Bloodstone Manor.
It sounds like the setting of a Scooby-Doo episode—some
crumbling old mansion with secret passages, dramatic lightning, and a villain
waiting to be unmasked.
It wasn't.
It was a real house. A large, Spanish-style stone villa that sat on a hill overlooking a sprawling cemetery. Between the house and the rows of weathered
headstones was a small pond, as if someone had decided a strip of water was
enough to separate the living from the dead.
By the time my best friend moved into the neighborhood, the
city had grown out to what had once been farmland. The new addition backed up
to one of the largest cemeteries in the area, and standing between the
subdivision and those 113 acres of headstones was the house we all knew as
Bloodstone Manor.
That wasn't its real name.
It's just what we called it.
Years earlier, a local church had used the abandoned house
as a haunted house fundraiser. (No kidding.) They christened it
"Bloodstone Manor," complete with a story about the family who had
supposedly lived there.
According to the legend, a mother, father, two sons, and a
daughter had all been murdered in the middle of the night. One of the boys used
a wheelchair, so the house had been equipped with an elevator. The story
claimed he had tried to escape and was later found at the bottom of the
elevator shaft with a broken neck. The killer was never found.
It was the kind of story every town seems to invent about
one old house.
Or so I thought.
By the time we started exploring it, there wasn't much left.
A fire had gutted the interior years earlier, leaving little
more than the bones of the house behind. The massive stone fireplace still
stood. The skeletal remains of the staircase somehow still climbed to the
second floor. To the right was the empty elevator shaft. The elevator itself
was long gone, leaving only heavy cables and pulleys disappearing into the
darkness.
And upstairs…
There was a bathtub.
Not just any bathtub.
A deep purple clawfoot bathtub (it was seriously cool).
To this day, I have absolutely no idea how it survived a
fire that consumed nearly everything else inside the house, but there it sat,
surrounded by charred walls and open sky, as though someone had forgotten to
tell it the house was gone.
For reasons that made perfect sense to a group of teenagers
and absolutely none to the adults we eventually became, that bathtub became our
favorite place to sit while telling ghost stories.
We weren't disrespectful.
At least, we didn't think we were.
To us, it was just another abandoned house with a creepy
story attached to it.
Years later, I told my husband about Bloodstone Manor.
I was halfway through the legend when he interrupted me.
"Oh...you mean the house by the cemetery?"
Not Bloodstone Manor.
It had another name—borrowed from the cemetery beside it.
He listened patiently while I repeated the story I'd grown
up hearing.
When I finished, he said something that completely changed
the way I remembered that place.
"It wasn't just a legend."
He was seven years older than I was. His father had been a
troop commander with the Highway Patrol and had been involved in more than his
share of major investigations (I really should write some of them down).
The murders had happened. The family had existed.
The story I'd grown up hearing wasn't invented after all. The parents, the children, and the elevator shaft weren't inventions dreamt up by imaginative teenagers sitting around telling scary stories, or by bored church ladies who apparently thought, "You know what would make a great fundraiser? That murder house out by the cemetery."
They came from a real crime. An unsolved one.
Apparently, after hearing his father talk about the case
over dinner, he and his brother did what curious teenage boys often do.
They slipped under the police tape.
The stories he shared weren't ghost stories.
They were crime scene details.
The kind that stay with you.
Suddenly Bloodstone Manor wasn't an abandoned haunted house
anymore.
It was a place where something unimaginably terrible had
happened to a real family.
Years later, someone bought the property and painstakingly
restored the house. I've often wondered if they kept that ridiculous purple
bathtub. Somehow it feels like it belonged there.
The new owners reportedly went through three different alarm
companies because the system would mysteriously malfunction night after night.
Is that true?
I honestly have no idea.
Like every old house with a tragic history, new stories seem
to grow around it.
Eventually, the home changed hands again and now belongs to
a church.
Ironically, not the same church that once turned it into a
haunted house attraction.
I've always found that a little unsettling.
Not because of ghosts.
But because somewhere along the way, a family's tragedy
became local entertainment.
Maybe that's what communities do. Maybe time slowly sands
the sharp edges off terrible events until history becomes folklore and folklore
becomes Halloween stories told by kids who have no idea where they began.
When I think about Bloodstone Manor now, I don't picture
ghosts.
I picture a deep purple clawfoot bathtub sitting alone in
the charred skeleton of a house overlooking a sea of headstones.
And I think about how sometimes the scariest stories don't
need embellishment.
Sometimes they're frightening enough simply because they
happened.
When I think about Bloodstone Manor now, I don't picture
ghosts.
I picture a deep purple clawfoot bathtub sitting alone in
the charred skeleton of a house overlooking a sea of headstones.
I don't know whether the family who restored the house kept
it.
I hope they did. Somehow it feels like one survivor
deserved to stay.
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