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"The House of Hell"
*688
King Street West as it is today*
The tiny village of Portsmouth, Ontario was a thriving center
of ship building in the late eighteen hundreds and was situated just a short carriage ride
down a dusty dirt road from the larger city of Kingston. In today's standards it would be
considered just another suburb of the city, but at a time when shipbuilding and cargo
hauling ruled the economy it was an important part of the landscape.
The dusty old road wound along the shoreline from the center of Kingston on the east up
over the large hill that Kingston Penitentiary was built on and down to the village of
Portsmouth. A scenic and peaceful ride at the time though probably not too comfortable as
the road was not well kept.
The little village surrounded the bay upon which its lively hood depended and was spread
in a haphazard fashion half way up a long slow hill on the western side. At the edge of
the village limits was a flat spot on which there was built the first church of the
community; a small stone structure, simple in design but lacking even a tower or a bell.
Further up the hill, on the opposite side, was the massive stone Church of the Good Thief
built by the convicts of the prison as penance for their crimes. Across the road from it
stood the Rockwood Insane Asylum.
Since the population of the village was mostly of a transient nature most of the
structures were built as boarding houses or hotels with very few single-family dwellings
on the main street.
On the main road to Kingston in 1885 was built one of these rooming houses. A wooden
framed triplex that could hardly be called anything but home to the impoverished
residents.
My family moved into the house at 688 King Street West in the year 1959 just two years
after emigrating from Wales. It was considered at the time a great step up from the three
tiny rooms we had previously lived in.
My parents had their own room and I shared one with my sister. The practice of a young boy
of eight and a little girl of 6 sharing the same room was totally acceptable in those
days, especially among the poor, but we didn't know we were poor.
If we had only known about the house before moving in, I am sure that my mother would not
have allowed us to live there.
There were many strange things about the place, like the noises that we would hear
sometimes during the night, scrapping or tapping sounds that seemed to emanate from the
walls or the floors. Voices that you could identify as a man and a woman talking but you
could not understand the words. And the bloodstain on the floor of the kitchen that would
not go away.
The kitchen was a small room about twelve feet by eight feet. With stove, fridge, table
and chairs and the back door entrance.
Just inside the door to the living room, in front of the stove and the sink was a stain
about eight to ten inches in width and approximately fourteen inches in length. It was
reddish brown in color and kind of faded but very obvious to the eye. The floor was tiled
with those old fashioned red and yellow tiles that you see everywhere in old houses in the
area.
From the day we moved in, my mother scrubbed that stain till it disappeared, over and
over. Yet it kept coming back by the morning of the next day. She bleached it; she scoured
it with steel wool she tried every cleaning method known to her. The stain kept returning.
She finally gave up and put a small throw rug over it and tried to forget it.
My mother had a way about her and it was many years later that I became aware of her
sensitivity to certain things.
My mother was one of those old-world believers, raised in a belief system of fairies and
goblins. Brought up with stories of ghosts and spirits that abounded in the Welsh
counties. She never talked about her believes or sensitivities and kept them to herself
for most of her life, but her fear of the basement of this house was one thing she could
not hide.
Shortly after moving in she began to act strangely at any suggestion that she should enter
the basement. Eventually she flatly refused to go down there alone. To this day I have no
idea what she saw or felt down there for she never talked about it.
She had my father install a sliding bolt lock on the basement door because she said it
kept opening on it's own. I do not remember this but I remember one particular night when
the door started to rattle for no reason. There was no wind that night and besides that
there were no windows in the basement for the wind to enter by. My sister and I cowered on
the sofa nearby while my mother leaned against the door sliding the bolt of the lock
closed because it was working its way open. In fear my mother finally had us help her move
the couch in front of the door and we all sat on it hoping our combined weight would keep
it closed. The rattling finally stopped and we went to bed still holding each other in
sweaty fear.
One day I entered the house by the front door and saw a man standing at the top of the
stairs. He was middle aged, wearing a white shirt and brown pants. He was balding and
appeared to have a scowl on his face. I had no idea who this man was but my immediate
impression of him was not a good one.
I rushed into the kitchen and asked my mother who the man was. She dashed up the stairs
and I heard her going from room to room. When she came back down she scolded me for
telling tales. I know what I saw.
