The Dead Body in the Attic
by Nick Manfredo

Until I was about ten, we generally changed locations every year or two—or however long it took to get behind in rent and get evicted. We had lived in a succession of church subsidized housing, relatives spare rooms and “welfare barns” for as long as I had been alive. But now, we would be moving into our own house. My parents had worked out a deal by which they’d purchase the home my father was born in. His parents had owned it since WWII and were leaving Pittsburgh to retire to Florida.

The selling price was $11,000. Not much money, even for those days, the late 1960s. Still it was a stretch for a budget mostly governed by short periods of small-paying labor and longer periods of illegal income from petty theft, subsidized by welfare.

On the day we moved in, my aunt, who grew up in the house and was only four years older than I, took it upon herself to give me a tour and tell me the “secret history” of the house.

“Whatever you do, don’t go up to the attic,” my aunt said. “But if you have to, don’t go near the closet in the room in the back. That’s where Mrs. Ward buried the body of her husband after she killed him. He’s plastered into the wall. You can still see his back sticking out through the plaster. She murdered him in the bedroom on the second floor, then dragged his body up the stairs. You can still see the marks from where his work boots dragged against the wall, and if water gets into the space between the wall and the stair, some of his blood is still caught in there and it will leak out. Late at night, you can hear him scratching on the wall from inside the closet.”

The more afraid I got, the more detailed and gory her story got. The details included how and why Mrs. Ward had murdered her husband, and what the damage to his body was (which was considerable, despite being inflicted by an eighty-year-old woman).

She told of how her older brother had gone up there years ago and was so shocked and unnerved by the “evil presence” that he told her the whole story and made her promise to never go up there. A promise she was delighted to keep. She had never been in the attic in the whole time she lived there.

When we moved in, my father, with his typical cruel sense of humor, used the same story as a threat. If you were bad or made noise when he was trying to sleep, he’d threaten to put you in the closet with the dead body overnight.

It was a potent threat. My sisters and I avoided the attic at all costs. My room was right at the base of the stairs leading to the attic. I heard the noises. I could hear Mr. Ward trying to claw his way out of the wall. I was scared...but not quite scared enough. Within a year I was telling the story to my friend, Timmy. We were alone in the house and decided to go up to the attic together and check it out.

We searched for the scuff marks on the stairs. We thought we could see them. They were old and worn, but we knew what they were. We q-tipped the cracks for blood. It didn’t look like blood. It looked like dirt. But surely, after years and years, the dirt and the blood had mixed together, and that’s what was on the q-tip.

We got up to the attic. The room in the back had a big old bed with rusty springs and a hole in the mattress. The closet, a huge walk-in, loomed. We opened the door. There was a big plastered-over spot on one wall. It bulged. His back—maybe.

We found a bag in there. It was full of 1950s black and white porn magazines. There was also a big dusty jug of some kind of booze. We tried it. And then we tried it again.

Under the mattress in the room we found old boxes of condoms.

We came to the conclusion that Mr. Ward must have been a pervert, and that’s why Mrs. Ward killed him. Either that, or my aunt’s brother had told her the story to keep her from finding his porn and condoms and booze.

When we came back downstairs, my sisters had gotten home from school.

“Oh my god, did you go into the attic? Oh my god, did you see him? Is it true?”

“Yeah, it was horrible!” I said. “It was the scariest thing I ever saw. His back is sticking out of the wall and covered in blood. And it moved when we saw it. Don’t ever go up there. It’s too terrifying!”

Nick’s story “The Greatest” appears in Dammit, I Learned a Lot from That Son-of-a-Gun. Click here to learn more about Nick.