I ended up writing a lot of stories based on my childhood home, and my hometown. I've been long distant from it for eons and the address is made up, but the layout of the house is on par for the rickety place where I grew up. This was a story based partially on my brother's obsession with exploring abandoned houses (one excursion, he took me, and I was absolutely terrified the whole time), and my memories of going back after years to finish cleanig out the home my mom had abandoned. It was a time capsule of the '90s and nature was quickly reclaiming. It was also an excuse to write about Sadie, though I made her more person than monster in this. Kinda need to draw her like that one day. Hmm.
This is going to be long. Fair warning.
I know it’s a longshot, but have you guys ever heard of Cumberland, KY?
I asked somebody this once upon a time, but the only “yes” I got back was from a friend of mine who really likes comic books. Apparently, one of the not-so-well-known X-Men was born in a fictionalized version of the town. In reality, it is a dying coal town, though, looking back at the records, it used to be booming once upon a time, with a city park, a movie theater, department stores, and nightclubs.
It’s mostly empty now. The shuttered mines had a lot to do with it, because with coal out of commission the town’s money began to dry up. People moved onto greener pastures. Business owners boarded up storefronts and walked away from their dreams. You can’t help but be depressed, even if you’re an outsider, but it’s a goldmine if you’re an explorer who doesn’t mind running afoul of a couple of small-time cops.
I’m one of those explorers. My girlfriend was, too, for a time, but after a few close calls with some unstable floors, she threw up her hands and told me I was on my own. One broken ankle was enough. At least she still helped me plan my excursions, taking notes of interesting things she drove by or found in town on Google Street View. Most of them were within driving distance (extended day-trip distance at most), but Cumberland was an exception.
The location wasn’t one she found on Google Maps. It definitely wasn’t one she drove past, considering we live in North Carolina. She found it on an urban explorer forum that she was prodding at for old time’s sake, in some big thread pinned at the top about the most interesting places in their local area. It seemed like an attempt at making a big database of buildings and ruins to hit up, she said, but it was mostly just bullshit.
Right in the middle, though, she found a post that caught her eye. A user wrote a badly punctuated blurb about someplace that “wasn’t local” but had left an impression on him. He didn’t specify how, only that it was a few hours away from him before following up with a link to a Livejournal that had been hacked by Russian bots. Most of it was indecipherable Cyrillic, one new post every couple of days, which I guess kept the journal active enough that it wasn’t purged.
If you went far enough back in the archives, though, you could find the posts of the original author. Some girl, early twenties, who lived out of her van on what seemed to be a road trip exploring “haunted” places. She’d post satellite views from Google and have areas circled in MS Paint and numbered, with descriptions of what was supposed to be there. She’d then follow up her posts debunking these places before moving on to the next town. Her final post was in 2011 and had an aerial view of a house covered in trees at the end of a dead-end road. The entry was brief and said something like: “109B Fugate Drive, Cumberland, KY. It’s just a tiny abandoned house. I don’t know why I’m bothering.”
Not exactly creepy, but it was interesting enough that it stuck with my girlfriend. And me too, once she told me about it. I’ve always been a sucker for internet mysteries and, when I looked up the distance online, Cumberland was only about a five or six hour drive away from Durham. My girlfriend told me that it was a dumb idea to waste gas money on the trip, but I wanted to go. It was a nowhere place and I was pretty confident it would be a bust, but there was a part of me who wanted to be a part of this subtly creepy, obscure internet lore that (I won’t lie) I thought could milk for online attention since people eat this sort of stuff up.
Yes, I am a whore. Thank-you.
First thing’s first: Cumberland is a depressing place full of nice but defeated people. Before I left, I read about it online since the only thing I could find out from people around me was “Cannonball was born there.” Nothing you read can prepare you for how empty and heartbreaking the place is. You can throw a rock from one end of the main road to the other, almost all of the stores on it are empty, the high school is a husk, and there’s countless vacant lots where homes and businesses used to be. There is a city park but the grass was knee high, there’s a state park but it seems nobody ever goes there, and the general reaction you get as an outsider is wariness and confusion. Nobody knows why you’d bother to be there, so they’re automatically suspicious of why you showed up.
Second: Fugate Drive is very hard to get to. This is despite the fact that it was right there immediately where I got off the interstate. You drive down a hill, there’s some Methodist church and a house, and the street right by it is Fugate Drive. But you have to circle around because of the fact so many roads are one way, and there’s only one entrance and no exit. In the end, I wound up going the wrong way on a road to get there because I figured the place was essentially a ghost town. What’s the chance of me getting hit?
Third: 109B Fugate Drive does not fit the rest of the street. Fugate Drive was one of the nicer roads I saw while driving around, at the bottom of a small hill with a 1950s, almost model-like quality to it. The very first houses you see are well-kept and one of them is massive and (as far as I can tell) seems to have a goddamned tunnel connecting it to the Methodist church. There’s a parking lot for the church, rows of smaller houses, flower beds, dogwood trees, and the very end of the road is right next to a river. It very much looks like an ideal place to raise a family until you get to 109B.
