`Part Two of a Three Part Story
This all happened
years before my family moved to Arkadelphia, and I’m not really sure what
happened to the guys who caused all this. I did not hear the first part of this
story until many years later.
My wife Barbara and I
have two children, Corey and Kinley. Our son Corey was starting into the eighth
grade, and our daughter Kinley would start into the fourth grade. We moved to Arkadelphia.
We knew this might be
our last move, if things worked out with the business we had just bought, a
photography studio.
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 on
the front end. 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. Strangely, it had a rail around the top, broken in
one place.
Corey and Kinley were 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
preferred HSU. Right after Corey started to OBU, he brought a couple of his
buddies out for the weekend. All being adventurous, the boys wanted to camp in
that old shack by the back fence.
They were back home by midnight. A plank had
fallen from the ceiling, seemingly for no reason at all, and raised a large
knot on Corey’s buddy’s head. They all swore they heard a woman moaning in
agony right outside, then they swore they could hear a woman screaming, a very
high pitched scream, 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 work overtime.
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 upstairs 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’s
high pitched scream. Way off in the woods.
My wife 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. Corey 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 and gave it to me
in payment for my time. He said I could use it working on our 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 enough to use. 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.
******************
continued in one week
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