Backstory and first story: My family is super secretive, so I don't know very much of the how's and why's of things.
I don't know why they were close-mouthed, but they were.
Also, we can trace our family lineage to Ireland, and the rumor is that my paternal great-grandmother was half white and half Native American.
Both of those are known for being more sensitive and in tune with the supernatural.
OK, sometime in the 1960s prior to '68, the town came into their neighborhood and, under eminent domain, forced two neighborhoods to move so that they could put up public housing or a housing project.
This was largely poor whites and poorer African Americans.
Somehow my grandparents and my two great-aunts and a great uncle found two houses on a dead-end street and bought them; they had always lived side by side or close by, and I guess it seemed like a godsend.
This property and the property above, you have a row of houses, then a giant hill, and my grandparent's house at the bottom of that hill, so all of that was once a boy's military school in the 1800s.
I've never researched, so I don't know what would have happened to a military school during the Civil War, nor why or when it was pulled down and houses put up.
Rumor and only rumor had it that there are underground caves where prisoners of war were kept chained during the war.
Rumor also has it that my great-aunt's/uncle's house was used as a house of prostitution up to the 1940s; they said the walls were black and purple when they moved in.
Again, only a rumor.
So both houses needed work; the yards were essentially a jungle, and there was trash all over, so both houses had a little hill and a flat area at the bottom we called the garden. As children, we were strictly forbidden from going down there; they were afraid we would fall into one of the hidden caves and just be gone.
They raked and shoveled and piled all the debris and clippings down there and set it on fire.
This made the local news; my grandmother had a clipping, but I've never been able to find it myself. Because of the caves and the oxygen, the fires burned for weeks before finally going out.
The newspaper called it the fires of hell.
That should have been their first warning that they hadn't moved into a normal house.
