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I’m just an average guy with a regular job, neither a journalist nor a scrivener, but I wanted to tell you about this. This thing that shouldn’t be, but somehow is.
I’ve lived in Camden all my working life, and for that long, as I drove to home and work, I wondered about the derelict old house roosting like a broody hen at the center of a cluster of empty lots. I could see it on my left as I drove in, my right as I drove back, some half a mile away from the overpass. One didn’t have to be a real estate mogul to notice the depressions in the middle of the vacant lots -now splashed with new grass- where homes had once stood, those homes obviously having been torn down, their occupants scattered to the four winds or moved on to more promising enterprises. All but the one.
Some houses reveal their bad intent by a flaw in their character that can be detected by the eye, but not seen. The Crone House was like that. It stood alone, seemingly purposefully so, encapsulated like a diseased organ by its four foot barrier of thorny weeds, seedy, brittle grass, and chain link fence set one hundred twenty feet equidistant from each of its four ragged sides. It was a wooden structure, two stories, and not so long abandoned that it was sagging. But time and/or vandals had bleached its paint; its broken windows were boarded over (save for one on the upper floor), and stout padlocks and hasps, both species now tarnished, barred entry at all doors. It wasn’t so close to the city that its discredited state would excite cries from the NIMBY’s to have it torn down, nor so far from the heart of the city that Andy and Opie were still using two tin cans and a string for a telephone.
But it shouldn’t have been there. It should have been demolished as part of an urban renewal project, or taken by the city for taxes, or condemned as a peril to life and limb. Any of those things before it had become such an eyesore and a nuisance that those around it had chosen to sell and get out. But had they sold out? Or just left? Their property values had to have gone into a free-fall, yet no-one had ever rebuilt around the house. Was it somehow corrupt? Even haunted? There had to be some bit of mystical local lore to explain it. I had to know.
One weekend I drove down to the house, just casually driving by. There was, I decided, something about it that made it a notch more foreboding than your run of the mill abandoned domicile. On the opposite side of the road, some hundred yards from the house, there was a park where a myriad of children played beneath the (sometimes) watchful eyes of their parents.
Even in such close proximity to the abandoned house, the atmosphere of the park was cheerful and light. Though there were a few children there enraptured by “Angry Birds” and elite speak, most were still kids doing kid things: running, laughing, jumping rope.
I sat on a bench with a group of parents (mostly mothers) and inquired about the house. Rather than being castigated and roundly condemned as some kind of roving pervert, a good number of the mothers had their own inside information on the house, but what I wanted was the real story, and that would come from the kids.
Eventually, I won the trust of the mothers enough that they allowed the little girls playing jump rope to tell me the tale of the Crone House, each flaxen or raven haired child, red, black or white, adding this detail and that rumor and an “I heard that….” until a coherent narrative emerged. As the day wore on, and while under the still mostly distrustful eyes of the mothers, the story came out…