A Nightmare in Detroit

William Adams rubbed the sleep from his eyes and clambered out of bed. His wife was just waking up alone in their room, for he had been working the midnight shift at the local Cadillac plant and hadn't wanted to wake her up. Instead of venturing into his usual spot in their bed, he had instead elected to spend the night in the quiet back bedroom of the house - which was a small, out-of-the-way room only big enough for a bed and a built-in closet in one of the corners. There was nothing outwardly foreboding about it, and yet the children and the dog had instinctively avoided it. The Adams family had ignored this. Treading across the cold floor of the grey frame house's bedroom, he approached the door. He turned the handle and opened it out into the darkness - and immediately felt hot terror surge up through his body. It fell out onto the floor before he could quite comprehend what it was, but once he'd been looking at it for more than a few seconds he felt sick. Blood and viscera oozed from its mangled flesh. The empty eyes of a mutilated corpse stared up at him from the floor.

## The Martin Street Haunting

William sat bolt upright in his bed, the image of the mutilated corpse still fresh in his mind - and an unending scream of pure terror forcing its way out of his mouth as he woke with a start. He would sit there, unable to do anything but scream, until his throat was raw. His wife, Lillian, rushed into the room to comfort him, but it would take a while before he crammed his hysterical mind back into a rational frame. Unsurprisingly, none of this was even remotely what the Adams family (no relation to the famous co-owners of that name) had had in mind when they had moved onto Martin Street in Detroit, Michigan. The house was a nice little grey frame house, and for the most part it was a restful abode for the budding family - with five children and a dog - but there was one room which had quickly become the bane of William's existence. The back bedroom seemed to be intangibly foul somehow. The children and the dog would instinctively avoid it, and every time he had to sleep in it he would be plagued with unearthly nightmares. There was nothing wrong with the physical appearance of the tiny room, but yet the nightmares still persisted.

William eventually talked to the *Detroit Free Press* about his family's experiences in that horrid house, and started his story by explaining that he still sometimes has trouble sleeping during the daytime even after years of working the midnight shift at the Detroit Cadillac plant. Not long after they had moved into the house and William had taken up sleeping in the back bedroom when he returned from the night shift, he had started to notice the strange effect the room had on him. He would have the '*most horrible nightmares you can imagine*'. He would wake up and find himself limp with fear and screaming until his throat was sore. Eventually he lost so much sleep to the harrowing phenomenon that he told his wife that he feared he would need to see a psychiatrist - but his mind perhaps turned to needing an exorcist as opposed to a therapist when he resumed sleeping in the master bedroom and found that the nightmares promptly ceased. Still, the Adams assumed that this was probably personal to William as opposed to anything actually dwelling in the room.

However, this would be proven wrong in August of 1962 when William's grandmother came from Georgia to visit them. She was given the back room during her stay - and the next morning, a dire realisation started to take shape in the minds of the Adams family. She looked pale and shaken when she came to the breakfast table that morning, and said that there were '*terrible sounds*' in the room - and that she would be refusing to sleep in the room from then onwards after having been kept awake all night by sounds like someone trying to break in. Grandmother Adams was so traumatised by her experience that she cut her visit short and returned to Georgia early. This was the first time that the Adams family realised that there was something seriously wrong with that room. Once they started coming to accept this - they began to give more weight to some earlier occurrences which they had previously ignored. Eight-year-old Jimmy, six-year-old Deborah, five-year-old Johnny, two-year-old Laurie and the Tammy the baby would avoid the room when they were playing around the house, and the dog (a small terrier) would consistently refuse to enter it.

An old family friend from Georgia, Shirley Patterson, arrived at the house to spend a few days with the Adams on October 27th - passing through Detroit before driving his new car back to Decatur. He was held to be a practical, no-nonsense man by the Adams family, and so they decided to have him spend a night in the back bedroom to test if there was any sort of bias contributing to its strange properties. If he could spend a night in that room without suffering at the hands of whatever was lurking in the space then it would prove that the phenomenon had merely been a mix of their imaginations and odd coincidence. They decided to let Patterson go in blind, so to speak, by electing not to tell him anything about their unpleasant experiences in the room. He later said that he was only in the bed for a few minutes - perhaps not even asleep - when something strange happened. He had been facing the wall, and he felt something turn him over. He couldn't describe this feeling - all he knew was that it had turned him over and he could see someone stood just outside the doorway. It was a woman - and at first he thought it to be Lillian. Despite his rational mind, he started to shake with fear. The figure was facing away from him, seemingly looking out into the kitchen. It had long hair and a short fur coat over a blue dress. Coming to the sharp realisation that the woman he was looking at was not Lillian - and perhaps not even human - he screamed as loudly as he could and ran towards her. Just as he was approaching her, every single light in the house blinked out.