109B is hard to identify because the address fell off the mailbox, and the mailbox is on the house, and the house is on the opposite side of a chain link fence. Reaching it is harder. The grass is high, the gate is locked and tangled in vines (pretty ones with flowers, oddly enough), and the foliage is insane. There’s signs that somebody tends to it sometimes, but sporadically, like they don’t want to be there. And that’s not even counting the fact that the entire house is cut off by cars lining the end of the drive; the neighbors of 109B use the road as their own personal parking lot and get pretty irate about strangers being on what they perceive as their own personal property.
This leads me to my fourth point: Fugate Drive seems adamant about keeping everyone away from 109B.
It makes sense when you read about it: the house is tiny, structurally unstable, and on private property, so of course they’d want to keep you away. The weird part is just how united they are in their defense of 109B. When I first drove onto the street, I could feel them looking out of their windows to see if I would stick around or was just a turned around out-of-towner. Once I made my way to the end of the street, they were actively coming out of their homes to confront me.
The two main mouthpieces were an old lady and a police officer, who was in full uniform like he was prepared to intercept me. I tried to play it off as being interested in the property, but when I couldn’t tell them how I knew about it (and they pointed out it was night time), the handcuffs came out. I’m not an idiot, so I bailed long enough to get a hotel room at the only one in town (or, at least, the only one I could find).
It gave me a place to park my car and store my things, and was close enough that I could walk back to Fugate Drive in about half an hour. And… that’s basically what I did as soon as I got my keys, cutting through yards and alleys to avoid being seen.
I don’t know the exact time I got back to Fugate Drive, but it couldn’t have been before midnight. Without my car and out-of-town tags, nobody noticed since I used everything available as cover. I just sprinted between objects, jump/climbed/tripped over the fence, and was left to wade through the jungle-thick growth.
Things I noticed immediately as I awkwardly circled the building: The house is extremely small, but the property itself is huge. Maybe a half acre? It doesn’t look like it from the street, though. The porch is painted in flaking paint and is made from a lopsided concrete block. There’s a rusty shed that I couldn’t get open despite the fact the lock was broken. There’s a back door that leads into a bedroom that is probably the sturdiest door I’ve ever seen. There’s a couple of holes in the side of the building facing the river, one of which is a perfect rectangle (which is… bizarre) and one leading under the house.
I used the rectangular hole to get in because the back door was not having any of it.
Things I noticed immediately as I fell face-first into the building: The living room and kitchen fuse together, and the appliances are all dated. The carpet in the living room is this disgusting brown color, but the tiles in the kitchen remind me of blue and white pottery. There’s furniture and belongings everywhere. Art is still up on the walls. There’s a blue pantry cabinet with canned food still in it. Whoever left was either in a hurry or ceased to exist.
I won’t lie. Spooky as it seemed at first glance, I felt cheated once I stood up and got my bearings. Briars had scraped me, my pants were caked in sticky little seeds, and all for a house that was maybe the size of a studio apartment. There wasn’t much more to look at after I got my initial glimpse. I spent about half an hour pacing back and forth and sighing, trying to get my money’s worth.
The floor was bulging. There were holes in the ceiling and the kitchen floor. The entire place reeked. That was about it.
I eventually decided I’d just try to piece together the story of who had lived here before, thinking that maybe if I dug around for some backstory, I’d figure out why that forum poster would bother to recommend the place. It took a lot of courage to make myself sit in the floor (it was disgusting), but I wound up spending the bulk of my time on my ass digging through plastic bags.
What I eventually pieced together was that the place was probably abandoned in the early ‘90s or late ‘80s. There were heaps of clothes that looked like they belonged to Daria, and dated knick-knacks scattered around. Lots of cassette tapes and an old portable cassette player, for example. As far as I could tell, whoever abandoned the place had lived there alone since only one of the bedrooms was actually a bedroom. The one closest to the front door was just a glorified closet.
The longer I stayed, the more freaked out I got. I said earlier the place reeked, but it started to get progressively worse until I’d have to abandon rooms entirely. I could hear shuffling and knocking above the ceiling and under the floor, and occasionally on the opposite side of walls. Common sense said that it was probably rats, opossums, or maybe a raccoon, but sometimes something would hit so hard that the ground would shake or flaking paint would rain from above. And I swear, the smell followed me.
After a couple of hours, I decided enough was enough. My nerves were shot after the “raccoon” decided to slam itself against the wall beside my head, followed by what seemed like something scaling the wall. Then, shuffling from above the ceiling and more dust falling from above. My heart was in my throat, because either the place was either crawling with wild animals or somebody else was in the house. Probably not a neighbor, I figured, but a vagrant.
