The first genre of literature/film I ever fell in love with was horror. From the time I was a child, watching Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney from behind steepled fingers on my Aunt Willie's couch, to discovering H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King in high school, I've been drawn to scary stories. While my novel-length works have all gone in other directions (so far), I've been writing short horror stories since I was a teen. Every year, for Halloween, I try to write something new in this genre. This year's entree is one I am particularly proud of - composed over the last week, I think it's one of the most macabre stories I have ever written. So be warned - if you don't like monsters and ghouls and things that go bump in the night, READ NO FURTHER!!!!!!
Still with me? Good. Turn down the lights, put on some creepy music, and enjoy:
THE HORROR AT HEMPSTEAD HOUSE
A Short Story
By
Lewis B. Smith
Folks near Bonham, Texas don’t talk
about what happened at Hempstead House, even though its ruined foundations
still stand, largely free of undergrowth, on the tall hill overlooking Bois D’arc
Creek. Nearly nine decades have passed
since the awful events of May 1935, and those who witnessed the bizarre occurrence
have long since passed on. Their
children heard their parents talk about that dreadful night in whispers, but very
few of that generation chose to pass the story to their own offspring, and to
teenagers growing up in the small Texas town today, the ruins of Hempstead
House are nothing but a rumor, a vague legend whose details are unknown, but whose
aura hovers over the wreckage of that once-stately antebellum home, creating
enough dread that even the boldest among them rarely venture near it.
I first heard the rumors when visiting
a friend in Bonham fifteen years ago. As
we drove down towards the creek to go fossil hunting, the windswept hilltop
caught my eye. The tall Johnson grass
that surrounds most unkempt old houses in North Texas was nowhere in evidence, and
the few plants that dared grow near the crumbling foundation were twisted and misshapen,
seeming to lean away from the crumbling stones in revulsion. A vague sense of wrongness hung over the
place, even though the ruins themselves looked as mundane any other derelict
foundation on which a house once stood. Stone
steps that had presumably led up to the front entryway were flanked by two
faded, cracked stone lions, both with traces of colorful paint flaking off of them,
and one missing its head.
When I asked what had once stood
there, my friend Travis shrugged.
“Some crazy old Civil War vet lived
there once,” he said. “Bad stuff
happened there during the Depression – I think maybe someone died? - and the house
burned. I think maybe the locals set it
on fire, but I don’t really know. No one
talks about it.”
I nodded and we drove on down the hill
towards the creek to look for shark’s teeth washed out from the ancient inland
seabed that once covered North Texas.
But those brief words, and the story they hinted at, hung up in my head
and wouldn’t let go. A few days later I
drove past that bare hill again, and on a whim, I pulled over and slipped
through the decrepit barbed wire fence that separated the property from the
road, hiking up the hill to the site.
As I got closer, I saw there was more bare ground exposed near the old
foundation, littered with bits of glass and stone and fragments of ancient,
burned wood, so brittle it fell apart at a touch. I mounted the steps between the two leonine sentries
and stood there quietly for a moment a few paces beyond them, perhaps where the
front hallway of the house had been.
I’ve always loved old places, and I’m
not particularly superstitious about them. I enjoy walking through old cemeteries around
sunset, reading the headstones and thinking about the lives they represent, and
I’ve puttered around in old houses – old for North Texas, anyway, which was
largely unsettled until the 1840’s. I’ve never once seen a ghost, an
apparition, or even felt the slightest frisson of fear that some malevolent
spirit might be flitting unseen around me.
But what I felt on this sunny fall
afternoon was something different. There
was a cold hostility radiating from this ancient pile of stone, as if the foundation
itself resented my footsteps upon it. The sunshine lost its potency, a cold chill seemed
to well up around me, and I could imagine a voice just low enough to be
inaudible to the human ear whispering at me to get out, go away, leave this
place and never return.
Then the noise of a passing vehicle
reminded me that I had cut through a fence onto private property, ignoring a
battered old “No Trespassing” sign in the process. I quickly returned to my car,
and the odd feeling faded the minute I stepped away from that crumbling
pile. But as I slid back into the driver’s
seat and headed back to Greenville, I made up my mind that I would not rest
until I knew what had happened at that barren and forsaken place.
Much of the basic history of the
property was easily uncovered by a quick visit to the Fannin County Historical
Society Museum in Bonham. Property records, old newspaper clippings, and letters
were all available there, having recently been digitized courtesy of a grant
from the American Historical Association.
A few afternoons of searching these sources left me more curious than
ever, because so many of the articles and entries concealed more than they revealed.
The house had been built in 1850 by
one Noah Hempstead, who had received a large grant of land – over twelve
hundred acres – for his combined service in the Texas Revolution and in the
Mexican War. He had taken part in the
Battle of San Jacinto, where Thomas J. Rusk had written about his “conspicuous
heroism and gallantry” in a letter to the Texas Congress, and in the Mexican
War, where he had taken part in the bloody assault on Chapultepec. Once the fighting in Mexico was over, Major
Hempstead had spent a year or two in the newly discovered goldfields of
California. But the rough and raw life
in California was no place for a man to raise a family, and with his son Andrew
nearing six years of age and another baby on the way, Hempstead and his wife
Melissa had returned to Fannin County, where he filed the claim for his grant,
and construction began on his ranch house the following year. Stone foundations were rare in Northeast
Texas during the antebellum era, but California gold paid for the limestone
blocks to be hauled north from the Hill Country west of Austin, and by the fall
of 1850, the family moved in just in time for the birth of Hempstead’s second
son, Aaron.
