The House and Other Stuff

I remember the day we moved out of our Father’s house. He wouldn’t let us take anything. Mom didn’t make a big deal about it. She told us we would go back later to get our things. We drove to a town about twenty miles away to a home the cult had found for us. Our “new” home was built in about 1860 by an early pioneer to the area. Although the neighbor kids were scared of our “haunted house,” we were excited to see our new home.

This is a picture of the home circa 1861 (meaning it was taken in 1861 - not when we lived there). The left (South) side of the house, the upstairs, and the basement were where I would spend the next eight years of my life. The right (North) side of the house had a two bedroom apartment that was lived in sometimes by outsiders and sometimes by cult members. Outsiders were renting the smaller apartment when we moved in. A girl about our age, Lena, lived there with her family. A newly married cult couple rented part of the upstairs which had been turned into a one bedroom apartment. At the time we moved into the house, we used the two large upstairs bedrooms. A short time later, my older sisters used the basement bedrooms. The windows in the basement were so tiny that if there had been a fire when we were sleeping, we surely would have died. The basement was so dark because of this that when the lights were off, our eyes never adjusted to the dark. If we woke up in the night, we could see only blackness.

That first night in the house, we slept on the floor because our beds were at our father’s house. We didn’t even have dishes. We went exploring and found some little cans on the shelves above where the washer would go which we used to eat our breakfast cereal. Later, Mom took her brothers with her to help get our belongings from Dad’s house.

Mom started dating my step dad shortly after we moved into the old house. He was very friendly. He would play and dance with us. Mom and Bob could have been married in the eyes of the law because neither of them had another spouse at this time, but the leader of the cult (the man my mother had left years before) wouldn’t allow them to legally marry. They had a spiritual ceremony that only my oldest sibling was invited to attend. Afterwards mom’s family had a big surprise party for her birthday which in hindsight I realize was a wedding reception. I don’t remember being told they were married, but I guess mom must have said something to us because shortly afterwards the babies started to come. The secrecy was one more way for the leader of this cult to make life hard for Mom. It was his way of getting back at her. If the marriage had been legal, she wouldn’t have been asked to go on welfare. He set her up for a fall, and she went along with it because she had seen how bad life was outside of the cult. She was warned, failed to listen, ended up in a horrible situation (one even worse than living in a cult), and was now back and ready to be completely obedient.

When a person leaves the cult they are told how bad the outside world is. They are also told that there are consequences for leaving – something bad will happen, and their eternal salvation is in jeopardy. I remember being told about a woman who left. One day, as the story went, she backed her car over one of her children and killed her own child. It was drilled into our heads that every time you did something against the cult or sinned in any way that a price had to be paid. The price could be paid by you, or God could take the price from someone you loved. If you told any of the cult secrets, you or someone you loved would have to pay the price – usually an injury or illness would strike. It just wasn’t worth taking a chance that something bad would happen to someone I loved. I kept my mouth shut about the cult.

We kept their secrets because of fear and because for the most part, we liked being in the order – at first anyway. The people were fun. They had that big party for my mom. There were a lot of celebrations and dances – complete with food. Unfortunately only a few of the people in the cult could actually cook a decent dish, but it was fun to play with all the children – most of which were our cousins at one level or another or both. Inbreeding makes for some interesting family trees – only more like a morning glory plant (bind weed) all wrapped around itself and strangling the host plant.

After their marriage, my step dad seemed overwhelmed by all of us. He was an orderly person, and we (including mom) were an unruly bunch. We were used to being on our own with only a slightly older sibling in charge of us. Our house was generally so cluttered and messy that we were embarrassed to have friends over. We had been in other homes and knew that not everyone lived the way we did.

Although my step dad made good money, Mom continued to work because that is what the women of this cult did. For a while, we were tended by our Aunt, but by the time I was eight or nine, we were back to watching ourselves again. Mom gave us jobs to do, but we usually waited until we heard her tires on the long gravel driveway before we did them. One day we even took the hose inside the house when a water fight got out of hand. We amused ourselves in the big house by sliding down the long staircase in boxes, playing dodge ball in the dark (inside the house), playing keep off the floor tag (which took its toll on our furniture), and hanging from the railing of the stairs and seeing how high up the stair case we dared to drop to the floor below. How we didn’t end up with broken legs or arms, I’ll never know. This was the environment our step-dad was thrown into. At the time, through the eyes of child, I was mad at him for being so playful before Mom married him and being so annoyed with us after the wedding. I thought he had tricked us all – had used us to get to Mom. I was angry with him for many, many years. Only an adult point of view would change my opinion of him.

This picture of the back of the house was taken when I was a teen. My room was behind the two top windows. Mom paid extra to rent the little upstairs apartment and had it remodeled into two bedrooms. The kitchen sink and stove were right behind my bedroom wall and still accessible. The nice part about us renting this little apartment was that now we had two bathrooms for our very large family. My windows faced West, and the afternoon sun streamed through making this a wonderful place to grow houseplants of every kind. I took advantage of the light and filled my room with living things.

I didn’t sleep well when I was a teen because I had nightmares nearly every night. To quell the nightmares, I stayed up late into the early morning hours playing solitaire on my floor until I could barely keep my eyes open. At that point, I’d turn on my nifty eight-track tape player, set the volume at barely audible, and let a Moody Blues tape play through the rest of the night just in case I woke up. The music comforted me when the nightmares came. Because of this, it was hard for me to wake up in the morning and be on time for school. I would wake up ten minutes before class, throw my clothes on, and run out the front door. One morning as I raced out the front door – nearly late for school again, some younger children who were walking to the elementary school took one look at me and ran screaming down the street, “The witch – the witch – run!” I laughed the rest of the way to school. Our house had quite the reputation as THE haunted house.

For those of you who believe in ghosts, the house was indeed haunted. For those of you who don’t believe in ghosts, I dare you to stay a week in the house and still not believe. I’ll share more about the "haunts" in another post. This house is  the place I consider my childhood home. It is boarded up because of a fire, and no one has lived in it for years, but if I dream about home, this is the home I dream about. I love this house and hope someday it will be restored to what it once was. My childhood was crazy and confused, but I have happy memories from the years I lived here.  The shadow you see is from a giant old apple tree that held a tree house where we spent many hours.