They call it the Martin House, and it's easily the most haunted place in town.
During the day, it’s a beautiful two-story estate in the Millville area. It sits behind a high gate overlooking the bay on ten acres (which comes at a high price given land costs inside Panama City). The current owner keeps up the grounds and maintains the home, but they say he will not live in the house or be there after dark. He rents it out for parties and events, lets people picnic on the grounds, and opens it during the day for tours and historical outings, but an hour before sunset, the gates are locked and the place is cleared of people.
It’s a beautiful place, but they say that the devil walks there after dark.
The local legend says that Mr. Martin suspected that his wife was having an illicit affair with a servant. They say that in a fit of jealousy, he made her watch as he hung him, later hanging his wife, his kids, and himself from the same large tree in their front yard. They say you can hear voices, screams, and all kinds of odd noises there after dark. They say that people have seen figures in the windows and on the grounds near sunset with black eyes and pale faces. They say that you can see lights come on and off in the house after dark, and it is best avoided once the sun goes down.
They say a lot of things, but as a writer of dark fiction, I don’t put a lot of stock in local legend.
I don’t believe in Billy Bowlegs, I don’t believe in Kissing Mary, and I don’t believe in the hitchhikers they say can be picked up by West Bay Bridge.
The Martin House, however, is something I do believe in, because when I was young, I experienced it firsthand.
It was nineteen ninety-three or ninety-four when it happened and I was about seven or eight.
My mother had worked at the same hospital for years, and that hospital had chosen to do their employee appreciation picnic on the grounds of the Martin House. I have to believe they were aware of the dark history of the place, but, as I said, nothing had ever happened during the day, so they weren't worried. The yard was huge, and the human resource department, set up games and tents, and all kinds of things to entertain the kids while their parents socialized.
I fell in with a couple of the kids that I knew, and we played some games and explored the booths, but ultimately got a little bored with the scheduled event.
These were kids that I didn't know well, but we all knew each other in that way that you know someone after spending years upon years going to these sorts of scheduled events with them. One of them was the son of my mom‘s friend. Another one was a kid I actually went to school with, but didn’t really pal around with outside of things like this. Another one was just a kid who would wander up and fall back in with us when we were all together. There were about seven of us that day, and I can’t remember who suggested that we should play hide and seek.
It was unanimously agreed upon, but after playing out on the lawn for a few rounds, it became a little boring. When someone suggested that we could play in the house, that sounded like a much better idea. So we went inside, but quickly discovered the problem was playing indoors. The house was kind of a museum, and adults don’t usually like it when kids are running around things that could get broken. We tried for a couple of rounds, but after being yelled out by a lady in a dress, we thought we might have to go back outside.
That was when we saw the kid on the stairs.
As I said, none of us really knew each other, but none of us had ever seen this kid. He was youngish, probably about five or six, and he didn’t really say anything. He just sort of stared at us through the slats on the staircase, and I’ll remember the way he looked at us for my entire life. He seemed both fascinated by our appearance and utterly terrified at our game. He looked the way I looked at the dog sometimes when he was making noise while my dad was trying to nap.
He looks like he thought we might wake up a parent that would be angry.
Someone suggested that maybe we could go play upstairs, and we all thought that might be a good idea. The upstairs was usually blocked off, but if that kid was up there, then the door must be unlocked. None of us ever went upstairs, it was locked, but we found the door was open so we all went up. The upstairs was about the same size as the downstairs, but we saw a ladder going up into the attic and thought that would make the best place for hide and seek. It would be dark out there, probably with stuff to hide behind, and it would be spooky.
What we found was a pretty big attic with boxes and furniture covered in sheets. It was dusty and cobwebby, and reminded me of the opening of one of my favorite shows, Are You Afraid of the Dark? We decided who was going to be it, and then we all went to hide. It was dusty in the attic, and a few of us got found right away when we started sneezing. I expected that we might see the kid we had seen earlier, but there was never any sign of him. I didn’t think much about it. Kids rarely question things that don’t come from adults, and, as we played, the volume of our game became louder and louder. We began to scream with joy every time someone was found, and some of them had taken to scaring each other instead of just playing, hide and seek. I’m sure that some of the people from downstairs could hear us, but given that we were two floors up, they might have mistaken it for just regular noise.
I was hiding behind a vanity near the back of the attic, peeking out from around the edge of the sheet, when I heard a little voice in my ear that scared the crap out of me.
It scared me because up until then, I had been the only person hiding behind the vanity.
“You guys shouldn’t be here. You’re gonna wake up Daddy, and he’ll be mad.”
