No one who’s twelve years old ever thinks about how their dad was also at one time a kid.
It was a truth that was too big to wrap my head around.
For all my life, my dad had always seemed so grown-up, never changing—the kilt-wearing, survival-camping, golf-course-owning, unofficial pep rally leader, ex-banker, and perennial optimist of Blue Creek, Texas.
But when confronted by the overwhelming evidence, I had to face the fact that my father indeed had once been a child, and not only that, but a child who’d apparently liked grunge rock and had at one time been arrested for breaking the law in the very town where I’d been born and spent my entire life.
“My dad must have been really relieved the day I fell into the well,” I said. “That way, for sure all the people in Blue Creek would stop talking about him and only talk about the other Abernathy.”
Because this is what the 1994 article from the Hill Country Yodeler revealed about my dad and the Purdy House:
Blue Creek Teens Detained after Being Trapped inside Abandoned Purdy House
Three incoming ninth-grade students from Blue Creek High School were arrested Friday night after finding themselves trapped inside an empty house on North Detweiler Road.
The teens, Davey56 Abernathy, 13, Oscar Padilla, 14, and Linda Swineshead, 13, all recent graduates of Dick Dowling Middle School, unknowingly locked themselves inside the long-abandoned Purdy House after accepting a dare from incoming members of the Blue Creek High School freshman football squad, to spend three hours inside the shuttered home on the night of last week’s full moon.
“We sure didn’t mean to cause any problems,” Abernathy said. “We just wanted to show we were brave enough to do it, because the other boys had been making fun of me and Oscar. Linda didn’t want us to go there, but she came along so she could stop us from doing anything stupid, which didn’t really work out. Because once we got inside, the doors and windows seemed to lock all by themselves, and we were stuck.”
“Davey was going to do it alone, but I wouldn’t let him,” Padilla said. “He’s my best friend, and I was afraid he’d get eaten by that cannibal ghost or something.”
The Purdy House has long been rumored to be haunted, and has been the focus of several recent paranormal studies. To date, stories of a cannibalistic wild boy named Charlie Purdy, the house’s fabled inhabitant, have never been substantiated.
Abernathy, wearing baggy jeans and a hole-pocked Nirvana T-shirt, was released early Saturday morning into the custody of his grandmother, gospel singer Lily Abernathy, owner of Blue Creek’s Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Course. The sheriff has not yet determined whether charges will officially be filed against Abernathy and the other teens.
“This is a tough call. The house has sat there empty for so long, it’s like nobody cares about it beyond its reputation as some sort of local nuisance. All empty houses do is attract trouble, I’ll tell you. But if being dumb was a crime, there’s no doubt these three kids would be facing the judge,” Sherriff Cole Glick said.
Padilla and Abernathy had both recently dropped out of the Blue Creek High summer football training session, and claimed they had something to prove to the other boys on the team who’d teased Abernathy and dared the boys that they were not brave enough to spend time inside the house, which holds a frightening reputation in Blue Creek history. The third teen, Linda Swineshead, went along in support of her boyfriend, Davey Abernathy.57
The three youths climbed over the locked gates and entered the house through a loose basement hopper window, which, once inside, proved to be too high for the teens to use as an exit. While the teens were inside the house, members of the Blue Creek High School freshman football team waited outside, timing the duration of the stay.
“As soon as we got inside the house, weird things started happening. We heard noises—like singing—coming from somewhere underground, and sounds like something was being dragged back and forth across the floor up in the attic,” Abernathy said.
“We didn’t realize that the window was too high for us to climb back out, and then Oscar [Padilla] found this little secret tunnel, but he got trapped behind the doorway, and that’s when me and Linda [Swineshead] got really scared. We tried to get out of the house through the front doors, but they were sealed shut, so we went back down to the basement and started yelling for help below the window where we came in, but it was stuck shut too, and I don’t think anyone heard us,” Abernathy said.
After three hours had passed with no sign of Abernathy, Padilla, and Swineshead, the football players outside went to a nearby house and called Sheriff Glick. None of the players remained present at the scene to provide an account of the trespassing to law enforcement.
Speaking on conditions of anonymity, one of the football players said, “We argued about going over to tell Miss Lily Abernathy that Davey was killed, but we decided she’d find out eventually anyway.”
According to Abernathy, Padilla had become trapped inside a narrow crawl space leading from the basement to a small room that had been dug deeper underground than the basement. “There wasn’t any light anywhere,” Abernathy said, “but Oscar told us how the place lit up by itself when he got inside, and then he started screaming at us because he couldn’t get out through the little door, and he thought he saw a ghost and what looked like a coffin just sitting there in the middle of the floor, and there was an armadillo that came running toward Oscar, which really scared him because Oscar is afraid of armadillos.”
Glick released Padilla and Swineshead to their parents’ custody late Friday evening, while Abernathy, the confessed ringleader of the break-in, remained in the sheriff’s detention until his parents could be located the next morning.
“Everyone does foolish things when they’re kids,” Glick said, “but breaking into that old Purdy House has got to be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of in all my years of law enforcement here in Blue Creek. I hope those three learned their lesson and are done with it now.”
When we finished reading the article, Bahar and Karim just stared at me, obviously waiting for me to confess to something that I had no idea I was guilty of.
“My dad never told me anything about getting trapped inside the Purdy House,” I said.
“Maybe he’s got a huge criminal record besides just that,” said Karim, always encouraging. Then he added, “Being called a ringleader when you’re only thirteen says a lot about your reputation as a scofflaw.”
And Bahar said, “I wonder what he’s going to say when you tell him you’re going there tomorrow night.”
I put my head in my hands again and said, “Ugh.”
And where had Karim ever learned a word like “scofflaw”?58
56. Davey? Davey? This was already too much to handle.
57. Wait. Dad had a girlfriend when he was THIRTEEN? Named Linda Swineshead? I can’t even…
58. A “scofflaw” is a delinquent.