Aaron Hempstead did not live to see adulthood
– he died of a “pleural fever,” according to the local paper, at ten years of
age. But the firstborn, Andrew, grew up in
Bonham and was attending college in Arkansas when the Civil War broke out in
1861. He abandoned his education to
serve the Confederacy and, despite his youth, rose to the rank of Major by the
fall of 1864. He was reported as missing
in action during the Battle of the Crater outside Petersburg, but nearly a week
later he was dug out of a collapsed Confederate trench, exhausted and frail but
still alive, and sent home on recuperative leave.
It was at this point that the ordinary
narrative of the Hempstead clan and their rambling, two-story plantation house
began to take a turn for the macabre.
Although the newspaper accounts were brief and hesitant, it was obvious
that the young man who returned from the war was not the joyful young soul that
had departed for Arkansas in 1860. A
letter from one of Andrew’s fellow officers dropped the only hint as to the
cause, when it described his rescue by Confederate soldiers from the wreckage
of the collapsed trench:
Them Georgia boys couldn’t get him
back to our unit fast enough once they saw that he was alive. Andy shore was a sight when they brough him
to us on a stretcher – his face was covered with dried blood and his uniform
was fair soaked in it, although the surgeon found only a few minor injuries
when he stripped the filthy clothes from him in the medical tent. It was a wonderment to me that any man could
survive being buried alive for a week, and I asked the corporal who’d led the
burial detail that discovered him how Andy could have lived. The man turned right pale and shook his
head. “I hate to speak ill of an
officer,” he told me, “So I’d rather you asked him yourself. Some timbers had just enough space beneath
left them to make a large air pocket, but he was pinned beneath another half
buried one and couldn’t dig his way to safety.
There were two other fellers on either side of him, both look to have
been killed in the blast or in the collapse of the trench. As to how he stayed alive – hell, I guess a
man will eat anything if he’s hungry enough.
That blood he’s covered in ain’t his!”
Needless to say, I did not want to
hear such a slander against my friend, and I gave the corporal a sharp dressing
down before sending him back to his unit.
Once Andrew was cleaned up, I visited him in the medical tent, but his
ordeal had left him weak and barely responsive, so I spoke to Col. Chaffin, who
agreed that he should be transported home as quickly as our disrupted rail
networks will allow; hopefully a few weeks of domestic bliss will return him to
himself.
Respectfully
yours,
Major
Elijah Wheeler
Second Texas Infantry
For the first year or so after the war,
I found few mentions of Major Hempstead except for a few references to his “convalescence”
at the family home, which caused his father to withdraw from local
society. In 1867 local news reported the
murder of two young girls, who had been found dead and partially devoured by
wild animals in the bottoms along Bois D’Arc Creek. A former slave was accused by the girls’
father and lynched by a vengeful mob before the sheriff could even interrogate
him. But in the days after the grisly
crime, the Bonham paper mentioned that the Hempsteads, father and son, had attended
a dinner party together. The anonymous
article added: “this is the first time Major Hempstead has been able to
appear in public since his sad ordeal during the recent war with the Yankees,
and he appears to be fully recovered from his wounds and privations.”
Over the next
decade, amidst the articles railing against carpetbaggers, scallywags, and “Negro
agitators,” there were scattered references to Col. Hempstead’s election as
county judge, and his son’s courtship of a local belle named Caroline Sullivan.
The wedding was scheduled for May of 1868 and was set to be the social event of
the season. A week before the blessed
event, another murder popped up in the newspaper – this time a Union soldier’s
body was found, gnawed to the bone, in the creek bottoms less than two miles
from Hempstead House. The coroner’s
report said the body was so damaged that the cause of death would have been
impossible to determine if not for the bullet hole through the man’s skull.
Given that the wars of Reconstruction were raging through North Texas at the
time, the death of a single bluecoat meant little to the locals except for the
attention it drew from General Sheridan, who sent a special squad of soldiers and
an army surgeon to investigate the corporal’s death. They met with a chilly reception and were
unable to solve the crime, but the presence of the hated Yankees cast a pall
over Andrew Hempstead’s wedding.
In 1870, another local girl named
Dolly Smithwick went missing in the woods near Hempstead House. Her body was not found for three weeks, by
which time little more than bones remained, and her cause of death was never
determined. However, the same day her body was found, another event rocked the
north Texas district – Colonel Noah Hempstead, the county judge, hero of San
Jacinto, and pillar of the community, was found dead in his study, his Colt .44
still clasped in his hand, and his blood and brains spattered on the walls of
his home. His wife had died of
consumption during the war, and the long ordeal of restoring his son back to
health had taken its toll on the old man.
A coroner’s inquest mentioned that he had “gone very melancholy” after
the latest disappearance; one friend commented that the judge had gone on a bender
at a local tavern and had to be taken home in a carriage because he was too
drunk to mount his horse. As the witness
helped him up the steps, Judge Hempstead said something that struck his friend
as odd – “This is all my fault. I
should have put him down when I found out.” When asked to clarify, Hempstead laughed out
loud and muttered something about a vicious dog he owned, and then he assured the
witness the matter would be dealt with soon.
