before: I love you.
“With dread in my heart I watched him walk out of one frame and into another, and on those monitors I saw him mount the stairs. I thought he might be going up to remove the video screen, but the way he’d said he loved me and the look on his face told me something was wrong. And it was, because he didn’t remove the screen. Like everybody else, you’ll tell me I’m crazy, and probably mock me like TMZ did, but I swear on my life, he didn’t remove the screen, because it wasn’t a screen at all. Whatever it was showed a desert full of ancient ruins, each one topped with black spires. Towering over them all was a stone statue of a giant. Its face was nothing but eyes, and its hands were colossal trees. More spires poked like black needles from the sand around its feet. I watched in disbelief, still sure this would turn out to be part of a clever hoax, as Mike stepped through the screen and then he was part of it. Inside it, somehow. The sand rolled away ahead of him as if something was alive beneath it, or as if his presence had caused a kind of shockwave. That’s when I knew this was no illusion. He had time to look up at the camera one last time before the screen, the door, the whatever it was, snapped shut behind him, and I ran, ran, ran down my stairs to my car to go save him. But he was gone.”
And what, asks the interviewer—who, like the rest of us, already knew thanks to the lipreader who decoded it the day it was made public—did he say to the camera before he disappeared?
“He said ‘I think it’s a door into someone else’s dreams.’”
The documentary remains unfinished, but in an effort to try to draw Mike out of wherever he might be hiding, or in the hope that somebody might see it and come forward with information that might help locate him, Therese made the footage available for download on the Internet.
Which is where Scott Walker saw it.
X
On the 6th of September, 2018, Scott Walker returned from a meeting with his agent in New York. It had gone well. He’d signed a three-book deal with HarperCollins, which meant he’d get to breathe for a few days before sequestering himself in his office for the better part of three years. Scott was tired, ready to do nothing but vegetate in front of the TV, but that rarely happened anymore. As the saying in publishing goes, a writer is always writing, even when he’s not.
His sixteen-year-old daughter Zoe was at the kitchen counter, an untouched plate full of her mother’s vegetarian spaghetti and meatballs next to her. She was, as always, glued to her laptop.
“Hi, honey,” he said, and kissed the top of her head.
“Dad,” she said, hands aflutter. “You have got to watch this.”
Scott loved his daughter dearly but confessed to not understanding her fascination with morbid stuff. Every week she tried to force him to watch another true crime documentary on Netflix, or worse, listen to some podcast in which nasally amateur sleuths rehashed facts that were freely available in books written decades before. He might have considered having a talk with her about the value of those shows that night, but as his wife had pointed out, he’d lost his vetting rights the minute he started writing horror stories.
Scott went to get a beer from the fridge. “What is it? More of those Vine things?”
“No, no. It’s about a house not far from here. Just off Sawmill, I think? I dunno. It’s somewhere close. Anyway, it’s supposed to be, like, an urban legend or something because for years people have been disappearing there.”
Scott cracked open the beer, took a long slug. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, they were making a documentary about it and there’s footage of the director, like, getting sucked into some kind of portal or something. Come, see.” To pacify her, he did, but was too wiped out to pay much attention to the grainy camera footage. So instead he kissed her once more and headed for the stairs. “Mom asleep?”
“Bridge night with Donny and Lo,” she said.
“Ah, that’s right. Well, I’ll say goodnight now, then.”
“Goodnight, and my name’s not Nowthen.”
“Hardy-har.”
He showered and went to bed.
Zoe recalls she heard him screaming that night, but when she quizzed him the following morning, he pleaded ignorance. He was, however, unusually eager to see the video she had tried to show him the night before. He replayed the video so many times, she had to beg him to stop.
What follows was retrieved from the NOTES app on Scott’s phone after it was retrieved in a field twenty miles south of Columbus:
The video was called “Mike Howard documentary SFX.” Later, once I went back to the start of all of this and caught up to where Mike’s documentary footage left it, I’d realize that this video was uploaded by another user, who edited it to show only Mike’s last night in the house. But at the time, that was all I needed to see, and once I watched it, I sat back in the chair and tried to make sense of it all.
