The Raven's Roost

 Down the road from here there is (was) a house I passed every day on my daily walks or runs. It was no different from any other house out here and at the time there was a family living there comprised of a man and woman, a little girl, and a white cat. Usually I'd see them leaving in the morning during school months, the mother taking the girl to - most likely - McRay Elementary which is nearby. Then one morning I saw them packing up and leaving.

I've been a landlord, I know when someone is ditching their digs in a hurry and these people were getting out of this house like it was on fire. Weird, but what the hell, right? Maybe the rent got too high. Maybe they got a better offer closer in to town, or the father got transferred, who knows. I didn't think much of it until a few days later when I saw a sheriff's deputy parked there, but he didn't flag me down to ask questions and I didn't go out of my way to talk to him, then we had a hurricane. For a while I wondered if they were hurricane noobs. My first husband had actually lived in New Orleans and still, whenever there was a counterclockwise swirl on the weather map, his brain fell out.

So the house sat empty. The people across the road showed up once or twice, apparently to depressurize the well pump and disconnect the gas. A white dresser or wardrobe thing sat on the porch. A broom was on the roof. What the fuck. The curtains fell down. The door swung open. Was it stained inside? Was there someone squatting in it? I was incredibly curious about the place, but I could not ever quite work up the courage to go exploring. The least troublesome thing I might find would be rotten floorboards, and even that was something I didn't want to deal with, so I left it alone. It became known between Fox and I as The Spooky House. 

Finally, a few weeks ago someone cut the lawn, the tore the house down. Fox got curious and looked up the property records and found something ... interesting.

The house was owned, and rented out, by some people from Jacksonville. In particular a woman who has been indicted for ... alien smuggling and sex trafficking. The article I've linked too has details about the case which, I guess it should go without needing to be said, carries a major trigger warning. Here's a link to the public property records, where it looks like the family moved out ahead of Clay County taking possession of the land.  Anyway, we were surprised to discover that about the woman who owned it previously - that's a pretty huge quantity of Horrible. Ugh, what the fuck is wrong with people?