The Judge’s body was found by his son
Andrew, and the coroner noted that there was no suicide note. When he asked the young veteran if he had
seen one, he noted that Hempstead seemed “evasive,” but he attributed it to the
young man’s shock and grief. The official
ruling was death by suicide, and for the next few years there was no mention of
the Hempsteads in the local papers, except for a birth notice in 1873, and
another in 1874, noting that Major Hempstead was now the proud father of two
sons.
It was during this time that the Bonham
Courier mentioned an odd superstition among the area’s Negro
population. In the midst of a summary
description of Klan activities around the state, the article noted “the
white-robed knights have found little to occupy their attention in Fannin
County of late, for the darkie community has been quite docile and submissive,
many of them afraid to even venture out of their cabins after dark for fear of something
they call the ‘white ghoulman,’ whom
they claim will take unattended children or unwary travelers on dark nights.”
Major Hempstead followed in his father’s
footsteps in 1878, being elected as county judge, but the newspaper articles
never showed him the fawning admiration that had filled the stories about his
father. They were rarely disrespectful
or critical of the younger Hempstead, but instead seemed dispassionate and even
(on occasion) a bit fearful. An 1882
article noted “a well-known knife fighter and desperado stood before the
docket in Judge Hempstead’s court today, snarling his defiance as the sheriff
began to testify against him. The judge
fixed him with a deadly glare and ordered him to be silent, and the fiend
suddenly turned pale and sank back into his chair, meekly answering questions
for the rest of the day.”
Caroline Hempstead, although she had
been a colorful and vivacious belle before her marriage, became more and more
reclusive afterwards, rarely leaving the Hempstead Plantation. When she did appear at social events with her
husband, witnesses noted her pale beauty and tendency to wear long-sleeved
gowns even in the warmest weather, but I never found a single record of her speaking
or dancing at any of these gatherings. Perhaps
she was being domestically abused, I mused as I read the articles.
The judge’s boys, on the other hand,
were mentioned often. Both seemed to be athletic, intelligent, and popular,
riding in local equestrian events and being sent off to boarding school when
they got older. Eventually both went south to Austin to study at the University
of Texas after their matriculation; Jonathan, the oldest, settled near Waco,
while the younger boy, Allan, returned to Bonham and bought a small house in
town, marrying a local girl named Eleanor Collins the next year.
Getting older seemed to have eluded
Major Hempstead, however. An 1885 photograph
in the newspaper showed a grim but youthful-looking man, in appearance about 25
years of age despite having turned 41 two months previously. By the 1890’s newspaper
articles began commenting on the Judge’s unusual vigor for his years.
Scattered throughout the decades of
the 80’s and 90’s, occasional disappearances continued, as did occasional
references to the “white ghoulman” so feared and dreaded by the local black
community. Then in 1905, a young brother
and sister, who had played hooky from school to go fishing in the creek, were
found by a horrified trapper, their faces gnawed off and their bodies
disemboweled. The bereft parents issued a public plea for justice, and for the
first time the stories of the “white ghoulman” were printed without mockery of
the superstitious freedmen who had coined the term. Bloodhounds were sent out, and they lost the
scent in the river bottoms just below Hempstead House. The Judge himself offered a $5000 reward for
any information leading to the apprehension of the killer, and several
promising leads were mentioned in the paper, but in the end, the killer evaded
justice – although a bloodthirsty lynch mob killed two black youths found
wandering near the creek, apparently more in pure frustration than in any
serious belief in their guilt.
In 1910, Judge Hempstead retired from
the bench after thirty-two years of service to justice. At a ball held in his honor, the Courier mentioned
that “the judge was joined on this special occasion by his reclusive wife
Caroline, whose delicate health has rendered her an invalid for the last few
years. Those who could remember her
vivacious youth commented sadly on her pale, wasted condition and wan, detached
gaze. Although the family has been
reticent about the nature of her illness, there are whispers of some skin
condition which seem confirmed by the bandages on her arms that could be
glimpsed beneath the long sleeves of her formal gown.”
The retirement
ball was her last public appearance, because the following year her obituary
appeared in the paper, although the cause of death was simply listed as a “long,
wasting illness.” Her funeral was attended by most of the town, and the Courier
noted that “the Judge, although bowed with grief at her departure, seems
as untouched by the ravages of time as ever, only a frosting of grey at his
temples and a few lines of care beneath his eyes giving hint that he is nearing
seventy years of age.”
About two years
later, a rash of disappearances and murders struck Fannin County. Three young boys, returning from fishing in
the creek, were found floating near the Sanders Crossing bridge, their bodies
bearing the mark of savage claws and teeth. A salesman from Kansas checked into
the hotel on the town square and went out drinking on a Friday night and never
returned. A young domestic, walking home
after a busy day’s work was abducted, and skeletal remains found the next
summer were assumed to be hers by virtue of a necklace that matched hers, still
affixed around the cervical vertebrae.
As the manhunt for the “white ghoulman”
intensified, the Courier mentioned in its “Local Doings” column that “Allan
Hempstead, the son of retired Judge Hempstead, is selling his house in town and
moving to his father’s farmhouse, to help the Judge manage the farm in his old
age.”
The disappearances stopped that week,
and although speculation as to who or what the killer was continued to appear
in the paper off and on for several years, he was never apprehended or
identified. Young Hempstead was
mentioned only rarely over the next few years, usually in stories dealing with
local land speculation and farm foreclosures.
