This is a true story. I’ve changed three names—two of which should be pretty damn obvious—and I’ve also skewed a minor time line to protect someone I hold dear, but the alterations make no discernable difference to the tale.

You’ll find copies of the newspaper and magazine articles mentioned in the book at my website:
tanyathompsonbooks.com

Foreword

When it was over, my favorite quote made it into all the newspapers. The detective said, “I was dealing with a mastermind.”

Oh god, who doesn’t want to be called a mastermind?

He said, “This girl has left in her wake a group of professionals.” He was talking about the FBI, Interpol, the DEA, INS, a panel of twelve psychologists and psychiatrists, the ACLU, Ron Howard, almost—but not quite—the United States Congress, and finally a couple of sheriff’s departments.

I’d been busy.

He said, “I don’t believe a normal 15-year-old girl in America pulled this off,” and he called me a genius.

I put the newspaper to my lips to kiss the word.

Then he said I needed psychiatric help.

Well, that wasn’t nice but it was probably true.

The journalists referred to me as a dark-haired beauty, which was appreciated, but there was no higher flattery than mental brilliance, even if it did come with instability.

I had been trying for years to be recognized as brilliant, but I was capable of some extraordinary acts of stupidity that undermined my efforts.

Wolf Meadows

The very night before I ran away to confound the authorities, I was acting moronic.

It was 2:00 a.m. and I had left my family sleeping to hitchhike the thirty miles to Wolf Meadows. Before I left Tennessee for Dallas, I wanted to see if the stories were true. The eighteenth-century mansion in Shelbyville was said to be too haunted to enter, and I had a reputation for insolence in the face of danger, so no one would take me.

Months before, I’d gone to see the famed Chapel Hill Ghost Lights. For hours I sat with three friends on the side of the road, looking over the railroad tracks, hoping to see a decapitated signal man searching the tracks for his head. In the boredom, I lost mine and became condescending, stalking down the tracks shouting, “I’ve got your head,” trying to make him light his lantern and come have a look. Certain that a blue light was swinging in the distance and getting closer, my companions flipped to screaming. I didn’t see it, and nothing I said could persuade them to stay and show it to me either.

It took a week’s worth of promises to convince them I wouldn’t taunt any more ghosts, but once on the porch of Wartrace’s Walking Horse Hotel, I proved myself a liar trying to pet an ethereal horse they all shrieked was there.

I had to swear and swear again I wouldn’t antagonize the Bell Witch, but the thrill of being at her grave after dark proved too irresistible, and I tried to call her up by claiming to be a Bell heir. I didn’t think the witch believed it, but something certainly chased my friends out of the cemetery.

After two months of such late-night supernatural nonsense, all that remained to be seen in Tennessee was Wolf Meadows and Old New Hope Church.

And no one wanted to contemplate me at Wolf Meadows after dark.

But once at Old New Hope Church, my friends decided this too had been a bad idea and they wouldn’t tell me what the legend was, convinced I would break into the church and try to carry off the New Hope Bible.

Years later, I heard it couldn’t be done. The book would either become too heavy to hold, or it would mysteriously vanish only to reappear at the pulpit. And, of course, anyone who managed to leave the church with it suffered a grisly death.

If they had told me, I might only have laughed.

I wasn’t so much sacrilegious as certain everyone else was wrong. There were a lot of things that made no sense to me as they were explained.

I was nine years old the first time I encountered fervent Southern religion. I’d been invited to Sunday service with a friend and listened skeptically as a Baptist preacher told a long story about the love of Jesus, the point of which was to say, “No person can stand before the image of Christ and say, ‘I hate you, Jesus.’”

He was emphatic, “It
can not
be done.”

He told about one man’s attempt to look upon the crucified image and repeat the words three times. The man managed the first blasphemous sentence, but broke down on the second attempt. The preacher boomed, “It can
not
be done.”

When the service ended and the preacher went to stand at the door to shake hands with the departing congregants, I went before the empty pulpit and looked up at the tortured figure of Christ on the Cross. I was a little apprehensive because I didn’t want to cry and make a fool of myself. I had nothing against Christ, but I needed to confirm if what the preacher had said was true, because it just didn’t sound right.

I said, “I hate you, Jesus.” And when that went okay, I said again, “I hate you, Jesus.” Then, somewhat cringing and waiting for disaster, I whispered, “I hate you, Jesus.” I was afraid maybe the last one didn’t count, so to make certain, one more time, “I hate you, Jesus.”

The preacher was wrong and I earnestly thought he should know so as not to embarrass himself with that story again.

He did not take it well.

I was pulled into a pew for an agonizing thirty-minute confrontation that quickly had me in tears when the preacher said, “Maybe your lack of faith is why your brother just died.”

So, yeah, I might have hauled off with the New Hope Bible. But I wasn’t the one that burnt either Old New Hope Church or Wolf Meadows to the ground. Both were still standing the night before I ran away.