The problem was that my exit was that rectangular hole cut into the wall in the living room, and whatever was above me in the ceiling seemed to start heading in the same direction. The bumping and dragging above me kept in stride as I closed the gap between the bedroom and my escape in maybe three steps, at most. It did eventually veer away from me somewhere in the living room, knocking around as it scurried to the one room I hadn’t checked: the bathroom.
It never occurred to me to investigate the bathroom, even though it was right beside where I crawled in. If I hadn’t gotten spooked, I would have probably poked my head in eventually, but nothing about it seemed interesting from the get-go. When that dragging, knock-knock sound began to trail in that direction, though, curiosity got the best of me. I pointed my flashlight up from the floor and shone it inside.
Tile flooring. Antique door handle. Something trailing from above and behind the door frame, slick and red and dripping. The drops never hit the floor, though. They just kind of fizzled out of existence on the way down.
I always imagined that if I ever came face-to-face with something horrifying that I’d be smart enough to run, but shock kept me from even registering what I was looking at. By the time it clicked that there were streamers of entrails dangling at the bathroom door, whatever owned those guts had a chance to get a pretty good look at me. And I knew this because I could feel it staring, even if I was too much of a pussy to follow the trail of innards to see where they went.
“Hello.”
Plain, clear, feminine, and average. I jerked the light upward and, upside down and beginning to crawl over the top of the door frame was, well, half a woman. Her intestines were still attached, her hair was red with blood, and half of it had either been shaved or pulled out. She was pale and freckled and covered in dirt. There were ropes, too, like she’d been tied up before she came to greet me.
Her jaw was crooked. Not lopsided, not broken, but just crooked enough to look painful. Her eyes were black in every sense of the word.
I stared at her. She stared back. Again, in that normal voice: “Hello?”
I didn’t answer.
“Hello, Desmond.”
It knew my name. I don’t even know how it knew my name, but it knew my fucking name. I made a jerking motion toward the exit but she followed suit. She was fast, she was strong, and she clung to the ceiling and walls like a gecko. Organs draped over her but she left no marks on anything. When I reached the hole, she was arched down in front of my face, chest pressed against the tacky wallpaper.
“How did your girlfriend really break her ankle?” she asked. My mind spun. I don’t actually remember what I said, but it probably wasn’t actual English.
“Did Ashley really fall? Is that why she didn’t come, too?”
When I threatened to pull away and head towards the back door, she fisted her hand in my shirt collar and dragged me back. Everything about her was gritty and disgusting. Her teeth were stained. Dirt and dried blood were caked across her cheeks.
She stared at me for a good, long while. At least, it seemed like it. Realistically, it was probably only a few seconds, but it seemed like an eternity that we just stood there, nose to nose, staring at each other in silence. With every second that ticked past, her expression began to change. Anger, then confusion, then what I swear was embarrassment.
“... She really did fall, didn’t she?”
She turned me loose and sighed. It came out like a death rattle. She began to slide backwards up the wall, like an animation run in reverse. Everything about it was surreal.
“Well, fuck me. You should probably leave, then.”
The tone wasn’t threatening. It was matter-of-fact, like somebody who just realized how late it was and they had work in the morning. She turned, dragged herself back across the ceiling, and vanished into the bathroom. I saw the entrails vanish upward, then heard shuffling and knocking above me. There wasn’t a smear left on anything, like every trace of her just vanished in her wake.
I vanished out the window. I don’t think the grass or vines slowed me down, and neither did the fence. Suddenly, I was a parkour master, vaulting over shrubs and chain link and anything that stood between me and a clean escape. As I bolted through the neighborhood, I could feel myself being watched and saw a few lights turn on in houses, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t even get the chance to be apprehended before I was up the hill and to my hotel.
I didn’t stay in Cumberland. I just grabbed my things, loaded up my car, and made a six hour drive in a grand total of four. I never even called my girlfriend to tell her I was coming back and, as I found out later, I actually didn’t have my phone on my person. The last place I remembered seeing it was when I was going through bags (I had it sitting next to me so I could keep track of the time), and I couldn’t remember putting it back in my pocket. I’d just got freaked out, grabbed my flashlight, and ran.
Of course, nobody believed me, though I really didn’t really tell anyone but my girlfriend. She laughed and made some comments about the house needed a carbon monoxide detector. I couldn’t think of where carbon monoxide would come from in a house that hadn’t been lived in for somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years, but it made a lot more sense than seeing a dismembered woman crawling on the ceiling of an abandoned house.
At least until my girlfriend came to me the other night, confused. Over the course of an episode of American Vandal she asked me two or three times where I lost my phone, and whenever I’d answer her that I’d dropped it in 109B, she’d get real quiet. We never even got a chance to see how the episode ended before she sidled up to me and forced her phone in my face.
She had a message. From me.
“you left yoru phone in my h u se. if you want it coen back. and brjng ashley. me and hrt need to have a tlak.”