The old Willis Beaufort house sat outside my small hometown, on a mostly forgotten gravel road like so many in the Midwest, unknown to us until we were teenagers. Its existence, location and lore was handed down from someone’s older brother or sister, though the details were sketchy.
The story went that “Willie” had had big barn dances out there, back in the days after the second World War, spending up what he’d harvested on his acres and acres of corn. His wife Ada was the acknowledged great beauty of her day and presided over it all. Everyone envied Willie.
And then Ada disappeared. Some versions say that he caught her with another man and she had abandoned Willie to run off with him. Others said he murdered her and disposed of the body…out there in the middle of nowhere, it wouldn’t be hard to do.
Literally fifty feet, on the opposite side of the road, sat a tiny old cemetery. It was probably the cemetery for the generations that had lived there, and we found some Beaufort tombstones, but they stopped around 1900, so they didn’t have Willie’s or Ada’s certainly.
One thing was sure: the farm declined, withered, and died, as did Willie in the space of five years. They had no children, and both being only children themselves, the state now owned the land. “It’s haunted, of course…Willie comes back, looking for Ada,” or, “A little boy saw a ghost of Ada carrying her own head, and he died on the spot. He’s buried in the little cemetery over there, you know.”
I’d gone out there a few times in high school, during the day, to take photos. The chicken coop, wood the color of cigarette ashes, was slowly imploding, its sides falling to center, with no glass at all where the windows had been. The house was putting up more of a fight than the chicken coop. It had waist high weeds all around and its porch was starting to collapse on one corner, but it was otherwise fairly level and plumb. Seedlings in its gutters were trying to sprout into pine trees.
It was a marvelous place to park at night. Take a girl out there, tell her the story… We’d add a few comments, like “Did you hear that?” and “Is someone coming toward the car? I better go check!” and she’d be hanging on for dear life. I think we knew it was just so much nonsense. I liked 'Salem’s Lot a bit too much, the idea that a place can embody or store up some kind of evil or whatever. It was fun to think we had something special in our little world, though, so maybe we indulged each other that. Maybe even the girls. Not that any of us would actually venture INSIDE, of course.
When I was about 21, and soooo above all that, I mentioned the place to my sister. We were running errands and we had my nephews (ten and eleven years old) in the back seat. “Well let’s just run out there and have a look around.”
On the way out, I’m terrifying the boys with the legend. We get out there, park the car, look around, and my sister says, “Let’s go in.” Inside, there were all kinds of Life magazines and old newspapers all over the bare wood floor. An old chair and couch…and a curtain to other rooms, probably the kitchen. My sister and I were sort of drinking this in, but the boys were antsy.
If the above doesn’t already demonstrate it, my ability to tell a spooky story is lacking…the boys weren’t scared. Hell no, they were in “explorer” mode, wanting to go upstairs etc. Right, have a rotten floor board give way underneath them! “Stay on this floor,” my sister said. The boys went through the curtain and came back in…oh, about 30 seconds. “Hey, guess what! There’s a man back there!” Aw geez, that Willie Beaufort bullshit I’d been feeding them!
And then the curtain opened and a nickel-plated .45 caliber, pearl-handled gun (wearing a man) stepped out. “What are you doing here?” he asked angrily.
“Uh, we were…uh…just looking around. We were…” I said
“…just leaving!” my sister finished.
“This is private property…”
“Oh, we’re, we’re sorry…we thought the state owned it…” I said.
“Yeah, we’re sorry. C’mon, boys!” sis added.
“But we wanna go upstairs!” one of them whined.
We left. :eek:
