First of all, let me give you a little background for this story.
This took place many years ago in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. Henderson State
University was still Henderson College. On the bordering property was a small
cemetery. It was very old, with many more ancient graves than recent ones.
As Henderson expanded, the small cemetery was
in the way. It was near where the girl’s softball field is today. Henderson
needed that land, so it was decided that the land would be taken, public domain
and all that, and the graveyard moved.
Almost nobody was still around to make an
issue of that.
Except for one older woman, whose whole family
was in that cemetery.
She protested to
anyone who would listen, but in the end, the land was taken. She apparently had
no money to hire a lawyer. The graves were moved out to a larger older
cemetery, some miles out west of Arkadelphia. It has been told that she sat in
her beat up old truck right beside that cemetery as her family was dug up and
moved, never speaking to anybody, and glaring at anyone who came close.
Nobody saw much of her for a long time.
Then one day, it was noticed that she was
hauling lumber in her old truck, stacking it right beside that cemetery fence,
where her loved ones now rested. After a large stack was finished, she
could often be seen hauling it, plank by plank, into the woods on the west side
of the cemetery. Everybody who knew her said she was a very strong and determined
woman, and were not surprised when a small shack appeared, just outside that
fence. She built a little rail around on top, and could sometimes be seen
up on top of her shack, in her rocking chair. As far as could be determined,
she now lived in that shack.
Stories were going
around that she had just gone off the deep end when her whole family was dug up
and moved. She seemed to dedicate her life to watching over her loved ones,
every day. I suppose she was guarding them, making sure they were not disturbed
again.
She didn’t own that land, but it occupied just
a very small part of a very large wooded tract of land there. Everyone felt
sorry for that poor woman, and the owners just left her alone.
Time went by.
Unfortunately, she was not always left undisturbed. Stories circulated about
the crazy old woman out by the cemetery. When one drove down that dirt road
beside the cemetery at night, she could often be spotlighted in the headlights
as one made the turn, just sitting on top that shack, just rocking.
Seems a group of young
men about college age eventually decided to have a little fun with her. They
started out by hollering at her, taunting her, until eventually she would
disappear into her shack.
Unfortunately, other young people got in on
the fun by walking out into the cemetery, hollering at her that they were going
to dig up her family again. Lots of people had heard her story by now. When
they did this, she usually would start screaming. It was the most highly pitched
scream anyone had ever heard and she would still be screaming when they tired
of the game and left. The few people remaining in Arkadelphia who knew her said
she had developed a very unnaturally strong hatred for anyone around college
age, starting when her family was dug up to allow HSU’s expansion. Nobody
seemed to know if any of the young people harassing her were students or not,
but to her it didn’t matter. She just grouped all young people together, and
hated them all.
One Halloween, a group of particularly mean
young guys decided to go scare her. They parked their car a good ways
back, walked very quietly up to the shack. On signal they started pounding on
the walls and hollering at her. She was dozing off up on top in her chair, and
when the ruckus started, she got up quickly. She was screaming that particularly
high-pitched scream and ran for the roof access hole. She fell against that railing and broke
through a section of it. In falling to the ground her neck was broken. She
was buried right beside her family.
But this is not the end of our 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 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.
My grandchildren loved it. For a year or so. I had made it
so that the second floor could be reached only by climbing a knotted rope, to
keep the small children from getting up to the second floor, maybe falling and
getting hurt. Actually, it pretty well turned out that my older grandchildren
couldn’t reach that second floor, either. That upstairs room has sat, empty and
deserted, for many years now.
Over time, I started
noticing that strange things started happening, seemingly in that upstairs room
of the tree house. Our bedroom in our house is on the end close to that
treehouse. One night, I heard a woman moaning way up there in that tree house.
It was one of those cases where I snapped suddenly awake, terrified, and was
absolutely sure I heard it. Yet later, I reasoned I must have dreamed that,
because it just could not have actually happened. Another time, I was
awakened in much the same way, by the sound of someone tapping, very sharply,
five times on our bedroom window. Occasionally I heard terrifying, high pitched
screams emanating, it seemed, from that upper room at night, or was it just
another nightmare? Occasionally, a small light could be seen, flashing on and
off, in that upper room. Several times, I have heard the sound of a board
falling up there, late at night, even though I left no loose lumber up there.
These last two events I was absolutely sure of. I was wide awake long before they
happened.
Barbara and I have an
open door policy for any college student in our church. If their visiting
friends or their parents need a place to stay overnight, they are always
welcome.
It occurred to me one
day, it seemed that the only time those strange noises occurred was when an OBU
or HSU student was in our house. I started keeping track of it, and sure
enough, strange things often happened up there only when a college student was
staying with us.
We often have a group
of mostly college students over on Sunday nights, and once, when I built a
campfire outside after our meeting, they started talking about that tree house,
only 50 feet away. Not wanting to scare them, I didn't mention its history.
One boy wanted to climb up there. I tried to
talk him out of it. I told him it had been deserted for years, that no lights were
in it now, and I don’t really know how solid it still is. He insisted, would
not listen to me. He snatched my headlight out of my hand and headed for the tree
house. The girls begged him not to go. He negotiated the 2x10 plank up to the
first level, then we could hear him entering. Soon, I could hear him ascending
the rope. With much trepidation, I began to realize, he was one of those rare
young men with enough shoulder strength to actually get up there. I held
my breath, terrified as I thought what may be about to happen. Suddenly,
we all heard an ear splitting scream, the most highly pitched scream any of us
had ever heard. It was followed by a
loud thud, as if someone, or something, had fallen. We saw him sliding,
jumping, and falling back down that plank. He came to the campfire, sat down in
a chair, and never spoke. Just stared into the flames. He was white as a sheet,
had a bleeding wound on his head, and my headlight was smashed. Nobody said a
word.
We all sat there
quietly for a long time. Finally, a girl spoke. “Why did you scream? And how,
with your deep voice, could you scream like that?”
He got up and started
heading down the hill toward his car. He stopped, turned and looked at us with
a wild look in his eyes, and finally spoke in his very deep voice.
“That
was not MY scream.”
That’s all he said. Not another word.
We miss him. Word got
back to me that he left town that night. And has never been back.
I know I need to
just tear that old tree house down. But to take down a tree house, one has to
start at the top, or risk having it fall on you.
And, I’m not about to
go up there.
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