The House on Elmendorf

Jack Klee had been a friend of the family for as far back as I can remember. He wandered in and out of our lives ever since I was a child, usually around the holidays and summers. Jack would drift across the state and beyond, but he always seemed to make it back to us and we were always happy when he did. He would say his time with us was therapeutic and just what he needed after a season of traveling. He was a white man, tall, light brown almost blonde hair. He always wore the same outfit, a large, brimmed Panama hat, blue denim type button up shirt, short sleeved and loose fitting, comfortable worn slacks and light brown boots. I would laugh to myself thinking Jack must have a dozen of those outfits hanging up in his closet. He was originally from Connecticut but had this world traveler persona about him, speaking several languages and being well versed in different cultures. He was an honest man, very intelligent, well rounded and loved to talk about the people he met and places he had seen traveling throughout the U.S. and Mexico. Jack was an accomplished photographer and was encouraging when it came to the importance of school and education. Jack could play several instruments but was best on the guitar. He could play anything, any style, any riff, any song, and coming from a family of musicians he fit right in. When I was a kid, our house was like the center of the universe and friends and family were always around and Jack was a key character in our carousel of familiar faces. At the time, my father and I and anyone else we could wrangle up, would spend hours jamming on our classical and acoustic guitars. We played all genres, from The Beatles to Jose Feliciano, Country to Disco and everything in between. The only thing that came close to playing music in our family was telling stories.

Now you must understand, telling stories in our family isn’t like telling stories in your family. This is sacred, this is an art form, and for the most part, the stories are true. Our family considered ourselves master story tellers, and I must stress, this is not because of the fantasies we were able to create but because of the situations and adventures we found ourselves in. Jack held his own when it came to telling stories and he had this ability to tell very big stories quickly, painting a pretty good picture without too much detail. So naturally we are always excited to hear about one of Jack’s adventures but when he showed up to our house in the winter of 1997, he had a different kind of story.  

That winter, Jack arrived suddenly as most family friends seemed to do. No phone call or letter, just a knock at the door and a smile, waiting to be invited in. Jack said he was just passing through, but no one leaves our house that easy. A big meal was prepared, music blasting through our home stereo and the guitars brought out to play along. After dinner, we spent a couple hours running through standards on the guitar and talking about the glory days of music and film. The music slowly faded, and my parents went upstairs to bed. Jack started prepping the downstairs couch for a good night’s rest when a batch of photos fell out of his large duffel bag.  I went to help gather the pictures when one caught my eye. It was the photo of a large barn in the middle of a field with a crudely painted haunted house façade. There wasn’t anything particularly interesting in the photo but with each new scan I caught something new. I thought I was only looking at the picture for a second, but it was long enough for Jack to stand there and stare at me. He nodded like he knew what he had to do and then he sat down on the couch and started telling me about the hills outside of Panuco, Veracruz and the small town of Tamante. 

Life was good in Tamante, Veracruz. I was the towns photographer and print shop, something they didn’t have before I arrived. Up until that point, the locals would have to travel 23 minutes by car or 2hrs on foot to get any professional photos done or prints made. The thing is, most people don’t have cars in Tamante, Veracruz so choosing between a 2hr walk and “Adelante Photography and Prints” was an easy choice. Now even though the demand for professional photos and prints wasn’t too high, the cost of living is so low that I had it made. Me there in Tamante, playing music, taking photos, being creative all the time and just spending most of my day enjoying life and what I do and then everything fell apart. 

This all starts back in November of 91’. 