Staggering around in the darkness for a moment until the lights came back on, he encountered Lillian in the kitchen. The mysterious woman in the blue dress was nowhere to be seen. William had previously left for his midnight shift at the plant. Just as Patterson started to explain what he had seen, he was cut off by a truly awful noise echoing out through the house. It was a harrowing sound, like the mournful scream of something half-human and half-animal. Both listeners were left literally speechless with terror - and Lillian would later admit that it was like nothing she'd ever heard before. Shortly after the screaming had ceased, a terrible smell started emanating from the room. It was strong enough to make both Patterson and Lillian sick. As if to bring the chorus of terror to a ghastly crescendo, a heavy trapdoor in the utility room of the house opened itself and rose several inches before slamming back into place. There was a set of rickety old stairs leading into a partially dugout basement below the trapdoor. The witnesses stood there, paralysed with fear. When they finally brought themselves out of their terrified stupor they figured that the best course of action would be to call the police.

Officers had arrived at the house within minutes, and they searched it from top to bottom - trawling their way through the attic and the incomplete basement in search of an explanation for the bizarre phenomena which had been plaguing the family. They would ultimately admit defeat, however, and resign themselves to the fact that there was no rational explanation for the unearthly moaning, the sickening stench or the terrifying apparition. When William got home on the morning of Sunday the 28th, Patterson and Lillian both did their best to explain what had transpired that night. William was shocked by what he heard, but refused to accept that his house was haunted until he had experienced it for himself. He had been in the Army, and considered himself a rational man.

It was 7:30PM on Sunday night when William lay down on the bed in the back bedroom. He had set himself an ultimatum - he would either conquer whatever it was that was occupying the room or he would admit defeat and abandon the room (and the entire house) to the entity that seemingly lurked within. He laid there in the solitude for quite a while when he heard movement. He had left Patterson and Lillian sitting in the front room with a small table lamp as their only light - presumably under the belief that darkness was more conducive to unexplained activity - but he assumed that the movement must've been Lillian. He sharply whispered out to her - asking her to leave the room so that the entity would be more inclined to reveal itself to him. However, he got no response. The sound of movement had also stopped, but he could still sense a presence in the room with him.

## The Old Hag Syndrome

Turning over in the bed, his stomach lurched when he found a hideous face just inches away from him. He would later describe it as the '*most horrible thing*' he had ever seen. Its eyes stared out through him, and although the mouth moved as if to talk the only thing that emerged was a ghastly hissing sound and a foul stench.

Immediately going into a state of hysterical panic, William leapt out of the bed, screaming wildly and tearing chunks of his hair out in uncontrollable terror. He ran into the kitchen, and Patterson tried to hold him down - but William flailed against him like a cornered animal. His wife and friend eventually had to throw a blanket over him and wrestle him to the floor in order for him to gain back his senses. The same sickening miasma as had been smelt the night before drifted once again throughout the house.

Only an hour after William had told his story, the Adams family had vacated the premises. They had grabbed their sleeping children from their beds and fled out into the street to go and stay overnight with neighbours. The next morning, they were with William's parents in Dearborn - a Detroit suburb. The only thing that William could think of that morning was how he would've likely ended up killing himself slamming against that door if it had been closed the night before. Eventually, the Adams found another house with the help of friends - and retrieved their property from the Martin Street house through a series of daylight visits. They would never return to the cursed property.

One final chapter in the story of the Martin Street Hell-House would play out when Leo Sanocki and his sister Virginia would arrive at the house one night in an attempt to verify the story told by William and Lillian. Leo announced that he would spend ten minutes lying down in the dark in the back bedroom, leaving his sister to stand out in the kitchen. Only a few minutes later, Virginia heard an '*awful groan*' coming from the room just before Leo rushed into the kitchen - his face a portrait of absolute panic. He refused to disclose what he had seen. The landlady would later refuse to allow paranormal investigators into the house with any electrical equipment, and so the mystery of the Martin Street Hell-House shall seemingly remain unsolved.

## Source

'The Awful Thing in the Attic' by Brad Steiger