chapter 1
I come from a very rural part of East Tennessee. It ain’t exactly what you’d call the “sticks” ’cause there is a large city about 20 minutes away but you could still get lost on the winding country roads surrounding the house I grew up in and it would take someone familiar with the area to help you get out and back on your way to civilization.
chapter 2
Behind my house was a steep incline and at the bottom of that incline was an old sawmill run by Elmer Nicely. The train tracks ran right along side Elmer’s sawmill and when a train would come through about once an hour all the windows in our house would tremble for about 10 minutes. Elmer also slaughtered hogs at his place so it was awfully nice when the train came by and masked the horrible squeals we’d sometimes hear from his small wood slaughterhouse.
chapter 3
There was a one-lane gravel road that cut between our house and the sawmill. I’d see cars pass through there at all hours of the day and night but when I was a kid I’d never been far down that old road. It just looked scary down there to me. The trees and kudzu was overgrown and the road looked like a path into a dark tunnel of leaves, vines, sticks and dust. I knew some people lived down that gravel road but I didn’t know anyone personally. They were mostly reclusive country people who liked to keep to themselves and I wasn’t one to go messing with them.
chapter 4
Once when I was a kid I had a dream that terrified me, more so than any dream I’ve ever had. I dreamed a man broke into our house and tried to kill my entire family. The man’s face haunted me for years. He was a lanky, middle-aged man with greased-back black hair, leathery skin and bad teeth. Several years after that dream I was in our back yard when an old light blue Chevy came speeding down the gravel road. The driver looked straight at me as he passed and my heart moved right into my throat. He had the exact same face as the man in my dream. I was petrified. I’d see this man pass the house many times after that and every time my body would tremble. Then one day I never saw that man again.
chapter 5
When I got older my parents would let me walk down the old gravel road by myself. I remember the first time I went down past the sawmill, past the slaughterhouse, and found where the old road bent to the left and crossed the railroad track. At that point I couldn’t recognize any surroundings. It was like I was in some small backwood village. There were old, broken down, rusted trailers that people still lived in, nestled back in the brush. There were so many old houses I’d never seen before and they looked like they’d been pieced together with scrap wood and plastic and cardboard. There was an old creek that ran behind the houses I had no idea existed. Every other house it seemed had an old, mangy dog tied up to a tree or a rotting dog house. Something about the whole atmosphere made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up.
chapter 6
Just past the shacks there was an old cornfield overgrown with weeds and brush. Hanging on a wood post was a pitiful looking scarecrow with only one arm raised. Like he was trying to hitchhike his way out of that place. Next to the corn field, sitting way back off the road was a decrepit, white, three-story wood house. All of the windows on the house were broken out and you would need a machete to get to the front door, but it was still a pretty impressive house among the dilapidated shacks. The old house looked like it had been quite something in its time and it made me want to do some research on it to find out its history.
chapter 7
The next day, after seeing the old house, I was telling some of my school friends about it. One of my friends said, “That’s the old Lockhart house.” Then he said with a smile, “I’ve heard it’s haunted.” Neither of us believed in ghosts or haunted houses but we’d both seen how creepy the place looked. I wanted to find out more information about it but I wasn’t sure where to go for it. I’d seen some of the Lockharts at the school and I knew they couldn’t live in that house. Or could they?