The Hempsteads did well selling corn and wheat to the Army during the
World War, and Allan’s daughters were sent to boarding school in Virginia shortly
after they turned ten. Both girls
married men from out of state and never returned to Bonham, except for their
father’s funeral in 1934.
Allan Hempstead was gunned down in July
of that year in a botched bank robbery by the notorious George “Baby-face” Nelson;
Hempstead was an innocent victim of the crossfire between the desperado and a
local sheriff’s deputy. Having just gotten
his hair cut at the local barber shop, he was walking out the door with a
newspaper tucked under his arm when a bullet struck him through the head,
killing him instantly. The community
grieved this man who had become one of its more respected citizens, although the
obituary commented that his work on the farm had precluded him from having an active
social life ever since he moved to “the Judge’s old place.” One odd
thing I noted, however, was that neither The Courier nor any other local
paper had ever printed a death notice for Judge Hempstead, although his son’s
obituary spoke of him in the past tense.
I spent a whole day scanning newspapers from 1915 through 1934, just in
case I had missed it, but it was as if the old judge had simply disappeared. The funeral of his son was front page news in
Bonham, but no mention of his father’s passing ever appeared in any newspaper
that I have been able to find.
But the final crisis, that ended in
the fiery destruction of Hempstead House, came not long after the death of
Allan. His lovely widow Eleanor had been
devastated by her husband’s passing, lamenting at his graveside that she feared
she could not keep the family legacy secure without him. But after the funeral
in July, her name did not appear in the local press again until her own grisly demise
that December.
It was a cold, wet week, and
torrential rains had caused the Bois D’Arc creek to overflow its banks, flooding
the bottom lands around it. No one knew
why Eleanor Hempstead chose that miserable December 6 to come to town, but her
body was found the next morning in the middle of the dirt road leading from Hempstead
House and the Bois D’Arc bottoms towards Bonham. Her throat was torn out and
her back flayed open to expose her ribs, and her face was frozen in a scream of
horror. The autopsy photographs were
preserved in a copy of True Crimes of Texas published in 1955,
and although they were grainy and partially censored, it was obvious that some
of the wounds on her back were bite marks – human bites, from the look of them.
The tragic death of the young widow marked
the beginning of an absolute reign of terror that persisted for the next fifty
days. During the course of those nightmare weeks, eleven people were murdered
in and around Bonham, Texas, their grotesque injuries described in increasingly
stark detail as the spree continued. A
young farm girl cutting across a hay field, a sheriff’s deputy searching the
woods for her killer, two elderly locals gutted and chewed to shreds in their small
farmhouse, a pair of little boys on their way to school – the sad faces stared
at me from the grainy pages of 75-year-old newspaper clippings, pulled up on
the glowing screen of the Historical Society’s computer.
Then came the glaring headline on
January 26, 1935, up half the first page of The Bonham Courier:
HEMPSTEAD
PLANTATION HOUSE
BURNED TO THE
GROUND
FORMER JUDGE’S
RESIDENCE COMPLETELY
DESTROYED
“WHITE GHOULMAN”
KILLER BELIEVED TO HAVE PERISHED IN FIRE
A
sheriff’s posse, attempting to track the person or persons responsible for the
terrible rash of killings that has plagued our community over the last few
weeks, pursued a suspect to the abandoned home of former Judge Andrew Hempstead
outside of town last night. As the
fugitive fled to the house’s attic, a deputy inadvertently knocked over a
coal-oil lamp and set the curtains of the front parlor afire. The flames spread
before the sheriff and his men could extinguish them, and the lawmen abandoned
the house to the flames, surrounding it so they could apprehend the suspected
killer if he tried to flee. Justice
seems to have overtaken the man who terrorized our community off and on for
these last years, for no one escaped from the conflagration, and the coroner
reported finding skeletal remains in the ashes of the house this morning. We can only pray that the “white ghoulman,”
or the debauched killer who inspired that local legend, is truly gone from our
midst. Sheriff Henderson seemed
confident that the man his posse was pursuing was indeed the killer who has claimed
a dozen victims, starting with the widow Hempstead, since last December.
However, none of the members of the posse have related where they found the
suspect, or why they are so sure he was the one responsible for the killings.
Amazingly, that was the last mention
of the Hempstead House fire, or the “ghoulman” killings, in the Bonham
Courier – or in any other Texas newspaper.
A curtain of silence descended over the rural community, as if the
locals feared mentioning the killer might bring him back from the dead. I scanned newspaper after newspaper, court
record after court record, for some bit of evidence or testimony, to no avail.
After several days of staring at the screen and thumbing through old books of
local history, I threw up my hands and gave a snort of disgust.
“What a shame that every witness of
those events is dead!” I snapped to Ben Walker, the archivist who maintained the
county’s records. “It’s like a curtain
of silence descended over the case after the old house burned down. I have so many questions, if only there was
someone to answer them.”
“Don’t be mad,” Ben said, “because I
didn’t think of this sooner. But there’s
a fellow out at the nursing home who was alive at the time. He born in 1925, so he was just a kid then,
but his Dad was a deputy sheriff and may have even been part of that
posse. His name’s Jeb Martin, and he’s
at the Legend Healthcare facility in Greenville.”
