Being a paranormal investigator can sometimes become tedious and repetitive to the point that you would love to do nothing more than hang up your EMF meter and never look back. On very rare occasions however, you come across those little investigations where your discoveries are enough to keep you in the game a bit longer and initiating a hunger, a proverbial fuel to the fire, that makes you quest for more. Sometimes the hidden and unknown histories behind the investigation itself can be more intriguing than the actual findings.
If by strange occurrence one day you find yourself heading east of Dallas on a mission to explore the inbreeding capitols of the country, you will come to a town called Greenville. Now, at this point my advice to you, the uninformed reader, is that you roll up your windows and lock your doors for the fear of being sucked in and trapped by the invisible force field that has held me captive here for as long as I can possibly remember. I’ve made it as far west as Los Angeles and was still somehow sucked back into its bloody claws of despair and mediocrity. If that chance should occur, playing the role of the weary traveler, that you become a slave to the needs of the human body known as extreme fatigue or hunger this place looks as though it could be a welcomed beacon in the endless night that is Interstate 30. Don’t let it fool you.
As our tiny group of rag tag paranormal investigators began to grow in popularity and recognition, we were approached by the owners of a small bed and breakfast on the outskirts of this prison of despair that some call a town. It was no longer open to the public and was serving as nothing more than a home for the couple, providing a human being’s necessary requirement for sanctuary and shelter with rooms that had not so much as been slept in for countless years. They told us that they had ghosts in the old home and who were we to deny them the services that we so graciously had wanted to supply to this community since my co-founder and I first concocted this crazy idea of being ghost hunters. In all reality of the situation, the majority of this community fears and hates anything that isn’t represented within the walls of one of it’s hundreds of churches that are contained inside the city limits and it was highly difficult back then to find an investigation. There’s no way we would’ve said ‘no’!
At that particular time in this otherworldly hobby, we didn’t want to know any details about the places we were investigating for fear that it would influence our decisions and results. We entered the house blindly and walked the floors of this home with no agenda, snapping numerous photographs of the countless dust covered antiques and asking questions into the unknown aimed at entities that we knew absolutely nothing about. The owner’s stayed outdoors and gave us total reign of the inside. They were already well aware of what they had there and were just waiting for us to exit the home to fill us in on what they already knew. After a few hours of recorded audio and video data had been collected and we could no longer walk in the same footsteps again for fear of the burnout effect, we packed up our belongings and headed in their direction. This is the story of the “Iron Skillet Inn”.
Way back in the days when the North Texas cotton barons ruled this part of the state, was a young girl that resided here whose lover was one of the founder’s of a very popular soft drink company...which shall remain nameless for the sake of law suits and finger pointing. I will say that this particular beverage is bold enough to carry a prefix at the beginning of it’s title so at least you’ll have the general idea of what I’m talking about while leaving myself a back door clause in case the before mentioned fingers happen to ever find me. The two were eventually married and they lived happily ever after, or so the general public and the local history books would like to have you believe. Not unlike the marriages of today but totally unheard of in the early decades of the 1900’s, the relationship came to a screeching halt when the soda entrepreneur discovered that a young, Jewish business man had bumped him unexpectedly out of the relationship. In an effort to express his undying love for this young woman, the Jewish man built an extravagant home for her, for those times, and everything was kosher, no pun intended. This is where the story gets interesting.
Before small town high society could even blink, the soda heir and the young bride were an item again and the young business man who had built the house was nowhere to be found. To this very day, not a soul is aware of his whereabouts. Passed down from owner to owner over the years, it’s rumored that he was forever quieted by the construction of a fireplace in the home that is made out of materials that are newer in date than the materials used to construct the home itself. The fireplace is grand in its appearance and way too big to be used for a source of heat in the tiny room that it’s contained in. Even today, no fire has ever been built in this room of the house. During the days of the great depression, things were not built that were unnecessary and, in my opinion, an extravagant fireplace in a room that size fits into that category. Years later, in one of the upstairs bedrooms, the young girl was found dead due to a drug overdose. Over the years, the house changed hands time and again and stories were passed from generation to generation regarding the fates of all the people involved since its construction. The current owner’s have never bothered to remove a single brick from the rumored tomb of the young business man for fear of what they might find or unleash. I don’t blame them. With our heads full of buzzing information, we headed for our makeshift HQ to review the photos and analyze the audio we had taken. Sure enough, in the background of the audio taken inside of the room containing the overkill fireplace, a highly unpleasant and insisting voice tells us to “get out”. In my personal experience, this is the way that my father in law would treat me if I were to enter his private sanctuaries and he, too, is Jewish. As we continued to pick apart the audio the word “fate” could be heard being spoken by a female voice in the upstairs bedroom where her life had been taken from her so many years ago. To sum this all up, the word ‘fate’ is definitely the key to this entire occurrence. The young business man built the house in an attempt to trap the heart of a certain young woman and, in turn, he could possibly be trapped behind the walls of the house itself.
The young woman, who insisted on freely partaking the secret sauces of society which eventually led to her premature demise, could also be trapped eternally inside the home itself that was once her coveted and scandalous trophy amidst the shanty’s and cotton fields that once filled this area.
Several decades later, it seems that her body was stolen from an above ground crypt by a drunken group of demented teenagers and made a fixture at a party that was being thrown in the honor of a certain ghost hunter’s high school graduation. Imagine the surprise and horror I felt almost twenty years ago watching the stumbling bunch introduce a dead body to the festivities that were originally meant as a form of celebration and rite of passage for a young man that was about to introduce himself into the slavery that is known as the rest of my life. They were caught, sentenced, and incarcerated but those images are wedged into a place in my mind that can never be erased regardless of how many times I have unsuccessfully tried. Was it ‘fate’ that I ended up in the former bedroom of the deceased party guest in an attempt to discover tangible proof of life after death all these years later? That’s another story completely. Until then…Keep Believing
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