I turned, and there he was. He was crouched down behind the vanity, looking at me, with these big, sad, scared eyes, and now that I was closer, I could see that he was dressed in suspenders and a grubby, looking white undershirt. His feet were bare, and his hair looked like somebody had cut it with a bowl. I asked him who he was, but he shook his head and put a finger to his lips as he made a shushing sound.
“You’re gonna wake Daddy up, and he’s gonna be mad.”
I started to ask him who he was talking about, when all of a sudden, we heard loud footsteps coming up the ladder. Someone was yelling, but it wasn’t regular yelling. Usually, when my dad yelled, there were swear words in it or some kind of direction. This yelling was just incoherent babbling, like an angry beehive, or the car when it needs an oil change. It was angry, and it was loud, but there really wasn’t any substance to it.
The game quieted down as we all became the hiders. We knew that we shouldn’t be here, we all knew that if we were found we’d be in trouble, so we all took to hiding as someone came very angrily up the ladder to the attic. I could see the others as they hunkered around the other covered pieces of furniture and storage boxes. They all look scared, but they also looked excited. This was a different level to the game. This was something a little scarier. We all knew that this was the real game, and we had to win or we might never be allowed to come to one of these again.
Through the white oiling up out of the square hole, came a large something. It was man-shaped, but maybe not a person. It had arms and legs, I could see ahead, but the rest of it seem to be just shadows. It was like someone standing in total darkness, and I think even then I suspected that this was no museum curator coming after noisy children. The hairs on the back of my neck began to stand up, and as the things started looking for us, I turned and found a little boy was gone. The other kids seem to of felt it too, and as the thing moved towards the left side of the attic, we all started shuffling to the right. It knocked over a box and kept yelling in that strange, barely coherent way. It did not seem unfamiliar with the attic, and I wondered if it was us that it was looking for, or if it was the little boy who had been a stranger to me.
Either way, we made our way back to the ladder and started quietly going down to the second floor. We were almost all down when the thing turned and looked at the two or three of us that were left. He didn’t have eyes, at least none that I could see, but I felt very seen by it and the last of us went down in a herky-jerky pile of bodies. We ran back to the staircase, and that’s when someone else found us.
We burst through the door that lead out onto the stairwell and almost knocked over a lady with a tour guide name badge. She blinked at us and did not seem at all happy to see seven or eight kids coming out of a restricted area. She asked what we thought we were doing in there, and we told her we thought it was open. She said no, the door was always locked, and told us we better get out of there before we got in trouble. When she asked how many of us there were, that’s when we seem to disagree.
Some of us said there were seven, but a few of us insisted there were eight.
“No, there was only seven of us. Remember, that’s why we didn’t play Capture the Flag.”
“Yeah, but then that other kid joined us, so we had eight.”
“What other kid? There’s only ever been seven of us.”
“The kid in the suspenders. He was playing in the attic with us.”
At that point, the lady was completely frazzled. She collected up all of us and brought us downstairs to have a talk with our parents. In the meantime, she had a few other people search the second floor and the attic for a missing kid. Most of our parents were not terribly pleased about being drug away from the festivities because their kids couldn’t behave, and we got an earful of it as we stood in the foyer of the Martin House. Some of us, me included, were more worried about the missing kid and getting in trouble. I can’t speak for everyone, but I had seen how scared he was. I don’t know who he was afraid of, but I was afraid that whatever that thing up there was, it had got him.
As my dad let me have it for acting out, my eyes started to wonder. I was looking at the pictures on the wall, the ones showing the Martin House through the years, before they finally settled on a very familiar face. The kid looked less scared and more confused, but it was definitely him standing on the front lawn with two other kids and his parents. The house behind him looked a little different, but it was definitely the one we were standing in right now.
“That’s him,” I said, interrupting my dad in the middle of his lecture.
“Who him?” my dad asked not appreciating being interrupted.
“That’s the kid. The one I saw in the attic.”
The lady who had found us looked over at the picture before shaking her head, and telling me not to tell lies.
“No really, that’s him. He was hiding with us and told me that we were going to wake his Daddy up. He looked really scared.”
My parents didn’t believe me, but I’ve seen that picture since and I know now that little boy is one of the Martin’s brood. He was one of the kids who allegedly hung from the tree in the front yard, and I would’ve bet you anything that what I had seen was his spirit. The big shadowy thing didn’t look at all like Mr. Martin, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The kid didn’t have black eyes like all the stories either, but maybe that’s something that comes a little later?
I’ve encountered a lot of strange things in my life, but that was one of my earliest scrapes with the paranormal.
As of writing this, the Martin House still sits in it same spot. They have completely closed off the inside these days, and after that year, the hospital started doing their employee appreciation somewhere else. I don’t know if it was the house itself, or because they got a better deal somewhere else, but I never went back to the Martin House again.
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