Haunted Houses

In September and October 1978, I volunteered to work in a March of Dimes Haunted House in the Tallahassee Mall with the Godby High School Drama Club and actors from Florida State University. Fortunately, the mall was only a couple miles from home, so I was able to go every night after school and on weekends. November 1 was a bit of  a letdown, because I had been so active with Halloween up until that point, and I still experience that feeling most years on the same day for the same reason.

My First Halloween in 1980, Mike and Arlene and I each paid $5 to go to a Haunted House in the Tallahassee Mall sponsored by another organization. I can't say that it was any more frightening than the one we had spooked in 1978, but we weren't familiar with it and towards the end I got jumpy when two arms grabbed me from behind and it became exceedingly difficult to walk. The Haunted House hallway had darkened and narrowed and I was in front, with Arlene immediately behind me and Mike was behind her. I yelled and attempted to leave them behind and RUN the last twelve feet to a small lighted opening marked EXIT, but the best I could manage was a sluggish uphill struggle until I finally DOVE headfirst through the egress, somersaulting into the mall as I noticed Arlene and Mike tumbling afterward in my direction. It was then that I learned that the hands that had grabbed my arms were Arlene's, and Mike's hands had held Arlene's arms, TO STAY TOGETHER. The people waiting in line to enter the Haunted House had a great laugh at our tumultuous expense.

Less than a year later, friends and I were visiting "real" haunted houses in Tallahassee. We knew of two. We never saw anything supernatural, but each was spooky in a special way. 

On Florida State University's Southwest Campus where Innovation Park now is used to be a dairy farm. Levy Avenue, which begins near Lake Bradford Road, was a dirt road west of Iamonia Street and there were a few modular style homes on that part of the road that supported the farm efforts. One was particularly interesting and we visited it twice in the early 1980s.

On our first visit, the house was filled with refrigerators. None were turned on, but it was eerie to imagine what might have been stored there by unsavory characters. In reality, I am sure they stored dairy products there while it was still in use. On our second visit, the refrigerators were gone and we noticed the single full bathroom in the unit. Water had obviously been turned off for quite some time, and someone, likely a sole person, had published epic poetic verse in neat handwriting on every square inch of available space in the bathroom, on the walls, in the bathtub, on the porcelain around the base and inside the tank and bowl of the commode, on and under the sink, and inside the bathroom's medicine cabinet. It was as if a lyricist spirit had been entrapped in the bathroom until some condition like the available space had been filled or a package of Sharpie markers had been exhausted. 

A couple of years later on another visit, the modular homes were gone and construction of Innovation Park had begun.   

On Ocala Road, south of Continental Avenue and north of Tennessee Street, on the east side of the road and set back into the woods stood a stately house that was originally built in 1834 on North Monroe Street, Highway 27. It had been moved to behind Rainey Cawthon's Ocala Road home in the 1960s, and by the 1980s, it was only visible from Ocala Road during winter with reduced foliage and it was quite overgrown and in serious disrepair. We often brought friends by to look at it, and every time we saw it we were saddened that such an old impressive house had been so badly neglected. 

In 1986, the late Rainey Cawthon's daughters Ann Booth and Sarah Shaw donated the Sarah Payne Cawthon House on Ocala Road, named for their mother, to the Florida State University College of Law. It was restored and is now a prominent building on the FSU Law School's Village Green.