These teenagers are driving to this corn maze around midnight, in west Texas, a little, tiny, 10-acre town called Lobo. It’s abandoned now, a ghost town, but I’ve been told it wasn’t much different at the time. It had one gas station and a diner and maybe a post office. Anyway, this corn maze was a Halloween attraction, but it’s November so the maze is closed and deserted but just a month before it was a pretty big deal with long lines of people ready to outrun monsters and zombies through the corn stalks. Well, this car full of kids are flying down this little road that runs parallel to the maze and I guess they were going to try and sneak into this place and to play around late at night. It’s late and it’s dark and there isn’t anything out on this road and the kids aren’t paying attention, maybe drinking or smoking and listening to music and fooling around and bam…they hit something. It turns out that the something they hit was a 23-year-old girl who had been missing for weeks and she was trying to escape from the people who ran the maze. They had kidnapped her and kept her in the basement of one of the homes near the cornfield. Three weeks prior, she had visited the maze with some friends but never came out at the end. No one thought too much of it at the time because the girl never really wanted to go, and she had gotten into a fight with her friend, and she kept talking about leaving and she had come in her own car so when her friends came out at the end and her car was gone, they just figured she got out first and had left. She wasn’t from around there; she lived in Dallas which is hours away so when she went missing no one knew she was gone for weeks.  

So, this girl had been tortured and beaten and abused and was tied to these anchors in the floor of the basement and somehow, she got out but was being chased by these people and she was running towards the car full of kids when they hit her. 

Well then, these kids slam on the brakes, and they are freaking out and there’s blood on the hood and windshield and everyone’s screaming, and they get out of the car and think they see someone in the road, and she looks dead, so they go try and help her and before they know it, they are surrounded by the people she was running from. It’s dark and they can’t see anything but on both sides of the road, hiding in the corn stalks, dressed in Halloween costumes stood this group, watching these kids. In an instant they swarmed the teens, overcoming them, and disappeared into the tall thick field of corn stalk. 

One of these teens lived nearby and one of them had told their brother or sister or somebody where they were going. Another kid had a father who worked for the state and the next day every cop within three counties was at that corn maze, guns drawn and kicking down the door, but they didn’t find the kids. They didn’t find anyone. 

Fast forward to October of 94’ and there’s this amateur reporter, this twenty something year old kid named Daniel who was working for his college newspaper, and he decides to cover this traveling haunted house that is set up outside of his hometown of Edinburg, Texas. It’s a cool concept that this haunted house would travel like a circus, to different towns each year and set up shop in an abandoned home within the town or right outside of it. I don’t know how they got permission or any of that, but this made the whole haunted house experience that much scarier, knowing this house is really abandoned. That year they picked this old two-story home and called it “The House on Elmendorf” since the location was the small, abandoned neighborhood of “Elmendorf Views” outside of Edinburg. 

Anyway, this guy Daniel goes with his girlfriend and they’re at the house waiting to get inside. It’s Halloween night, it’s almost closing time and they are the very last couple to be let in. They are given some snacks and drinks while they wait, a “thank you for your patience” type thing. They finally get inside, and they get separated. Now you have to picture what the set-up is like inside of this place. There are at least a dozen people working to try and scare you, wearing masks and wielding machetes and chainsaws and flashing lights and sounds blaring so loud they distract and disorient you and you start to lose your ability to focus and make sense of what’s happening.  

Daniel is trying to find his girlfriend and stumbling through this house and he goes into a room where he sees these two young people tied up and screaming for help but he thinks it’s part of the show so he moves on and he goes into another room where he sees this person bound and gagged and they look dead, slouched in the corner and now Daniel’s heart’s racing but again he thinks it’s part of the show and he moves on still trying to find his girlfriend but now he’s also trying to find a way out. This goes on for what feels like forever, and Daniel’s head is spinning, and his vision is blurred, and he keeps going into room after room of people begging for help, and the entire house randomly goes pitch black, and there’s music so loud his ears are ringing, and he’s just broken and trapped inside. Daniel’s blacked out several times and he’s exhausted but finally somehow, he finds a hallway that leads to a door, and he makes his way outside. He knew he had been inside for a while, maybe hours but he had no idea he had been inside for days. He didn’t know this when he exited but he found out after the 45-minute walk back into town. Daniel had traces of a drug in his system, something that caused temporary paralysis and disorientation. Well Daniel’s a pretty strait-laced kid, he didn’t do drugs or drink and he and his girlfriend hadn’t been seen for a few days, so the sheriff believed his story about being trapped and they went back to the “House on Elmendorf” with two more officers and his girlfriend’s parents. They get inside and it’s dusty with spiderwebs and they can see the path of where people walked when they were moving through the haunted house and everything looks how you would expect it to but then they find these two rooms built within the house, kind of a room within a room type thing. They essentially have to break into these rooms and when they do they find the space where Daniel was. There’s blood and straps and anchors on the floor and blind folds and real tools and weapons, not props. They search the house, but they never find Daniel’s girlfriend or the people that ran the place or any of the kids that were screaming for help. 

