"Real" Haunted House



 

^{The chimney standing out of the remains of the Chambers house.}

Chambers Road in Walton, Kentucky, is a long stretch of road lined by an odd mix of both subdivisions and farms, only scary if your fears include lots of grass and the occasional child. However, the road is said to have a very dark past, complete with it's very own haunted house. The Chambers Road House isn't haunted like Land Of Illusion or U.S.S Nightmare with people in costumes and fake saws to scare your girlfriend into huddling up close to you like in a horror movie. In fact, most people have no idea what is said to have happened in the house, or about the cold case murder than happened right on the street in front of it.

View of the still-standing house on Google Maps, Aug 2007

 

   




















If you're not looking for the house as you drive down the winding road, you'll miss it. That's because right now it's less of a house and more of a hole in the ground with a chimney standing out eerily right in the middle. it sits right on what was 481 Chamber's Road, although there's no marking as to the address.  It's obscured by tall but thin trees and grass from the gravel drive way. The house wasn't always this way, and on Google Maps you can see the way the house was nine years ago, still standing empty. It looks like something out of a horror movie, a small white house with a brown, red roof and dark windows. Rumors say the house burned down, but there's no mention of a fire in any news paper articles and it doesn't look burnt. It was probably just collapsed from age and lack of care, or torn down by who ever owns the land, tired of being bothered by ghost hunting teenagers. The barn is barely visible behind the overgrowth, and both buildings are sitting on a large plot of land - mostly dead grass with a few visible trees. of course, when you take into account the photo was probably taken some time in the autumn, its a bit less eerie and more natural. Joshua Smith, who has visited the house on three occasions but only been inside once, said, "The house doesn't feel haunted. There's no such things as ghosts."

The barn of the chamber's road house

Depending on who you ask, the Chamber's House story can take a few different turns. In the most popular version, a man came home from World War Two to his little Kentucky home, complete with his wife and his three daughters. His wife and his daughters were not excited about his return - because either they had been living with a different man, or because he was an abusive alcoholic (again, depending on the story) - and made a plan to leave in the night. The father, rather than lose his family, decided to kill them. He shot two of the daughters in their bedroom, and the wife and his third daughter downstairs, before hanging himself in the bar. In other versions, he kills them one by one in the barn, and one of the daughters escapes, and is then caught and killed in the tunnel under I-71. However, no amount of searching can turn anything up abut a murder in the house. While the story is interesting, and a fun way to scare your friends, there is no police report or even a newspaper article to verify the story. It's nothing more than an urban legend.

The tunnel under I-71, where one of the daughters was rumored to have been killed.

The lack of murders inside the house doesn't necessarily mean that it's not haunted. According to Kentucky State Police, the remains of a Dixie Heights High School Student were found on the road. The student's name was never released, but the remains were found in 1976, forty years ago. The case went cold, the murderer was never found. "I feel like it has something to do with the person who killed his family. It will never get solved," Josh said. That's probably true enough, the case is 40 years old and has mostly been forgotten. Whether or not it has anything to do with the last residents of the house, though, is debatable. The rumor carries that the house was abandoned in the late 80's, nearly ten years later.

All that's left standing of the house - the basement walls and the chimney

 






















  It's safe to say no one was murdered in the Chamber's house, despite pictures and blog articles claiming to have seen blood in the kid's room, bullet holes, and angry ghosts. At the best, it's people trying to scare their friends. People like to be scared, we devote holidays to it and no place is more suited for a myth about the wrongful death of bitter ghosts than an abandoned house. Slap on some red paint and you have a believable ghost story, it no one bothers to fact check it. Cincinnati has hundreds of haunted attractions, both real places with real murders - like Bobby Mackey's Music World - and totally made up attractions like Land Of Illusion. But if Cincinnati is already crawling with ghosts, why lie about a new one? "To scare their friends, and have fun," was Josh's answer, "The adrenaline rush is kinda cool. You might find something in a real haunted house instead of a fake one."

Katrina Campbell, Junior