Way back in the 1960s, my family lived in the small town of Blakely Georgia, a town famous for nothing at all except having a peanut butter factory that let contaminated peanut butter to kill seven people nationwide with a salmonella outbreak. That was many years ago, and I haven’t been back to that town in more years than that.
The road going to school, and we rode our bikes to school, was dirt, so those kids worried about their clothes getting muddy would ride slow. We rode fast and got dirty. Then they paved the road one year and ruined it.
A green and white house at the end of the road had home made signs that read, “No Trespassing” and “Keep out!” but we never saw anyone in the house or a car in the yard. We kids decided it was haunted. We had no reason to think ghosts had written the signs, but that didn’t stop us.
The yard wasn’t mowed on a regular basis, weeds popped up, the fence around the yard, which looked terrible even to kids, eventually fell over and it disappeared. We worried the ghost was now free to roam the earth and that’s not a bad beginning for a ghost story.
Yet over the years, just a few actually, but three or four years for a ten year old is almost half a lifetime, we ran out of reasons to believe in ghosts. A family with two little kids moved into the house, and since they were little kids we suspected the ghosts would eat them, not that there was a reason to believe that ghosts had to eat.
Then they bused us to the other side of town, to the middle school and we stopped riding our bikes as much. Suddenly, we were in high school and one day I went by the haunted house and they were tearing it down.
My family had moved to another neighborhood by that time and no one rode bikes to school when they could drive. The stories we would have told about the ghosts murdering the family, and as far as I know no one was murdered at all, would have kept us going, but it was too late . I realize now, having driven by the place where the haunted house once stood, it wasn’t ghosts that were haunting that house, but us.
What there a house in your home town people thought was haunted?
Take Care,
Mike
There was a “haunted house” down the street from the house I grew up in. Our house was the first on the peninsula. My grandparents had the last house on the peninsula, which was about a mile. Not quite half way was the haunted house.
It wasn’t run down really, just drab. Solid white, but that whitewashed kind of white. With black shutters closed over every window. Two stories. I never saw a car in the driveway. But the porch light was on or off according to time of day.
Before I was strong enough to ride my bike the whole mile to my grandparents’ house, I would have to walk my bike some of the way. Past…that…house. I walked quickly.
And then again to get home!
BS, ever find out anything about the house?
When we first got married the place we found was an upstairs flat in a fairly large house. When i was a kid we believed it had been a hospital many years before and many had died there. One night I was telling my wife about it and scared myself.
The rest of the houses to avoid when I was young were the “Get off my lawn” houses.
Buzz, we had a few “get off my lawn” people but not that many.
Most people had kids, not lawns.