I saw them for myself, but I saw the last one by myself. I knew there were not enough oaths under heaven to get my superstitious friends to trust me again, and I didn’t trust any of them enough to tell them that time was pressing and I really needed to see the place soon. I’d put off going alone until the last night in the hopes they’d come around, but Wolf Meadows was Shelbyville’s own home-town terror—a haunted mansion where acts too despicable to discuss had been committed, a place so cursed you could only approach it in a fast car with a competent driver because no one could look upon the place for longer than a minute before going mad with fear.

It sounded positively enchanting. There was absolutely no way I was running away to Dallas without seeing it.

It was mid-September when I went and the night was cool. I had my hands half hidden in the long sleeves of a sweater, considering the mile-long drive that led to the mansion. The city had been granted possession of the avenue and named it Steward Road, but it was nothing more than the driveway to the house. Cedars, hickories, and oaks grew heavy over the lane, turning it black, and I’d come without a flashlight. There were crickets and, if I strained, maybe cows shuffling around in the dark, but nothing that would keep me from entering. I walked the length of the drive, stopping occasionally to listen, and then I paused once more at the last bend to study the dark roof in the field ahead.

It was only the two trees in front of Wolf Meadows that anyone would talk about. I’d been told you could see chain marks cutting into the bark. Those that dared discuss the place said that when it had been used as a home for the mentally handicapped, children had been shackled to the oaks and you could still hear them howling at the moon.

But there was no moon out this night, and standing at the chain link gate, I couldn’t see the scars. The sign said
No Trespassing
, but then, didn’t they always? I stepped around the gate and over the falling remnants of fence to enter the yard and stand with my back to one of the oaks while I considered the house.

Red brick towered overhead to a peaked balcony jutting out of the attic, and then, just below it, there was another balcony with French doors on the second floor. Brick and stone steps led to a deep recessed entrance, but nothing of it could be seen as it lay in the shadow of the second floor. The place was divided through the middle by this stack of doors, and to either side were large rooms with double windows. The glass wasn’t broken, but the place appeared abandoned. The upstairs had no curtains and the downstairs had damaged screens that blocked seeing further inside without light.

I crept around the outside perimeter to check for cars parked in the back, but it was empty. I felt certain I was alone.

I returned to the trees and ran my hands over the bark feeling for the cuts, straining my eyes in the dark to see, but if the trees had been scarred, they had healed.

I looked back to the house. It was eerie. It was big and dark and sitting scary at the end of a mile-long drive. I wasn’t certain I wanted to get any closer, but I was moving forward regardless. Up the six steps to the stone landing, peering into the gloom of the recess, sliding one foot forward and then another, hands out in front of me, searching the air for something solid while playing a horrible scene in my head of someone grabbing my wrist. Despite the vivid images in my mind, I kept moving on until finally touching the double doors.

No one I knew had been brave enough to leave the security of their car, much less enter the yard where ghost children were known to wail, and I’d heard no tale of anyone daring to enter the house, but having come so far, I had to see if the doors would open. The handle twisted and the first door gave, but it was tight. I put my hip into it and threw it wide into the hall. Standing on the sill, I couldn’t think of a reason to enter, but I was waiting and listening, smelling something old in the air. I’d smelled it before, the scent of decaying newspapers, books, and wallpaper, and aged wood, too, throwing off decades of life under cracking varnish.

I wasn’t intending to cross over the threshold, but I couldn’t seem to turn away either. I hadn’t so much changed my mind as simply carried on, putting my back to the second door, and then slipping into the hall. The faintest light from a window on the side of the house revealed a double opening to my right, and I just kept moving forward even though I knew I shouldn’t.

Gliding one foot and then the other across the wood floors, hands out to explore the air, I was edging through the arch. Then keeping to the wall, I was running my fingers over the cracked wallpaper, the cuff of my sweater catching on ripped bits, pulling at the torn paper, tearing it further until it sprang loose from the knit with a tiny flick.

I was nearly in the corner when I heard, “Who are you?”

Oh. Good. God
. I couldn’t breathe. Breathing would require moving, and any movement would lead to running; running would lead to screaming, and screaming in a haunted house was bad.

He asked, “What are you doing?”

Whimpering, but silently. Too terrified to move yet
.

Behind me in the dark, springs were creaking free of pressure and someone was getting to their feet.

“What do you want?”

To leave. Leaving now. Casually like nothing is following
.

The voice was old, “Have you taken anything?”

Not talking to you. Leaving. Just heading for the door
.

Shuffling steps were so very close, “I asked, who are you?”

I felt the air move past my face. He’d reached to stop me but it was utterly black and he’d missed. I picked up the pace. No time to be dignified, but I wasn’t running. Running would break into panic.

Out the door and across the stone landing, and then the shout, “Hey!”

No time to chat
. I was moving fast down the stairs and into the weeds.

“Now hold on there,” he scurried after me and I broke for the gate.

“Wait right there.”

And I did, my hand and sweater all caught up in the fence. I was fighting with the chain links for freedom, and he was coming, nearly on me, throwing me into a panic until I ripped free and dashed for the cover of the tree-lined road. Dragging loose yarn through the gravel, blood was streaming down my wrist, soaking my hand, dripping from my fingers to leave a guilty trail to the road.

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