“Does he still have his wits about
him?” I asked.
“He’s sharp as a tack,” Ben said. “Broke his hip a few weeks back and has been
in rehab there, but I’ve had many a long talk with him down at the Gilded
Horseshoe. The man is a walking library of local history.”
“Thanks, bud!” I said. “Ever since I saw the foundations of that old
house, this case has haunted me. There
must be more to the story than what the newspapers hinted at.”
“Want my advice?” Ben said. I nodded, and he continued.
“Jeb’s
right fond of a sip of Wild Turkey now and then. He’ll be more likely to talk to you if you
can slip him a flask,” the archivist told me.
For
the sake of time, I’ll spare this narrative the details of the six visits to
the nursing facility (and six flasks of whiskey!) it took me to win Jeb’s
trust. At first, he denied all knowledge
of the horrors of Hempstead House, and after I proved to him that was a
practical impossibility, he told me that his father had sworn him to a lifelong
vow of secrecy regarding the events of that night. Finally, on the final visit, the old man
looked at me and smiled.
“You
won’t thank me when I’m done, you know,” he said. “That’s what my Pap told me when I finally badgered
the full story out of him, after I got back from the war. And he was right. I was already messed up enough by the things
I saw and did on Okinawa, but when he told me about what he and the others witnessed
that night before they set that accursed farmhouse ablaze, I didn’t sleep for
three days. My Daddy never published
anything, but he used to write stories for us kids when we were little, and he
could describe things in such a way to make you feel you were really
there. I can tell you every detail of
what he and the members of that posse saw, despite the fact that I’ve been
trying to forget the story for sixty-five years now. Maybe it’ll do me some good to finally share
it with someone, but just remember what I said – you won’t thank me when I’m
done. Let’s go outside, at least. This is a story for bright sunlight, not
these damned fluorescent soul-suckers!”
By
this point he was far enough along in his recovery that he could hobble on a
cane, and he led me out to a shaded porch where the westering sun’s rays
illuminated our surroundings without beating down on us.
“People
were afraid of old Judge Hempstead, you know,” he began. “From the day he came
back from Petersburg, pale as a sheet and barely able to talk, there was
something not quite right about him. How any man could be buried in a collapsed
trench for nearly a week and then be pulled out of the ground still alive was a
mystery to everyone in the town. There
were whispers that he’d had to do horrible things in order to survive, but no
one seemed to know what. But people whispered
that his health didn’t come back to normal until after those two girls were
killed down in the creek bottom. Then,
in a week, he went from being a gaunt invalid to a normal young man again. My Daddy was born not long after that, and he
told me that folks noticed that every few years, Judge Hempstead would start
looking poorly and gaunt, and then some poor Negro or traveler would go
missing, and suddenly the judge would look ten years younger again. Of course, no one spoke these things out loud
– being a county judge back in them days meant that you were just a couple of
rungs below God in the order of things. Some
folks said that old Colonel Hempstead blew his brains out when that poor little
girl Dolly was found, because he’d discovered what his son really was. My granddad was convinced that the Colonel
hadn’t killed himself at all, but that Andrew Hempstead had done the deed himself,
when the old man threatened to turn him in to the sheriff.”
“You
think the judge was behind all those murders?” I asked.
“I
don’t think so, I know so,” Jeb replied.
“He needed to kill, in order to survive.
That was why he aged so slowly, and then would suddenly look ten years
younger whenever someone disappeared. My granddad was also friends with Doctor
Kuykendall, the town medic. One night,
he told my pa, the doctor came into the saloon and knocked down three whiskeys
in a row. See, the judge’s wife,
Caroline, had come to a banquet that evening because the election was
nigh. Everyone noted how pale and peaked
she looked, and while the Judge was off politicking with a couple of State
Senators, she fainted and Doc took her into a cloakroom to see what was wrong. She had passed out, so he slipped her out of
her sleeves to try and measure her pulse and blood pressure. What he saw frightened him so badly he pulled
her sleeves back down over her arms and used smelling salts to bring her around
– then he returned her to her husband and just about ran down to the bar. ‘She’s been bitten!” he said to my
grandpap. ‘All up and down her arms and back, nasty bites, deep bites, some
old, some freshly bandaged. In a few
places there were divots, where actual chunks of flesh had been bitten off of
her and healed back over. I swear, that
man is trying to eat her alive!”
“It
was many years after that when she finally died, of course,” he said. “A long, wasting illness, the Courier said. My Pa talked to the coroner who went out to
Hempstead House to recover her body, and the man told him privately that, while
she had indeed been sick for a long time, and that her body was covered with
scars and bite marks, some fresh and some long healed, the real cause of death
was that she’d hanged herself, and the judge – or someone - cut her down and
laid her in their bed before calling the law. The noose was gone, but there was
still a red ring around her neck – and the coroner said he saw a cut rope still
looped around one of the beams in the bedroom ceiling, although it was gone
when the sheriff came by the next day.”
“Why
didn’t they do something?” I said. “It
seems to me there was plenty of proof that she’d been abused for years, never
mind all the other rumors about her husband!”