Another time, my sister and I were alone in the house playing in the living room. Our next
door neighbor, a man studying for the clergy at Queens University, entered the back door
and accused me of pushing the window screen from my parents room out and nearly hitting
him. It is hard to argue with an adult when you are only eight. There was no one else in
the house but he said he clearly saw some one backing away from the window and because I
was known as a "little terror" by the neighbors, I got the blame. (It should be
noted that each screen in the house was held in place by four wing nuts that had been
painted many times and were hard for an adult to turn let alone a child.)
Many years later (when my sister and I were in our late forties) we sat talking at the
kitchen table with my mother and some how the discussion came around to the old house.
My mother admitted that she never liked the feeling in the house and would not go into the
basement on her own. This was the first acknowledgement of her true feelings. That was
when my sister and I both admitted that there was only one place in the house we had felt
safe. A little closet in our room that had a window overlooking the front door with a
small bench on the opposite wall. It looked like it was designed as a spot to sit and
watch the comings and goings of the village. We had never discussed this before and it
came as a surprise to find out that we both felt the same way about the closet.
It seems my sister had also seen the man upstairs on several different occasions. The one
she remembers the most was waking up and seeing the man bent over my bed choking me. I was
totally shocked. I had always thought the dream I had had of a man choking me was just
that a dream. One I will never forget, mind you, but I had never told it to anyone. The
only way she could have known about it was to have seen it. I had lived in terror for two
years, dreading bedtime, because of these attacks. I can still feel the oppressive weight
on my chest and the fingers at my throat relentlessly squeezing the life from me. I can
see his face close to mine, a sickening grin on his face. The balding man seemed to enjoy
his work.
There were many other little things about the house but they fade into my memory and I am
not too sure of the details. We finally moved out of the house in 1960 and into a new one
that my father had built.
The house at 688 King Street West was occupied until the late 1970's when it was torn down
and a convenience store erected in its place. I always wondered if the present owners had
seen or heard anything and had the good fortune to work with a man who owned the store for
several years. He claims that he was there at all hours of the day and night usually alone
and he denies that there were any occurrences.
I showed my brother and sister this story today and we talked about the house at 688 King
St.. The following are additions to the original story and are sworn to be true by them.
My sisters story-
As I said before my mother would not go into the basement alone, and neither my sister nor
myself were to eager to venture into that dark dank windowless hole alone.
One day, for some unknown reason, my sister decided that she needed to enter the basement.
She descended the steps cautiously, as the light was not working. When she reached the
bottom of the stairs, she turned to her right and faced the old well near the back wall.
To her shock she saw the images of three people. A man of about forty, wearing brown pants
and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and suspenders. He was standing beside a
middle-aged woman wearing a long flowing white dress with flowers on it. The woman was
holding the hand of a little girl dressed in white as well but wearing a blue pinafore
over it.
Needless to say my sister rushed back up the stairs and closed the door quickly. It was a
long time before she dared venture back down there alone.
She also told me that she used to dream of the man she saw choking me, the same man she
saw in the basement. In the dream she was playing in the rock quarry just two blocks from
the house. The man would approach her and she would run down a path that led back to the
house. The man never caught her in the dream but she knew she was really scared of him.
Another dream she used to have was of the same man trying to drown her in the bathtub. She
did not elaborate too much on this one; it was obvious that it bothered her still.
She also told me that I had told her that the man had killed the little girl and thrown
her body down the well in the basement. He was arrested and sent to jail at the prison
just down the road, for the rest of his life. Funny thing is I don't ever remember telling
her such a tale cause I never told her about the man. Did she have some insight here that
I did not have?
My Brothers Story-
My brother was born while we lived in this house; he was about a year old when we moved
out so he has no memory of it. We never talked about it and he had no idea till today that
we had ever lived there.
When we moved out of the house on King St. we moved into a new house in a village ten
miles outside of the city of Kingston. The village of Westbrook is where he grew up. He
knew nothing of our past adventures in the house.
Of all the places in the city of Kingston that he could have taken his girlfriend to park,
he chose the only one that had a connection to us. The house was abandoned at this time
and he used to pull into the parking lot at the back and sit there looking at the house.
Did some unseen force draw him there?
When I asked him if there was any particular part of the house that attracted him, he
described the part we used to live in. This was uncanny.
Even after the house was demolished and the convenience store was built, he used to return
to the parking lot of the store and sit there for hours drinking coke and chatting with
his friends. This was not a usual hang out for kids and still isn't. Why was he drawn
there? Did the man in white shirt want him too?
©2000 Merlyn of Cresycellog
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