While it’s true that 15 Hill House occupies the site of an ancient Native American burial ground, those same Native Americans exhumed their dead – an unheard-of practice at the time – and moved them elsewhere long before the white man came because they were tired of being pestered by evil spirits when they went to visit their dead relatives.
It’s also true that while the Hill Street that ends at the house does indeed crest a hill leading out of town, 15 Hill House is at the bottom of that hill. Appropriately, at a dead end. The 3-acre property itself inhabits a depression in the geography as if God realized his mistake and tried to squish the land out of existence with an enormous, divine thumb. It didn’t work – it’s still there. Though the trick of geology means that a pernicious low-lying fog hovers about the whole forsaken area from just before dusk until well after sun up.
No one even attempted to build on the land until the late nineteenth century when the steel magnate Levi Corman decided against the advice of everyone asked to build a Victorian-style house. Corman, a stout man whose stubbornness rivaled only his orneriness, seemed uniquely suited for the cursed land. No reliable count of how exactly how many people died during the construction of the place, but most estimates put the number in the high two-digits. The first dozen died as a bunch when sinking pylons for the foundation opened a methane fissure. The foreman heard and smelled the gas and wisely called for an immediate halt and evacuation. No one knows where the spark came from, but the resulting fireball could be seen from Dawsville, ten miles away. After that, the site and house seemed content in picking off workers one by one – the perfectly solid rafter suddenly gave way, the anchored stairwell broke free, and every few weeks someone simply went crazy and leapt off the highest point of the construction.
Eventually, the house was completed. Corman moved in immediately and sent for his family to join him. When they arrived his wife initially refused to go in. His youngest daughter struck up a conversation with an unseen playmate who tried several times to lead her into the well. Their oldest son, Levi Junior, was the only member of the family who expressed enthusiasm for the new place. Perhaps that’s why a few weeks later he killed the rest of the family in their sleep with an axe before leaping to his death from the widows walk.
For generations, the pattern had been set: family moves in, things go bump, unseen forces terrorize, then quiet… and then one family member massacres the rest. Twice the patriarch butchered his family – once with a rifle, once with an awl, believe it or not. Only one matriarch dispatched her clan – that was food poisoning. The children really did the heavy lifting in terms of killing: oldest sons mainly with blunt or sharp objects, a few sisters took lead in annihilating her kin, and once the baby of the family (barely five) managed to do the deed with a pair of pruning shears – kids do the darndest things!
By the early 1960’s it seemed humanity had finally cottoned on to the devious machinations of the place and it went vacant for fifty years. Sure, the odd urban explorers, hippie groups, homeless, and boy scout troops would seek to explore and find refuge in building which seemed to, on the whole, resist dereliction. The bodies would be found days or weeks later and the house seemed to delight in hiding obvious fatal injuries; the county coroner took to simply putting cause of death as “Corman House” or, eventually just “Haunted House” – everyone knew which one they meant.
About ten years ago the county tracked down the relatives of the last family that murdered each other in the house – the Whites – and sought permission to destroy the place. When informed they technically owned Haunted House, the Whites decided they should move in themselves, terrifying name be damned! After Mrs. White killed her family with a pair of darning scissors and made an unholy scrapbook out of their flesh, she deliberately set herself on fire (doing, it should be noted, no damage to the structure). The next closest relatives took the clue and more than happily signed the deed over to the county.
The plan was simple: set the Haunted House ablaze and let the volunteer fire department practice putting it out – but, you know, not too soon. The two firefighters assigned to set the house on fire somehow managed to inadvertently douse themselves in accelerant before setting themselves ablaze. As the paramedics attended to the burned firefighters, several in the gathering crowd swore they heard the house laughing. The fire department decided to improvise by putting together Molotov cocktails in order to hurl fire onto the house. The sun had grown low in the western sky as the bottles were launched in glowing arcs. Several of the incendiary devices broke against the outer walls and despite the gasoline in the bottles didn’t manage to ignite the wooden structure. One bottle broke an upper window and the crowd gasped as if now they really made the house mad. The fire sparkled through the windows and the fire chief gave the signal to fire up the pumps in anticipation of finally getting practice underway. One engine immediately died. The other revved uncontrollably until the motor exploded, casting shrapnel in all directions and sending four more firefighters to the hospital with ugly wounds. The burning was called off, the crowd dispersed, the dead engine towed away, the remaining firefighters limped back to the station. The Haunted House won again.