“I
told you, folks were afraid of him!” Jeb replied. “The man could stare down a cold-blooded
killer in the courtroom and about make’em piss themselves. And there really was
not much in the way of proof – just a bunch of whispered rumors and
speculation. I think that, whatever it
was that was driving him, he was able to control it when he was around
people. Whatever his poor wife suffered
at his hands – his teeth, more like! – while she was alive he managed to rein
in his sick appetites, and only preyed on the helpless, the unwanted, and the poor. But then, a couple years after she died,
there was a horrible spree. Six people
that we know of, maybe more – the sheriff in those days didn’t keep too careful
a track of disappearances and killings in the colored community. Allan Hempstead had moved back to town, and
I remember Pa telling me that with every killing, that young man looked more
and more desolate. Then he sold his
house in town, and he and his wife moved out to the farm – all of a sudden, not
telling anyone of their intent until the wagon was loaded up with their things. Pa rode out there to deliver a jury summons
the next week, and he heard the Judge and Allan shouting at each other
something fierce – so much so that he decided to deliver the summons another day.
When he saw Allan come in to get his
mail the next week, he handed over the summons and mentioned what he’d
heard. He said the look Hempstead gave
him was so full of despair it made his blood run cold. ‘Daddy’s not quite right anymore,’
Allan said. ‘He’s been getting worse
and worse since Ma died, and he won’t recognize it. So Ellie and I have pulled
up our roots in town and moved in to the farm, because it’s not safe for him to
be out there alone anymore. For him or
anyone else.’
No
one in town ever saw the judge again after that, although folks driving by Hempstead
House said that sometimes they’d see his face, looking old and gaunt, watching
them from the gable window in the attic. One of my schoolmates, coming back from fishing
down at the crick, said the old man howled at him as he walked by on the road –
just threw back his head like he was a coyote and let loose this blood-curdling
cry that set my friend running to town as fast as his legs would carry him.”
At
this point Jeb took a long pull from the flask I’d snuck in for him, and then looked
at me with a haunted expression.
“I
don’t know how many people would still be alive if poor Allan hadn’t stopped a
bullet outside the barber shop that day,” he said. “Baby-face Nelson killed more people than he
knew that afternoon. At that point, it
had been nearly twenty years since the last round of killings. We all though the Judge was either dead or a
bed-ridden derelict by then, and Allan always played coy when people asked
about his daddy. He and Eleanor didn’t
have guests out at the farm if they could help it, and those who did drop by
were usually greeted out on the porch or invited in to sit at the kitchen table
for a very brief visit. The new pastor
in town swung by back in 1930 or so to invite them to attend the Methodist Church’s
upcoming revival, and he told my pa that the whole time he was talking to Allan
he kept hearing a weak, quavering voice from upstairs crying out for food. He said Hempstead tried to pass it off on
his father’s senility – “He just had a big breakfast an hour ago, but his
memory is so far gone he doesn’t even remember!” was what he told the preacher. But when the pastor asked if he could go and
pay his respects to the old Judge, Allan and his wife hustled him out the door
right quick. Like I said, if Allan hadn’t
been gunned down by that two-bit bank robber, the final horror might never have
happened. Whatever it was that had kept Andrew
Hempstead youthful and vigorous all those years was starving to death by then.
Maybe – or maybe it was just pretending to grow weaker, biding its time until
it could make one last desperate effort to regain its freedom. Pop told me that Eleanor turned to him at the
funeral and whispered: “I have to try, I have to try for Allan’s sake – but I’m
not sure how long I can hold it back!”
Of
course, he didn’t know what she meant – the poor woman was half mad with grief
at her husband’s sudden passing. She
returned to that accursed farmhouse and shunned all attempts by her
well-meaning neighbors to get her to leave.
Everyone just chalked it up to grief and anxiety, and after a while
folks quit dropping by. But when they found her a few months later, face down
in the middle of that nasty, rutted dirt road with her back chewed to pieces
and her throat torn out, with that horrible look of stark terror frozen onto
her face, everyone knew that the “ghoul-man” was back.”
The
sun was westering, and its slanted rays etched the deep lines of Jeb’s face into
a map of remembered fear.
“I
was ten years old, but I will never forget those next few weeks. Pop drove me to the schoolhouse in his police
car, and then he’d pick me and my friends up at the end of the day and take us
home. As more and more victims were
found, the rumors swirled around the town like a Kansas tornado. People came to
town in groups, and huddled in little clumps, casting suspicious glances at everyone
who passed by. Folks whispered that they’d
seen him late at night, skulking along the country roads and haunting the local
cemetery, this pale figure that neither walked upright nor went on all fours,
but loped along in some gait that was both and neither at the same time. My Pop and the sheriff drove around every
night as best they could – there were few paved roads in Fannin County then,
and that winter was a frightfully wet one.
Whatever was murdering and mangling our citizens seemed to have an
uncanny knack for striking when the police were elsewhere – until that final
night; that night that nearly drove my poor father insane. He never touched a drop before January of
1934; but in the years after, he rarely went to bed without taking a double
shot of whiskey first – and sometimes a triple!”
“What
happened?” I asked when his pause had stretched out for over a full
minute. “What did they find when they
went to Hempstead House?”
“I’m
trying to work up the guts to tell you!” Jeb snapped. “I’ve bottled this horror up inside me for
sixty years now, and now that I’m finally ready to let it out it doesn’t want
to come.”
He
shook his head and closed his eyes for a moment, his ancient face fraught with
anxiety. Finally, he opened his watery
blue eyes and stared straight at me.
