SHUNNED

Before we begin our tales of Haunted Houses and Haunted People I thought I'd share a real life tale of a real Haunted House and the curiousity seeker who visited it. In fact she's a guest here tonight...

Call her Anita Marie.



I was working on my journal last night and I came up with a list of shunned places.

I did this because I love shunned places and the fools who end up visiting there. I've been a fool myself more then a few times so here are some observations I have made about them over the years.

There are places like The Blue Hole http://www.weirdnj.com/_unexplained/legendsofthebluehole.html ( as featured in Weird NJ ) or Collage House http://www.weirdnj.com/misc_story_archive/10_02.html#01 as also featured in Weird NJ. That are called shunned but can they truly be shunned places if they're on the Internet and people actually go there?

Well, no.

Don't get me wrong; I'd be at these places in a flash if I could.

Shunned places are shunned quietly by people even animals, because there is something wrong with those buildings, roads, bridges and empty houses They’re the places that no one goes near even if they're on well traveled roads or highways or suburban developments.

And no one seems to know exactly why that is.

Another thing I've learned is that shunned places don't have to be Haunted Places.

Down the street from where I live now there were two farmhouses.

These two old people who kept to them selves lived in one of the houses.

We only knew they were there because we saw the mailman deliver mail there a few times a week and even if he didn't he'd still walk back to check on them.

Their house was very interesting because it didn't have power or phone lines going into it for the longest time and they lived, as it was described, " like mountain people ".

I thought that meant they ate squirrels.

So besides being accused of reducing the squirrel population they were also accused of having bodieds buried in their backyard.

Then one summer the rumors started about cannibalism and black magic and the kid who started those stories thought they were cool at the time. But now that she's a 40-year-old woman who's moved back to the 'old neighborhood' she's faced with those stories.

Honestly, think about it; do you know what it's like to have some new neighbor look at you over a barbeque and you can just see by the look on their faces they want to know this story, but icky...one is not suppose to like these stories. " Do you know about those dead bodies they found buried at the end of the street all those years ago? "

And you get to laugh and say, " yes, I do...in fact I put them there! "

So that little farmhouse doesn't count. I know why it was shunned. Some smart alec kid did that.

The one that was on the next street over does count and to this day I'm glad it was pulled down.

I truly hated that house.

There was this really beautiful old house on the corner that I use to be a real working farm. By the 70's it stood on a nice sized lot and they had some horses and I think a few cows and a kitchen garden...they grew corn and squashes, tomatoes.

And this dead Apple Orchard.

These twisted gray apple trees stopped producing leaves but they still produced apples. It was weird. Those apples looked like little bloody heads and the horses would sometimes get over there and eat them. Now, if I were to define at what moment horror became my life I'd have to say that watching those horses munch on those little heads was probably a pretty big defining moment.

So why did I hate this house? Because I think I saw it the day it died. It must have been a weird hard death when I think about it now.

We use to walk by the farmhouse to get to this day old bakery to buy our snacks and we use to see the old woman and her son puttering around and they ignored us and we ignored them and that was okay. They weren't mean or hostile, just liked to keep to themselves.

Then one day we were on our bikes going over to the bakery that was on the opposite corner from their lot when we noticed them sitting on their porch.

The Son was standing next to his Mother (they were both old and I'm not sure why they were called Mother and Son even). His Mother was sitting in this high back wicker chair with a blue plaid blanket spread across her lap.

And they were glaring at us, for the first time they SAW us and the look those two had on their faces was malicious. Downright mean. Like they wanted to hurt us.

They sat on their porch on one corner glaring at us and we were on the other corner on our bikes in this little clump and we were staring back. Then we got off our bikes and walked them to the racks in front of the bakery and went in.

When we came out with our bags of treats they were still there with that same look.

This went on for almost a year.

The two of them on the porch, her sitting with her blanket on even in the summer, him standing to her right and their house too...watching us with that same mean look.

We heard rumors the Mother had died and no one knew for sure but one day their property was just full of cars and everyone was wearing black.

After that we saw the Son doing chores but he got rid of the Animals and I'd have to say he managed to keep the place up real nice.

Then he must have died and the house was emptied and then it was abandoned.

It stood like that for almost 10 years and one summer, when I was about 23 my Sister and friends decided to break in. It was going to be pulled down and we thought why not take a look around? We reasoned it wasn't wrong as long as we didn't wreck or take anything. Plus in all those years in this small neighborhood NONE of our Parents had been inside that house. In fact, no one even knew these people's first names.

We wanted to meet, near its last days, this House that had been part of our lives up close and... at last.

The state of that abandoned house was an exception to everything you might think of empty houses. The House was clean, no dust, no animal damage, nothing nasty on the stove or in the sink.

It was clean and the windows sparkled.

We went into the living room and looked around and then someone guessed we should go upstairs and take a look at the rooms. So I started to walk up the stairs and I thought about that blue plaid blanket and I panicked.

It felt like it took me forever just to turn around because I really DID want to go upstairs and see what was there and I bet it wouldn't have been a nice clean set of rooms. I'll bet I would have seen mold and decay and rot and that Mother and her Son sitting there just waiting for us all.

No one really said ' let's get out of here ' but we did and for safe measure I locked the door on my way out. I figured it'd give us a few seconds if anything had followed us out.

But we weren't done yet!

The garage was right out back and the door was open...of course it was shut when we first went in but were we surprised?

Of course not.

The inside of the garage was full of stuff from the 40's. Furniture, magazines, canning jars and a dress form and folded neatly on a wicker chair...

That blue plaid blanket.

It's an image I don't need walking around in my head. I'd have done better I guess to respect the fact that shunned places are shunned for a reason. Trust me, you don’t always need to know what those reasons are…keep them where they belong.

Way in the back of your mind is a good place.

Second place?

In your nightmares. At least then you’ll know for sure they’ll be gone in the morning.