The County Executive, a man named Augie Lewis, grew up in the area near Haunted House. He’d had friends who had been killed in or around the place, so after the fire debacle when the community uproar reached a fever pitch he assured everyone it would be taken care of, but he approached the subject of the house with due respect; it wasn’t a decrepit structure to be demolished, it was a cunning, sentient, and obscenely dangerous foe that had to be out maneuvered. Brainstorming, he struck on two key things: first, though seemingly possessed of a wicked intelligence (emphasis on “possessed”), it couldn’t move out of its geographic depression – in the 150-year history of the property, no one ever accused Haunted House of stalking them across hill and dale.
Second, in the abstract this was not a problem without analogs. There are other structures so dangerous that all who enter are killed either instantly or very shortly after coming into contact, and the structures remain dangerous for thousands of years: Chernobyl. Three Mile Island. Fukushima. And how are the dangerous, unstable cores of these sites dealt with? They’re buried.
Augie Lewis would turn Haunted House and its entire depression into a hill.
The last week in October, the plan went into effect. Augie himself drove the massive earthmover down the hill towards Haunted House. As he approached, the second story twin dormer windows reflected the rising sun like angry red eyes ready for a battle. Perhaps lulled into a false sense of security or distracted by the enormous treaded diesel beast lumbering downhill towards it, the house took no action against the cement trucks arrayed behind the tree line. Perhaps Haunted House mistook the hoses for another firefighting action and creaked its foundations in anticipation of a repeat battle it would obviously win. Augie stopped the earthmover a hundred yards from the front door of Haunted House, climbed out onto the hood so he would be visible and raised arm and let it fall in signal. The hoses opened up not with water but with shotcrete, the grey liquid stone splattering against the black siding like caveman graffiti. From four directions, the shotcrete sprayed in, whitewashing the house before accumulating, turning the structure into a huge gothic statue.
Augie had crawled down off the earthmover, relinquishing the yellow diesel beast to its regular operator who signaled to the other tractors to start pushing earth in. Word came in that the convoy of trucks with fill dirt that stretched three miles was starting down Hill Road. The machines did not stop for lunch (though their operators rotated out in shifts). When the sun started to sink into the horizon, rows of hyper-white construction lights turned the site from night into day, shining down on the hardening sarcophagus over Haunted House. By noon of the second day, the first floor had been completely covered. Two days later, only the railing of the widows walk where so many had leapt from remained peaking out of the newly laid dirt. By the end of the week, what had been a depression holding an abandoned, malevolent building had become a gently rolling hill. The earth tamped into place, fertilizer and grass seed was sprayed atop the new landscape. By the spring the grass had grown thigh high, and volunteers came and planted dozens of shallow-root trees. An eagle scout candidate installed a frisbee golf “course” over the spacious open area, dedicating it to the boys in the troop that Haunted House had killed so many years before.
By summer, Augie presided over a ribbon cutting ceremony for the new county park. Holding an oversized pair of scissors, he spoke of the macabre history of the area, but focused mostly on the herculean effort involved in the hilling of Haunted House before cutting the ceremonial ribbon. Kids played on the newly-installed jungle gym, and a pick-up soccer game started on the now-established turf. Food trucks served from the on-site parking lot. Augie looked over the park trying to remember exactly where the Haunted House lay meters below the earth, encased in concrete. Maybe near the enclosed dog park? Was the widows walk beneath the horseshoe pits or the picnic area? He couldn’t remember now, and it didn’t matter.
Eventually, though, the dignitaries left – Augie among them. Then the food trucks drove away. The families took their kids home, and the last stragglers left the park under its now constant glow of LED street lights. No low-lying fog hung around the park. Instead of an ominous, pervasive silence, crickets chirped in the grass and bushes. An owl even hooted from one of the newly planted trees.
No one was around to feel the earth shift. No one saw the turf rend and split. No one heard the disembodied laugh emanate from the new chasm in the earth. At least not yet.