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    The House on Abigail Lane
    The House on Abigail Lane
    The House on Abigail Lane
    Ebook74 pages1 hour

    The House on Abigail Lane

    By Kealan Patrick Burke

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    About this ebook

    From the outside, it looks like an ordinary American home, but since its construction in 1956, people have vanished as soon as they go upstairs, the only clues the things they leave behind: a wedding ring, a phone...an eye.

     

    In its sixty-year history, a record number of strange events have been attributed to the house, from the neighbors waking up to find themselves standing in the yard outside, to the grieving man who vanished before a police officer's eyes. The animals gathering in the yard as if summoned. The people who speak in reverse. The lights and sounds. The music. The grass dying overnight...and the ten-foot clown on the second floor.

     

    And as long as there are mysteries, people will be compelled to solve them.

     

    Here, then, is the most comprehensive account of the Abigail House phenomenon, the result of sixty years of eyewitness accounts, news reports, scientific research, and para-psychological investigations, all in an attempt to decode the enduring mystery that is...

     

    ...THE HOUSE ON ABIGAIL LANE.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKealan Patrick Burke
    Release dateJun 18, 2020
    ISBN9781393219958
    The House on Abigail Lane
    Author

    Kealan Patrick Burke

    Born and raised in a small harbor town in the south of Ireland, Kealan Patrick Burke knew from a very early age that he was going to be a horror writer. The combination of an ancient locale, a horror-loving mother, and a family full of storytellers, made it inevitable that he would end up telling stories for a living. Since those formative years, he has written five novels, over a hundred short stories, six collections, and edited four acclaimed anthologies. In 2004, he was honored with the Bram Stoker Award for his novella The Turtle Boy. Kealan has worked as a waiter, a drama teacher, a mapmaker, a security guard, an assembly-line worker at Apple Computers, a salesman (for a day), a bartender, landscape gardener, vocalist in a grunge band, curriculum content editor, fiction editor at Gothic.net, and, most recently, a fraud investigator. When not writing, Kealan designs book covers  through his company Elderlemon Design. A movie based on his short story "Peekers" is currently in development as a major motion picture.

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    • 4/5
      There were times I honestly Google'd, because this seemed so real and possible...
    • 4/5
      This was a lot of fun to read. I love the faux-nonfiction format.
    • 5/5
      Super interesting read, great if you love stories about alternate worlds.

    Book preview

    The House on Abigail Lane - Kealan Patrick Burke

    From what I can see, it’s just a house, no different on the outside than all the others around it. It certainly doesn’t radiate evil, but then, the devil is clever, and where better to catch the innocent sleeping but at home in their beds? – Reverend Thomas Moore

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    The earliest known disappearance is that of fifty-eight-year-old Elmore Washington during the construction of the house in June of 1956. Then, as now, there was little to distinguish Number 56 from the twenty-two identical houses that comprised the newly built neighborhood of Abigail Lane. And on that fine summer day sixty years ago, it was starting to come together nicely. The air was punctuated by the bark of hammers and the growl of saws, of machinery grumbling, of trucks grinding their way over the as-yet unpaved streets and driveways. A haze of dust hung over everything. The rough framing had been completed, the plywood sheathing applied to the skeletons of the houses, and the doors and windows had been installed.

    According to his coworkers, Elmore, who’d been working primarily on the roof that day, hadn’t exhibited any noticeable sign of preoccupation. He was known as a jovial, quick-witted sort, slow to anger unless raging drunk, in which case, Jeb Foreman said later, He’d pick a fight with a chair and probably lose. He was not given to moods or depression. If there were demons nestled in the folds of his life, he kept them to himself. All of which made it even more of a mystery that in the middle of an ordinary work day, he vanished, and was never seen again. His co-worker Jeb Foreman (who was not the foreman, because that would have been a little too perfect) says the last time he saw Elmore, he was entering the house to retrieve his lunch pail, which he’d left somewhere on the second floor. Jeb claimed he saw Elmore mount the stairs (saw those big size elevens of his clomping up the steps) and didn’t give it a second thought until close to quitting time when Ronald Mayhew (who was the foreman) asked if Elmore had left early.

    Figuring maybe he’d snuck away for a quick nap, they looked for him. On the stairs in Number 56, they found his lunch pail, the bologna sandwich and apple rotted as if it had been sitting in the sun for two weeks, and another item everyone was pretty sure Washington wouldn’t have left behind on purpose, which was when it was decided that the police should be called.

    All anyone knew was that wherever Washington had gone, he’d traveled there without his car, a 1953 Packard Clipper, parked at the construction site, and eighty dollars’ worth of savings he’d kept in a Mason jar beneath his bed. He had never married, wasn’t known as a ladies’ man on account of badly pockmarked skin and a glass eye, so he left no broken hearts behind, only a mother who suffered from dementia and likely died never knowing he’d disappeared.

    What he did leave behind, was the eye, which Jeb and Ronald discovered sitting on the second to last step of the stairs. That thing put the fear of God into me, Ronald said. Like the Poe story about the fella with the big eye, looking at that man like it knew all he’d done. Jeb said he felt sick after emerging from the house. For some reason I can’t figure, I couldn’t stop clenching my teeth. The air was all wrong in there. I smelled fresh cut grass, and there ain’t a thing wrong with a smell like that, but it made me sick to my stomach. Before he lost his lunch on the bare earth of the soon-to-be lawn, Jeb told his wife he could have sworn he saw sunflowers there, just for a moment, right where someone in the future would undoubtedly put them. He made her promise she’d never share what he said. The men will think I’ve gone soft in the head. And she didn’t, until the documentarian Mike Howard came calling some six years after lung cancer made her a widow.

    Of all the theories put forth at the time to explain what had become of Washington, which ranged from the possible (he’d been suffering from depression and, to spare his mother the distress, had committed suicide somewhere the body was not likely to be discovered), to the highly improbable (he was a Communist sympathizer who’d been called back to Mother Russia for an important assignment)—nobody blamed the house.

    Despite the dilapidation, Number 56 does not appear sinister at all, at least, no more than any other house that has fallen into disrepair. Of course, for those who want to characterize the building as a Something Evil, the missing shingles, boarded up windows, and the sagging roof is ample fodder. Similarly, the smoke stains on the façade and the smudges of soot around the windows—testament to an attempt to burn the place to the ground back in 1988—make it look sad, tortured, cursed, to those who wish to see it that way.

    I imagine it looked anything but sad back in the winter of 1957 when the Wilson Family took up residence.

    Harold Wilson was an insurance salesman from Skokie, Illinois. Due to a shift within his company (he would have died before he’d admit it had anything to do with his own poor performance), he was relocated to Columbus, Ohio. To ease the sting of what was essentially a banishment, Sun Life & Liberty Provincial provided him with the house on Abigail Lane. Had they foreseen the consequences of this action, or had Wilson been aware of the disappearance of poor Mr. Washington eight months earlier, alternate arrangements might have been made. But without knowing what had become of the construction worker, and with nobody left behind to ask questions, Washington’s vanishing was relegated to just one of those things.

    Thus, unburdened by disappearances past, Harold moved into the house on January 1st of that year with his wife Alison and their children: May, who was

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