UNTITLED TALES
Untitled
15
In 1972 my
father got transferred to Paducah, Kentucky where he went to work at a newly
formed MASH unit that the Army had located there due to its closeness to
several smaller towns in Western Kentucky, Southern Missouri and Illinois. My
dad went down several weeks before the rest of the
family to find a place for us to live. At that time there were mom, dad, my
two sisters and myself.
Surprisingly
enough after a few days dad called and told us that he found a place big
enough for us and the rent was relatively cheap. The place he rented was a
two story, 3 bedroom red brick house with an unfinished half basement. It
took us a couple of weeks to get the place cleaned up (the former tenants left
it in quite a mess) and get our stuff moved in and arranged where we liked
it. We moved in the beginning of July and for the first couple of weeks the
place was quiet, but then the fun started...
At that time
we had a dog that would go anywhere my mother would go, we kinda kidded mom
about the dog being her white shadow....but there was more than one occasion
when the dog would not follow mom upstairs;
instead she would stand at the bottom step whining and watching something on
the landing. The upstairs consisted of a full bath, three fairly large
bedrooms and a spare room that we turned into a rec room. The rec room was
always colder than the rest of the house; we could
have the heaters going in the dead of winter and the house would be around 75
or 80 and that room would be in the 60's or lower. It
was like that all the time, in fact there were several times that we could see
our breath while in that room in the middle of summer when it
was 90+ degrees outside.
This is also one room the dog would never go
into, she would stand at the door and just snarl toward the middle of the
room. The door to that room would never stay open;
we'd open it up and by the time we were down the stairs it would close with an
echoing bang that came close to shaking the house.
The whole
family heard footsteps upstairs while we were downstairs. At other times we
would hear knocking on the walls or banging on the floors. The only place I
did not go was the basement. The
first and only time I was down there I felt like something was down there
watching me. It made
the hair on the back of my neck stand up on end. We lived there for two
years with these things going on, nothing to harm us,
just noises. The
last day we were in the house My father, mother and I were in the living room
getting ready to lock the place up when every door
on the second floor slammed at the same time. I guess it was the houses'
way of saying goodbye...
I personally
never did find out exactly what went on there, but there were rumours that
back in the 1950's and 1960's the place had been a brothel and several of the
girls were killed in the house. In 1963 there
was a police raid on the place, with several people
being injured or dying on the property. After
that the place stayed empty until 1970, when the son
of the original owner fixed it up and started renting it. As far as I know
the place is still there. I haven't been back to
Paducah since then.
-Hezikiah Caw.