This all happened years before we moved to
Arkadelphia, and I’m not really sure what happened to the guys who caused all
this. I did not hear of this story until many years later.
In 1982, we moved to Arkadelphia. We knew
this might be our last move, if things worked out with the business, a
photography studio we had just bought. Barbara ran the business, and I found a
job teaching at Arkadelphia High School. We finally found just the spot, and
bought five wooded acres out west of town, to build a house on. It was heavily
wooded, and I cleared out just enough trees to build the house. At the back of
the property was a very old cemetery, and just across the fence from it, on our
land, was a very old shack, much of it beginning to rot, with a rail around the
top, broken in one place.
Corey and Kinley, our children, were just
young children when we built our house. They were curious about that old shack.
We could never figure out why anyone would build it there. I went down with
them through the woods to check it out. They wanted to use it for a playhouse.
I decided that was all right if they would stay off those stairs and off the
top. Some of those boards were getting very old, and it might be dangerous.
They spent a lot of time playing in that old shack with their friends when they
were young.
Our children grew up in that house in the
country. A few years later, Corey chose OBU. A few years after that, Kinley
would spend some time at OBU and HSU. Right after Corey started to OBU, he
brought a couple of his buddies out for the weekend. All being adventurous,
they wanted to camp in that old shack by the back fence. They were back home by
midnight. Seems a plank had fallen from the ceiling, seemingly for no reason at
all, and raised a large knot on his buddy’s head. They all swore they heard a
woman moaning in agony right outside, then they swore they could hear a woman
screaming, way out in the woods. That
made up their mind. They headed up the trail toward our house. One of the boys
just seemed sure he saw blinking lights inside the shack when he looked back,
but you know how young guys are. Get a little scare and the imagination begins
to run away.
Both
our children and their friends seemed to shy away from that old shack after
that, and I didn’t discourage it. It had to be getting a little dangerous by
now, being so old and partly rotten. I think by now the kids and their friends
were building on that “haunted house” thing. Both of them began to tell stories
of someone moving around up stairs in OUR house, while they were home alone. On
top of that, Corey and his buddy claimed they once accidentally stepped on a
grave when crossing that graveyard, and in the distance, they could hear a
woman scream. Way off in the woods.
Barbara was
getting tired of being a country girl. That dirt road kept her car dirty, and
she was wanting back in town with cable TV and city water. The kids, well, they
were about grown now, but were anxious to get away from that place. So, I put
in ten months at hard labor, building our third house I have built. Right
before we moved, I tore down that old shack at the back. Some of that lumber
was still solid, and I might need it to build the grandkids a playhouse,
someday, so I carried a couple of loads of it to our new house in town, stacked
it in the edge of our woods, covered it up to save it.
The years were flying by, and Barbara and
I found ourselves with five grandchildren! Four boys and a girl. I still had
not gotten around to building that playhouse.
Kinley and her husband, Mickey, bought our
studio in Arkadelphia, then moved to Little Rock and bought a Sports
Photography franchise, which they continue to this day. Corey, also, followed
in Barbara’s footsteps and became a photographer in Little Rock. I always
thought kids usually followed in the father’s footsteps, but no, it was not to
be. He soon decided to build his own studio in West Little Rock, and I helped
supervise his contractors, living on site in my camper for several months. When
finished, he had a lot of scrap lumber left over, gave it to me, sorta in
payment for my time. Said I could use it
working on my rent houses.
In the end, I decided to use it to build
that playhouse for my grandchildren. I went one step farther, and built a tree
house in the edge of our woods. When I was finishing up, I decided to check
through that very old lumber, stacked in our woods for many years, and maybe
there was enough of it still sound. There was. I decided to build an addition
to the top. I wound up building a second story, mostly from that very old
lumber from out by the cemetery.
CONCLUDED IN FOUR DAYS Don't miss it - I can only hold up to tell this last part once.
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