The Gold is Mine - Part One

The Gold is Mine – Part One
Serial: The House that Never Forgot
Denton Texas: Home of the Happy Hookers 
– So says his Husband Lee

Recorded from Robert Royal – Lansdale PA

Robert owns the local comic book shop, Royal Comics, where we play D&D on Saturdays. He and his husband Lee are good friends, and Robert has always been sensitive to the otherworld. His spirit is childlike, and all children are born with their eyes wide to spirits. He has maintained this gift and has become a good friend. With his bald head, goatee, and round face, he looks more like a hell raiser in a biker gang, but he’s a sweet person, sensitive in this insensitive world. Robert’s stories of his life in the antebellum mansion of Denton Texas would take up a few entries, so I’ve decided to make this a serial. I’ll be telling this dark ghost story in three parts.

As recorded from Robert Royal while sitting with him and Lee, his husband, in Molly’s in Lansdale. I aided with the prose a bit. Part One:

I was a boy. The family looked for the house and found a foreclosed house for 15,000. It needed some work. It was a huge old plantation house—four bedrooms, two half-baths. It also had a little over an acre of property—mostly a grassy field. It had a fenced-in backyard, which was good for the dogs. It had been for a different age—an age of opulence and splendor, of wealthy oil barons. This was a house built of dreams, when old men drilled black oily cash from the ground or herded cattle across grand fields in a time of innocence and plenty.

My mother replaced the front door with a beautiful maple door. She stained and it varnished. It was the most gorgeous piece, the cream-of-the-crop of the house. When you walked in the front door to the immediate left was a twisting staircase with a wooden banister. To the right was a formal living room. Southern splendor. Walking straight ahead was the den, and off the den and in conjunction was the kitchen. Once in the den, there were two sliding glass doors that overlooked the backyard with three prominent trees: an old men oak and two younger brother maples.

To the left of that was a half bathroom and across from that was a garage. From the stairs, going up and if you stand on the landing, you could look out onto the front yard. The first door to right was my sister’s shared room: Sharon and Darlene. The door next to those was the door to the master bedroom. It was at least twenty-five feet wide with a fireplace, a walk-in closet and a huge window that overlooked the back yard. Along with a dressing area, the bedroom also boasted a separate bathroom. If you made a left and went straight down the hall, the next door would be the bathroom. The second door would be my bedroom. And across the way was my oldest sister’s room.

When we first saw the house, we opened the back door, and it looked like no one had lived there for at least ten years. Dead birds rotted on the floor. My mother was excited about the fireplace, examined it and found a squirrel skeleton; it had been eaten. She turned around to my father and said: “There’s a lot of cleaning to be done.”

It wasn’t long before the first event happened.

We lived at the house for a short time. We had a cat that was pregnant, and she gave birth to six kittens. My parents worked all day, and my oldest sister attended college. That’s when the first weird thing happened. My sisters and I came home to discover all six kittens ripped apart on the lawn, which was strange because they all lived in the house.

We called my mom to say the kittens were killed, and she said she’d come home. We were up in our rooms when we heard the front door open. We assumed Mom had come home, and we came out of our rooms, calling down to the hall to see if she needed help with anything like groceries. She called out to us, saying she was home. We went down the winding staircase to find her, to see if she needed help with groceries. We couldn’t find her, and my sisters and I searched the house. We didn’t find her. That’s when she came home through the front door for the first time. She had only just come home.

This is when we knew we were living in a house that wasn’t normal.

*   *   *

I’ll be featuring Rob’s story over the October, and it is an interesting one. Rob is having some local ghost hunters come to Royal Comics on Wednesday, 23^rd October 2013 at 5PM to answer questions and talk to visitors. I’ll be there collecting ghost stories from guests and talking to them. They’re the Midnight Watchmen, founded by Paranormal Investigator John C. Fowler.

The Midnight Watchmen: www.paranormalwatchers.com

Royal Comics: www.royalcomicsandgaming.com