So, this is an odd and longish and pointless story.
I grew up on my father’s cattle farm in very rural central Alabama. The name of the house was Locksley Hall, a rather grandiloquent name for a rather mundane house (it would pass unnoticed in most middle class neighborhoods from the 1960s but was admittedly a mansion by the standards of the place where I grew up). There are some pictures of it here.
The brick house is the one I grew up in from infancy until just after I turned 20
The roofless house is my grandmother’s house (or what’s left of it) which was next door. The roof and most of the floor is gone (open to a 5 foot drop in places) and, the scary thing- it is still lived in. The reversed polarity shot is of the back bedroom where some squatter has a bed and battery operated appliances; she/he/it was not there on the day a few weeks ago when I made these pictures (my first time inside the house in almost 20 years). One pic is of the bathroom window that figures in this story.
The falling down old white house is my father’s family’s homeplace, lived in when I was little by his twin great-aunts. It’s a two room log cabin that, like Topsy or cancer, just growed and then just collapsed. That front room from the inside is where my father and many other relatives were born and grew up and believe it or not it still smells like cats.
The stately old home with the dogtrot is an 1830s plantation house built by distant relatives and that bordered our property (which used to be part of the huge Holy Field Plantation). It was falling down when I was growing up but has since been dismantled, moved, fully restored to better than it’s ever been and is currently part of an antebellum Alabama “reconstructed village” of houses and buildings moved from various parts of the state into a faux 1850 town.
Anyway, all that aside: I have some good memories of Locksley Hall and all of these places, but the good memories are almost 30 years old. For the last decade of the half of my life that I spent there, the bad memories outnumber the good by a huge margin. When I was 15 my father died in the house during a blizzard while I was sharing a bed with him and that’s far from my worst memory. Our finances went to hell in a proverbial handbasket until the house was falling apart like post-bellum Tara, my mother was constantly suicidal, the house reeked of urine from my great-aunt who came to live with us after her twin died, towards the end we were continually having our phone and other utilities disconnected and being circled by creditors, in the five years we tried selling the place there were no interested buyers (even when we dropped the price to “take over the mortgage and pay closing costs”- this was during the double-digit interest years, incidentally) and on top of it all the place was haunted.
I’m a skeptic, I’m an agnostic, I don’t believe in most mumbo jumbo bumps in the night stories, but I firmly believe that place was haunted. I have never had a problem with hallucinations even when feverish from illness or marginally manic or under the influence of substances (well, actually, during my unintentional one experience with LSD [my drink was spiked at a party] I hallucinated, but I literally knew at the time that I was hallucinating and even told people “I hear the wallpaper and see light coming from the speakers- take me home and let me sleep until my brain chemistry is no longer fucked up”] but on my oath I have personally seen people vanish on the grounds of that place, I have seen doors open and close themselves and heard them a lot more than that, dogs would go ballistic at something only they could see in the middle of the floor, a tape recorder left on one night recorded a muffled but audible voice calling my mother’s name when nobody was in the room [my mother and I shared a room by this time, long story], etc.). I don’t attempt to explain it, but it happened.
In any case, my mother and I finally let the bank take the house (not that we had much choice) and essentially refugeed with the clothes and possessions we could cram into a Chevette and the furniture that we could fit into one (1) load on a small borrowed pickup. From living in an overstuffed 4 BR house we wound up in a 2 BR apartment with lots of empty space and only 1 bed, no sofa, etc. (though it didn’t stay that way long as we’re both accumulators). From late teens through early 20s was the most impoverished and miserable part of my life, and that house is the capitol building of its misery.
My siblings left the place a decade before I did and both graduated pharmacy school within months of my father’s death. They both married and engaged in well-paying careers while my mother and I in a good month were only two months behind on the house payments and had electricity. Their last memories of the place are of riding horses through the yards or playing football on the acre we marked off for a football field or big 4TH of July parties and ridiculously commercial Christmases when the house didn’t smell like pee and dogs and ducks and calves and the occasional peacock and goat roamed the yards outside- pastoral, carefree, etc… My sister managed to salvage some of the family land from the sheriff’s auctions that occurred when my father’s creditors finally breached the walls of Constantinople and raised their flags and was furious that “you let the place get away” (like we had a choice). She currently owns my grandmother’s house (or what’s left of it), the aunts’ cabin (or what’s left of it) and polka dotted pieces of the former family farm that were untouchable due to an odd arrangement of lifetime interests and deed names and the like, about 30 acres from the 250 acre farm as near as we can tell.
This place is 5 miles from the nearest place to buy a gallon of gas, 20 miles from the nearest place to (legally) buy a computer and 40 miles from the nearest college. At it’s zenith the “community” (given the name Weokahatchee on a very old map of Alabama) had about 18 inhabitants and today that is down to 2 (one of them my father’s 80 something old maid cousin and the other the squatter). Last year the closest neighbor, a farmer who lived about 2 miles away, was gunned down in his front yard while his wife spent all night hiding under her house as the killer ransacked the house. (The neighbor was involved in the cultivation and distribution of Alabama’s largest cash crop and had a disagreement with his fellow farmers over marketing.) Nobody called the sheriff for the simple reason that nobody heard the dozen shots that were fired- the place is that isolated.
In the past 20 years Locksley Hall has had three owners. The first moved in perfectly healthy and was dead of cancer within 2 years (which I don’t pretend to think is at all unnatural or supernatural, just unfortunate). Next it was sold to a family that owned it for a few years then spent 2 years trying to sell it before finally slashing the price and finding a buyer. The last owner died of a heart attack in the house (according to my source) and his heirs, who do not live in the area, let the house be foreclosed on rather than take up the payments. It is currently abandoned (as it has been for several non-consecutive years over the last 2 decades) and owned by a bank.
Must run, more in a moment.