“I’ll
tell it to you exactly the way my Pap told it to me in 1946,” he said. “Word for word, as best I can recall. Please don’t question me or interrupt me
again, or I’ll lose it. If that recorder
thing of yours is working, turn it on, because I never want to speak of this
again. Here’s what Pop told me after a
half a bottle of Jim Beam, when I asked him about it for the hundredth time.”
He
straightened up in his chair, and suddenly the lines in his face smoothed a
bit, and his voice took on a different accent and timbre, as if someone else
were speaking through him. The effect
was so eerie that a cold chill ran down my spine, despite the heat of the
afternoon. I still have the recording of
old Jeb’s monologue, but so deeply is it graven in my memory that I don’t even
have to play it to recall every word, even now, with Jeb nearly ten years in his
grave.
“Fine,
boy! You aren’t going to give up, and
some secrets are too dark to take into the darkness of the grave with you, so
listen close! I was at the Sheriff’s office, talking to Andy about how on earth
we could catch this ghoulman, when the phone began ringing, loud and
insistently. Nell, our dispatcher, had
gone home before dark, so I picked it up, and the voice I heard on the other end
was screaming with more sorrow and hurt than I thought a human tongue could
ever express.
“It
took my baby!” the woman screamed. “It reached through my window and snatched
my poor baby! Please, you have to help
me! It has my child!”
It
took me nearly five minutes to calm her down enough to get her name – it was
Sally MacMahon, who lived with her husband about a mile outside of town on a
forty-acre corn farm. As soon as we
figured out where they were, Sheriff Anderson began ringing the town siren,
summoning all able-bodied men to the courthouse. As soon as a dozen or so men were gathered,
we loaded into trucks and headed towards the farm. It had snowed the day before, and there was a
blanket of white covering the road and the hills – fortunately, we’d all put
chains on our trucks that afternoon, or our manhunt might have ended in a
pile-up. We drove out of town to the
MacMahon place, and Jimmy met us at the door.
We could hear his poor wife desperately wailing inside, holding on to
their other child, a four-year-old boy, and keening for the missing baby. Jimmy
was furious, but he was a level-headed soul, and he led us to the side of the house,
where we saw a clear set of footprints approaching the window, and then loping
off towards the road that led to Bois D’Arc Creek.
“Pile
in, boys,” Sheriff Henderson said, and we loaded up in those trucks and started
following those footprints. Jimmy
insisted on coming along, and the sheriff saw there was no sense in saying no. I guess two months of glutting itself had
rendered the thing careless, because those tracks led straight towards the
dark, looming hulk of Hempstead House.
As we got further from the poor child’s home, we saw splashes of blood
in the snow. Sheriff Hempstead told poor
Sally we never found her baby, but that was a half-truth. We never found all of her baby, but bits of
it were scattered along that trail of half-human footprints that wound through
the snow towards the hill were Hempstead House stood. Sheriff Henderson was white with rage as they
neared the deserted farmhouse, and the posse grew silent as they realized that
they were hot on the trail of the monster that had held our county in fear for
the last fifty years or more.
Andy
and I led the way through the front door, and we saw that the wet footprints
were outlined on the carpet heading towards the stairs. The old house was two stories tall, with a
gabled attic room above the second floor, reached by a narrow staircase just
beyond what had once been the judge’s bedroom.
Although the tracks were growing faint as the monster’s feet dried off,
we could still tell that whatever it was had made straight for the attic. Henderson turned and looked at the townsmen,
who were pale with fear but determined to end this horror once and for all.
“Deputy
Martin, myself, and Jimmy will go up and end this,” he said, “or die
trying. I want you men to surround this
house, and if anything comes out that isn’t one of us, I want you to fill it
full of lead and then set it on fire! One way or another, these killings will
end tonight. We’ll give you a moment – now get out that front door and be sure
to cover all four sides of the house!”
There
were a few protests, but not many. No
one wanted to take a chance on whatever it was that had killed so many of our
citizens escaping justice. The three of
us looked at one another, our weapons drawn, and our kerosene lamps held high,
and after what seemed like an eternity had passed, the Sheriff nodded.
“Up
we go, boys!” he said, and we went up those stairs single file. There was a short hallway through the attic,
where old boxes and furniture littered the floor on either side. But we could hear the sound of chewing and
slavering coming from the gable room at the end, and we knew where our quarry was.
“Lamps
high!” Henderson whispered. “Maybe we
can blind it for a moment!”
With
that he strode the last few paces and threw the door of that accursed room
open, and all of us moved forward to block the doorway lest our quarry try to
escape. What we saw on the other side – dear God, son, how I wish I could
forget! But I still see it every time I close my eyes and try to sleep. Some things are too horrible for this world,
Jeb, so horrible they simply ought not be.
Bones
were scattered all across the floor – most of them were from various animals,
but scattered atop the goat and pig bones, fresh and bloody, were the gnawed
remains of human arms and legs. A shattered
skull with tatters of flesh clinging to it lay upside down in one corner. There was a bunk bed, and sturdy chains
coming out of the wall next to it, but the manacles at the end of the chain
were twisted and broken. Our eyes took
all of this in after the fact, for at the first moment, they were locked on the
hideous being that knelt on the floor, tearing the flesh off of a tiny leg. Its
skin was leprous and mottled, its belly grossly swollen and distended, but its
arms and legs were wiry and strong. Its
face was streaked with the unwashed gore of its victims, its beard matted and
tangled, its hair hanging in long, scraggly locks around its face. But despite the squalor and gore and filth, we
still recognized the owner of those savage features. It was Judge Hempstead! Yet he was not a frail old relic of ninety
years’ age, but rather a plump, young man whose features, filthy as they were,
were those of someone still in his prime. When he saw us there, he stood upright
and dropped his bloody meal. His eyes reflected the light of our kerosene lamps
so intensely that it seemed as if the flames of hell were dancing inside his
head.
