When I purchased the old Shepard Place—one hundred sixty acres in northern Nebraska—I felt as if I’d stepped back in time. In 1925, Old Man Shepard ordered a house kit from the Sears & Roebuck catalog. It came by rail, arriving at the depot in town, about twenty-five miles away. Mr. Shepard and his brother made several trips by horse and wagon to retrieve all the pieces, and the last five miles along the bumpy river road took some real skill to navigate.
After Mr. Shepard finished putting the house together, he built a barn for his livestock and dug a six-by-eight-foot root cellar into the hillside behind his home. He and his wife lived there for the next thirty years, eking out a hardscrabble living in the sparsely populated Nebraska Sandhills.
That house had seen better days by the time I acquired the property in 1990. I bought it from a bank that had repossessed the place, which I considered to be barely habitable. A sign leaning against a big tree in the yard read, “Huck Hobbit Rentals.” I asked my neighbor, Roy, about that.
“A character named Hobbs lived at your place during most of the 1980s,” Roy said. “The best I can describe him is a hippie entrepreneur. He did odd jobs, rented out a few canoes to tourists, and he always come up with looney ideas to make a buck. He moved his family to Alaska when the bank kicked them out.” He shook his head and whirled his finger around his ear, pantomiming “crazy.”
The outbuildings were in worse shape than the house. Gaping holes in the barn roof allowed rain and snow in for years, and the root cellar had partially collapsed. Both structures gave me the creeps, so I avoided them.
One day, needing a break from working on the house, I decided to do a deep dive into the barn to see if Mr. Hobbs left behind anything interesting. I noticed that the roof remained intact over several of the stalls, which appeared to be crammed full of junk. I pulled on a pair of heavy work gloves and started exploring. The place didn’t feel so eerie with the afternoon sun pouring in through the roof and the openings left by missing wall planks.
The stall closest to the broken barn door overflowed with rusty iron. Rummaging through it, I discovered tractor parts, handle-less garden implements, wheel rims with broken spokes, and pieces from an old corn sheller. A wheelbarrow without the wheel peeked out from beneath a pile of rebar. Two dusty typewriters sat to one side, the carriage return lever missing on one, and the key bars in the type basket twisted into a knot on the other.
“Nothing useful here,” I muttered to myself as I turned my attention to the second stall.
It appeared to be full of discarded river outfitter gear. Planted atop a pile of torn life jackets, two broken paddles crossed over each other, as if to say, “X Marks the Spot” on a treasure map. With my foot, I nudged a few life vests aside to see what lay beneath them. A mouse startled me when it scurried out from under an aluminum canoe with a jagged hole in the hull. I guess I’m a little edgy after all, I thought.
I peered over into the next stall and gasped. A bloody arm protruded from a huge pile of deteriorating cardboard boxes and dirty rags. A cloud passed in front of the sun, dimming the daylight. I walked around to the stall door, and poked my head inside, straining to get a better view. I saw a bloody leg sticking out below the arm. I shivered. Jumbled thoughts raced through my mind. Should I take a closer look? Should I call 911?
My sense of reason returned when I realized that everything was too dusty for any recent violent disturbance. Nobody’s been in here for months, maybe years. If that was a genuine dead body, it would either stink by now or be reduced to a skeleton. Skin and wounds wouldn’t still be intact.
I crept into the stall, all senses on alert. I carefully moved some of the rags and then began digging deeper into the pile. Several complete, or nearly complete bodies emerged—all with elaborately painted “wounds” and “scars.” Some wore red-stained bandages wrapped around limbs or torsos. A couple of detached heads grinned at me. These are just mannequins, I thought. Why would someone go to all this work to make it look like carnage and mayhem?
A peal of thunder made me cringe, and I raced back to the house as it started to rain.
The next morning, I paid Roy another visit and told him about my gruesome discovery. His face broke into a huge grin. “Scared ya, didn’t it?”
“Not after I figured out they weren’t real,” I lied.
He chuckled. “Old Hobbs was into a bit of everything. For two or three Halloweens he created a big haunted house attraction. People came from all around and paid to see it. Every year it got wilder, and it drew bigger crowds.”
A week later, I pulled everything out of that stall and loaded it into my pickup. A dozen mannequins in various states of distress, boxes of moldy black and orange decorations, several torn, faded masks, and a big plastic witch’s cauldron filled the bed. I threw a tarp over the whole mess and hauled it to the dump.
I saw a handful of other people dropping their garbage at the landfill when I arrived. Several of them looked at me, first casually and then with rapt attention, as I backed in to unload. One little boy hopped up and down, pointing at me and pulling on his father’s shirt.
What are they looking at? I wondered.
I shut off the engine, got out of the cab, walked back to untie my load, and discovered the source of the stares. One of the straps holding the canvas came loose during the drive and one corner of it blew back, exposing a gruesome jumble of limbs and “bloody” bandages.
I untied the rest of the ropes and dropped the tailgate. A severed head fell out and bounced into the garbage pile. I jumped, in spite of myself. The little boy screamed. His father’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.
Suddenly feeling the need to rush, I emptied the pickup bed, stowed the tarp, and drove away, half surprised that nobody tried to stop me.
It took me months to get comfortable again about going to the dump.
S.G. (Sandy) Benson is a retired forester and journalist. She published My Mother’s Keeper: One Family’s Journey Through Dementia in 2021, and in 2024, Dear Folks: Letters Home 1943-1946 World War II, a collection of her father’s letters. Her short story, Rosebud Wacipi, won bronze in the 2024 North Carolina Senior Games/Literary Arts division, and an excerpt from My Mother’s Keeper garnered an honorable mention in the 2024 Northwind Writing Award. She is currently working on a memoir, “Girls Can’t Do That.”
Academy of the Heart And Mind 