The Tomb of the Lurker

Stories about haunted houses usually reveal more about the stresses faced by families than they do about the world of the supernatural. Sometimes, however, the mysteries behind hauntings are revealed in full in the most unexpected ways.

Greg writes to tell me the story of the house he grew up in and the strange events that bedeviled his family. Greg’s grandparents, Clark and Mary, lived in Florida in a house that Greg’s grandfather built himself. The sturdy ranch house would go on to shelter three generations of Greg’s family.

Greg’s story begins with his newly wed grandparents. Their new home was finally finished and the happy couple were looking forward to starting a family. Now they just had to face a few minor problems.

After almost a year, Greg’s grandmother, Mary, was not yet pregnant. The families and in-laws were beginning to talk and Greg’s grandparents silently wondered what the problem could be.

Added to these problems was the fact that, despite being a warm and loving man, Greg’s grandfather, Clark, enjoyed his drink. “He wasn’t the kind to drink all the time,” Greg tells me, “but when he drank, he got mean.”

The happy couple seemed happy no more and their new home became the scene of heated discussions. It was about this time that the strange noises started.

“At first they heard a few knocks, some taps on the wall, I guess” Greg says. Clark chalked it up to the new construction settling and changing in the humidity. Mary, swallowing her skepticism, agreed.

Things continued much as before until one late afternoon when Mary was alone in the kitchen, preparing dinner. As she chopped some carrots and onions, she began to hear a soft tapping sound behind her.

Turning from her work, she faced the blank kitchen wall. Faintly, she could hear the tap tap tap that seemed to be coming from inside the wall. It only grew louder as she tried to ignore it, but she couldn’t ignore what she heard next.

“Mary,” whispered the voice from the wall. “Maaaaary.” Dropping her carrots, Mary tried to take a step back but found herself pressed up against the kitchen sink. She heard a strange rustle from the wall and then the voice screamed at her: “Get out of my house, you bitch!”

“My granddad found her passed out on the kitchen floor,” Greg tells me. The next few weeks saw the activity only intensify in the house.

During the day, there were taps on the wall and knocks on the floor. Footsteps could be heard when no one was home, whispers in empty rooms.

At night, it sounded like a family of raccoons lived in the walls, the only difference being that raccoons don’t scream curses and threaten homeowners with bodily harm.

Mary and Clark were nearing the end of their ropes. Mary wanted the local priest to bless the house, but Clark couldn’t admit that the home he had built was flawed in any way. He countered Mary’s concerns by pointing out that the house was newly built and, therefore, could not be haunted by ghosts of any former tenants.

After living with the phenomena for nearly two months, the constant harassment combined with Clark’s drinking put a terrible strain on the couple’s relationship. One night, after an evening with a bottle of whiskey, the disturbance drove Clark over the edge.

“It was late and he had gotten pretty plastered,” Greg tells me. While Mary slept, Clark and the whiskey kept vigil in the den. As he listened to the rising curses and insults and inexplicable noises emanating from the blank walls around him, Clark decided he had had enough.

He rose from his chair, berating his own house. “He was like an Old Testament prophet casting out some devil, they told me” Greg says. “And of course he had the gun, too.”

Clark took his rifle out of the cabinet and proceeded to shoot the walls of his den full of holes. As Mary ran screaming into the room, Clark’s ammunition and anger were spent. She helped him to bed and hid the gun.

The next few weeks were oddly quiet, although it seemed that a sickly pall hung over the house, that the very air was rancid. But soon all the couple’s troubles were gone.

Clark stopped drinking and Mary got pregnant. They had a beautiful girl, followed by two brothers in the years to come. One of those brothers, Greg’s dad, inherited the house after Clark and Mary passed away.

Over the years, the story of the strange noises and the terrible night had come out and been told and retold to the children when they gathered at their grandparents’ knees and insisted the tale be told. Mary and Clark had always been baffled and a bit embarrassed by the experience.

In 1992 a terrible disaster struck Greg’s family and much of Florida. Hurricane Andrew severely damaged the house Greg’s grandfather had built. Greg’s family escaped unharmed, but the house was declared uninhabitable and condemned.

Greg, then a young college student, returned home to help his family with the demolition. As his father and uncle worked to remove the drywall in their grandfather’s old den, they made an inexplicable and startling discovery.

There in the space between studs and drywall, between wires and insulation, lay a small dust-covered skeleton about the size of a ten year old boy. Greg and his father were aghast at the thought that some child had somehow died there years ago, but Greg’s uncle remembered the old story about the strange haunting.

The men conferred and confirmed that the skeleton was in the right place in the right wall. They closely examined what was left of the woodwork and thought they could see the holes that the bullets made as they passed through the wall, through the body in the wall, and into the outer wall.

Greg and his family, haunted by the thought that their father and grandfather had committed murder, didn’t want to report their finding to the police. The crime was decades old after all, and its perpetrator was long dead.

Still, it may seem strange for law-abiding folks not to call the authorities when they find a skeleton in their own home, but Greg goes on to tell me that he and his family were unnerved by the remains and they believed that the skeleton was not a normal skeleton, that the arms seemed too long and the fingers too sharp like talons, that the teeth were too numerous and viciously barbed, that the pointed spurs on the skull looked a little too much like horns.

“I don’t know what the hell it was, but I’m sure it wasn’t human,” Greg tells me. “It all went out with the trash, anyway.”  Clark’s house came down but the mystery of its haunting lives on in the story of the strange little bones of a strange little monster, entombed for decades in drywall.

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