I was driving past the War Memorial Auditorium and saw a sign for a Halloween “Village of Horrors.” Chuckling, I immediately called my younger brother to ask if he remembered when our sister lived in her own village of horrors.
Our sister is much older than we are and in the late-1960s she and her husband moved to a part of Fort Lauderdale that is currently trendy but back then it was just plain scary. With their first child on the way, they rented a crumbling, un-airconditioned bungalow that was shrouded by huge banyan trees but was within walking distance of the Piggly Wiggly.
The first time my brother and I we saw the house we were terrified. It was filthy and reeked of mildew and it had dark blotches on the terrazzo floor that looked like blood stains. The overgrown banyans kept the house in perpetual gloom and a colony of bats lived in the coconut trees out back. Rats inhabited the attic and the kitchen was so infested with cockroaches that my sister kept the lights on at night hoping that the light would keep the roaches hidden.
My younger brother and I, in elementary school, were frequent overnight guests since my sister babysat for us when our parents went out. We called the house “The Roach Retreat” and I can still remember sleepless nights watching the roaches climb the walls and listening to the rats scurrying in the attic. Looking back it seems incredible that the Roach Retreat was one of the nicer homes on the block, but it is perfectly believable that the residents of such a neighborhood were pretty scary in their own right.
Next door were the Masons who had 6 sons and a daughter in a three bedroom house. Mr. Mason had a pegboard on display in the carport with a variety of leather straps, belts and paddles. On Saturdays he would pull the name of one of his sons out of a hat , and spank him right in the carport for “all you did last week that I don’t know about.”
The neighbors on the other side were the Shaw’s, two ancient biddies who were raising Claudette, a little girl who dressed like a ballerina. No one knew where Claudette came from but people said that she was kept locked in a bedroom and that there were no knives or matches in the house. No one ever saw Claudette in the daytime, and she never went to school, but neighbors frequently woke up at night to find a ballerina staring silently into their bedroom windows.
Next door to Claudette was a hairy, unemployed plumber everyone called Uncle Nelson who spent his days catching lizards and burying them alive in a makeshift cemetery complete with miniature headstones. He eventually progressed to birds, and then cats, but then we never saw him again.
And then there was Shira who was in her sixties and looked like Dolly Parton’s mother. She had big hair and even bigger- well, you get the idea. Shira spent all day “working” in her front yard while wearing a leopard print singlet, black fishnet stockings and stilettos. She spent her days trolling for the young men and boys who lived or worked in the neighborhood and a trip to Shira’s was considered a neighborhood rite of passage.
Now, as my brother and I reminisced about ogres and witches, malevolent ballerinas and a reptilian Grim Reaper I mentioned that in that neighborhood every day was Halloween. Laughing, I said, “Remember Shira?”
My brother paused. “Shira was OK,” he said, “We had some good times.”