A few months ago, I’m in Tamante working in my shop and a woman comes in asking me to make posters for a haunted house they are putting on outside of town in an abandoned barn. It isn’t the strangest thing I’ve been asked to print but she wasn’t a local and no one had ever put on a haunted house around there so that was different, but I did what she wanted and that was that. A few days later, I end up going to where the haunted house was with some friends, not to go inside but just to hang out. There was live music and food, and it was more of a fiesta than anything scary. I have my camera like I always do and there’s a whole bunch of people dressed up, all having a good time and there’s workers from the haunted house all wearing these black cloaks and red masks, giving off “cult” vibes and people on stilts and fire breathers, all trying to get people to pay to go inside and some did, and some didn’t and that was it. And then there was this guy, who came out of nowhere who was pushing through the crowd towards the front doors of the haunted house. He was dressed in all black and had this green backpack and he caught my attention, so I started taking pictures of him. He made his way to the front doors, and I see that woman who I had made the flyers for, and he takes out this knife and stabs her in the stomach in front of everyone. This woman let’s out a shriek as the knife is driven into her belly and this guy is immediately bum rushed by workers from the haunted house and the woman is carried inside the barn and the workers throw this huge burlap sack over this guy as he kicks and screams, and they drag him inside and without missing a beat one of these cloaked figures on stilts announces that this was all part of the show. Most people are so drunk they don’t know what happened and others aren’t paying attention and the few that did see everything start clapping and I didn’t know what to do but keep taking pictures. 

I found out later that the man with the green backpack was Daniel and he had been tracking these people from Edinberg, Texas to Tamante, Veracruz. He was never seen or heard from again. 

Jack got up and headed towards the bathroom and I just sat there, trying to process his story. I started flipping through the pictures in my hand and each one confirmed that night outside of Tamante. I saw the crowd, the people in black cloaks and red masks, Daniel and his green backpack and the burlap sack being dragged inside the old barn. I was shuffling through the photos when I noticed a sliver of green cloth inside of Jack’s duffle bag. I flipped back through the photos and found the picture of Daniel and the green backpack. I slowly opened Jack’s duffel bag and pulled on the worn green cloth revealing a tattered and torn green backpack. Why would Jack have this? Maybe he picked it up after they grabbed Daniel? That must be it. Crazy Jack and his adventures. The only way to be sure was to look at the last photo, the one where Daniel was being carried away in the burlap sack into the barn, you could see the ground in that picture and I’m sure his bag was on the floor and that’s where Jack got it. It had to be. I started flipping through the photos trying to find the right one, but Jack was coming back now, and I had to stuff the green bag back into his duffel bag before he saw that I had pulled it out. I managed to stuff it back in just as Jack came into view. I told him goodnight and went up to my room. 

I didn’t get much sleep that night, but I must’ve dozed off for a minute around sunrise because when I ran downstairs Jack was gone. I asked my parents and they said he had left before anyone woke up. I went back upstairs to my bedroom but was stopped in my doorway, frozen by what I saw hanging over my bed. Thumbtacked into the old wooden headboard, right above my pillow, was a 4x6 print. At first, I was unable to approach, I don’t think I wanted to know the truth but finally I felt myself floating towards it. I pulled the photo off my headboard and scanned the picture, searching every inch of it for that green backpack.

Everything we never knew was there, in a 4x6 print of a barn outside of Tamante, Veracruz, where a man was being carried away in a burlap sack by figures in cloaks and nothing at his feet.