“I
figured you’d eventually track me back here,” he said in a clear strong
voice. “Brave Texans! Bold Texans! You think to slay me, and end my harvest of
flesh from among you? Fools! I cannot be killed! The voice promised me, the voice that first
came to me when I was trapped underground in that awful trench, my comrades
rotting on either side of me. ‘Worship me,’ it said, ‘and take of my forbidden
fruit, and I will grant you a life span many times that of mortals, and make
you impervious to all metal weapons, and you will never die, as long as you feast
on the forbidden flesh in my name!’ And
so I did, I ate and ate in the dark until my belly was full, and the next day
those foolish Georgians dug me out of that earthen tomb. Oh, I was ashamed of what I had done at
first, and I swore I would never devour human flesh again – but then I grew
steadily weaker and more frail. Finally, in desperation, I attacked the nurse
my father had hired to care for me, and bit deep into her arm. That tiny taste gave me back enough strength
to go out and feed for the first time, and soon I was young and strong and
virile again! How I’ve laughed at you
all, you witless frontier buffoons, for I have feasted on your loved ones, dead
and living, for nearly seventy years now, and you none the wiser! Did you think the ‘ghoulman’ was gone, or starving
himself, when no one was taken for years at a time? Dig up your mothers’ graves
if you want to see how I fed myself - the freshly buried are almost as tasty as
the living! Only my faithless son figured out how to stop me, by chaining me up
here and feeding me the flesh of beasts instead of men, letting me wither away year
after year without the sustenance I required.
But when that bank robber took his life, poor dear Eleanor wasn’t as
careful as he was. I pretended to grow
weaker and weaker, biding my time, until she was foolish enough to try and
spoon feed me, thinking me too weak to lift my food to my mouth. How she
shrieked when I bit a chunk out of her arm!
Oh, she pulled away and fled, but that sweet taste of human flesh gave
me the strength I needed to burst my bonds and chase her down! How delectable she was!”
The
roaring blast of a shotgun cut the monstrous Judge’s monologue short, and the
impact of the buckshot knocked the ghoul across the room. Henderson and I turned and looked, and Jimmy
MacMahon stared back at us across the smoking barrel of his twelve-gauge.
“That
was for my baby, you bastard!” he muttered.
“Your
child was delicious!” the evil voice rasped, and as we watched in horror, Judge
Hempstead slowly pulled himself erect.
The gaping hole in his chest was already knitting itself shut.
“Fools!”
he snorted. “Your metal cannot hurt me!”
All
three of us opened up on him, but as our bullets tore through his body, he
continued to lurch forward, claw-like hands grasping for us. Then, in desperation,
I hurled my kerosene lamp at his feet, and a gout of flame leaped upward,
igniting his ragged clothes. An
unearthly shriek filled the air as the thing that had once been a young
Confederate soldier felt its flesh begin to char. He turned towards the window, but the sheriff
threw his lamp over the monster’s head and it shattered on the wall just above the
lintel, dropping a curtain of flame across his only exit. The shrieks grew even louder, and the flaming
ghoul turned upon us, shrieking words that I hear in my sleep even today:
“Father! Father! Azagog, help me!”
That
was when Jimmy MacMahon hurled his own lamp, striking the thing square in the
chest. The shrieks became incoherent,
and we backed away from the door as the figure lurched forward, reaching its
blackening hands out for us, then staggered, and finally fell face first on the
floor. A gurgling whisper more horrible than any scream barely pierced the
crackle of the flames: “You promised me . . . immortality!” Then the blazing form gave one last heaving
lurch and lay still, and was swallowed by the crackling flames that spread
quickly through the attic. The three of
us fled out the front door as the fire consumed the old farmhouse, and we
joined the posse and waited outside until dawn, making sure that nothing
emerged from that pile of blazing wood and ashes. As the day finally dawned,
Sheriff Henderson removed his hat and spoke.
“And
fire descended from heaven, and consumed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and
the smoke of their burning ascended to the heavens, and the sins of the wicked
were purged from the land in the cleansing fire of God.”
After
that, he made each of us swear that we would never speak a word to any man
about what transpired that night. We’ve
been trying to forget it ever since, but some memories are too powerful to be
forgotten, son, and some terrors are too dark to stay buried.
Jeb
was silent for a long time, and the lines of his face gradually returned to
normal. When he spoke again, it was the plaintive voice of an old man.
“Before
you take me in, could I please have one more shot of that whiskey?” he asked.
I
complied, and by the time I helped him into his bed, the old man was already
half asleep. But I did not sleep a wink
that night, and precious little in the days that followed. To this day, when my business takes me up to
Bonham, I take the western highway and avoid the barren hill that overlooks
Bois D’Arc Creek, where the ruined foundations of Hempstead House guard their
unholy secret.
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