It isn’t possible to remember every dream you’ve ever had, but most people remember some of them. I can only recall a handful of my most vivid dreams, or nightmares, many of them from my childhood.
All of them are in Mike Howard’s video footage, playing on the screen at the top of the stairs.
After that night, I put my book on hold and spent all my time researching the house. I wanted to know how it was possible that over the course of sixty years, several people in the real world somehow walked into my dreams and nightmares, brought to vivid life by an unnatural house. I should have let it go, because the nature of the situation suggested it might drive me mad. Certainly, it was insane to expect a logical explanation. In the end I decided I must not have had those dreams after all. A more likely explanation was that I saw the Howard video somewhere, or came across an article, maybe that old guy Windale’s blog, and my mind created false memories from the fragments.
But I know this isn’t true.
When I was seven years old, I woke up screaming so loudly my mother ran into the room to comfort me because I’d dreamed of a clown that had insectile limbs and cockroaches crawling under his shirt. Even when I woke, I thought he was inside the room, but it was just my Abominable Snowman onesie hanging in the closet. My stepfather was less kind about it. For weeks, right before my bedtime, he’d jump out at me from under the stairs, hands raised to his face, fingers wiggling, and cry out: “CLOWNMANTIS, LIVE IN FIVE!” and get great pleasure from my fear.
When I was fourteen, I almost choked in my sleep while dreaming of an alien planet presided over by a stone god who had stolen all the air and sent needles up through the sand to impale explorers. I had read Frank Herbert’s Dune only three weeks prior.
I know when I first fell in love, I dreamed of the kind of place where we wouldn’t have to go to school, or work for a living, or deal with grownups. I dreamed we were marooned on a distant island lit by a towering lighthouse. There, we would live off the land and be together until the stars burned out. I was young, and silly, a hopeless and clueless romantic. In school, I fantasized about that place. I saw us there, me and Ramona. I even christened the place Valerine after a character from one of my favorite fantasy novels. And I know when she broke up with me, I had nightmares about her asshole father coming to my door to make me answer for trying to talk his daughter into sleeping with me. I dreamed of going to her house and begging her to give me another chance, but she wouldn’t come to the door. Her brother Liam, that irritating little shit, was in every window, watching.
All the alleged horrors that befell the people who disappeared in Abigail House were taken from inside my head, but how? I wasn’t born until 1971. HOW then, did my dreams manifest themselves back in 1956? One theory is that the dreams preceded my mind’s screening of them, as if after I was born my brain became an antenna that picked up transmissions from somewhere else. But where? Deep space? Another dimension?
If you’re looking for a concrete answer, you’re going to be disappointed, just as I was yesterday when I went to see the empty lot where the house once stood. I thought it might spark something in me, trigger some grand revelation that would make sense of everything, but it didn’t. I will die never knowing how or why any of this happened to me, and to others.
All I got from that visit was a headache from the smell of engine oil.
* * *
NO. NO, I WAS WRONG. Oh God, I was so very wrong. The house...the door...it was there all along...
...I went home, to what I thought was my home. At first, I didn’t notice the differences. Zoe was there at the counter. God. Her face. No eyes. No eyes. My wife, in the shower, scales on her back. I ran, God forgive me, I ran and—
* * *
I’M SORRY TO MY WIFE and daughter there was not supposed to be an ending not supposed to ask questions for which there are no answers but i did i didn’t know i’m sorry to the lost and wonder where you are i am no longer there and i’m sorry you got lost in my dreams
my head hurts I am here now and I have found my faith and it smells like clay
the old world is gone
only the field and the flowers
and the one who put them there
he has promised to teach me
i have
promised to
listen
if i listen
everything
will be okay
all hail
the
sunflower
god
* * *
AS OF YESTERDAY, THE neighborhood of Abigail Lane is no more. Nothing remains of the houses which once stood there but the memories. Trucks and construction crews have come and gone, and the land has been leveled and sold. The cheery billboard out front shows a family staring up in awe at a massive futuristic mall. Beneath it, is a date: June 2026.
