In my younger days, I used to explore nearby abandoned places with my cousins. There really wasn’t much for kids without spare cash to do in my hometown back then. When you’re too young to visit bars, sex shops, head shops, or strip joints and you don’t have money for shopping at the mall or watching a movie at the cinemas, the only options you have left are running around nearby parks LARPing, loitering at places where you really aren’t welcome, or sneaking into scary places you know you should probably avoid.
On very seldom occasions, I would continue exploring strange places in town well into adulthood, whenever my cousin Shutterbat could drag me or our other friends to some abandoned place he wanted to explore with safety in numbers.1 One fine Sunday just before we went to work, Shutterbat brought me to an abandoned house in affluent East Odessa that he had explored the previous Saturday evening with some mutual friends of ours.
The old Headlee house — formerly located just off the corner of East Loop 338 and State Highway 191 — didn’t seem very spooky from the outside. It appeared to be a stock standard 1950s middle class earth-tones ranch house whose interiors had been remodeled at some point in either the 1970s or 1980s.
Only the constant, annoying bleating of peacocks would tell you different.
The house was owned by Dr. Emmet Vincent Headlee, Odessa’s first practicing physician who moved here with his wife, nurse Marie Sprusil, in 1926, back when the town boasted only 450 residents. During the worst years of the Great Depression, Dr. Headlee and his wife Marie bought this parcel of land to house the many, many animals they accepted as payment from impoverished patients. He was, essentially, the West Texas Dr. Doolittle.
Of course, oil had been discovered just a few scant years before the Headlees arrived here, way back in 1921. If the Headlees had hoped to find peace and quiet in Odessa when they first moved into town, they would be quite disappointed by the massive population boom during the coming decades.
The Headlees later built their ranch-style house here in 1949. By that time, Dr. Headlee, his wife2, and their children had become much beloved pillars of a community whose population would rise to 80,338 souls by 1960.
One of the more peculiar types of animals the Headlee family collected at their lovely ranch home were peacocks. Someone in the Headlee family really loved these bright, colorful, aggravating birds, since the family practically hoarded them. By the time the long dormant old Headlee house was torn down sometime between 2005 and 2007, peacocks had overrun the place. They roamed the area in herds, and they were a stunning sight to behold.
As long as you didn’t have to listen to the damned things.
Peacocks have a very eerie vocalization that sounds like a human baby crying out in distress. Having one bird making those kinds of sounds at all hours of the day would be nightmare inducing; having multiple birds making noises like that would be maddening.3 Horror writers like Lovecraft, Bradbury, or King could’ve had a field day writing about such birds.
That was the situation faced by the congregants at the fairly well-to-do churches located nearby what had come to be known as “the Peacock House”. According to local legend whose veracity I cannot corroborate, some of the congregants at the churches located in immediate proximity to the then-abandoned Peacock House grew so weary of the sound of peacocks next door that they petitioned to have the then-empty old Headlee house torn down in the hopes that the peacocks would leave on their own.
According to that same legend, some locals — likely led by surviving members of the Headlee family — tried to have the Headlee house declared a town historic landmark, but that plan sadly fell through. Real estate developers moved in like starving vultures and the Headlee’s plot of land was developed into the Chimney Rock Shopping Center.4
Before the Headlee homestead became the Chimney Rock Shopping Center, however, there was still the little matter of tearing down the old house, which had been sitting just off East Loop 338 without permanent residents since the 1980s.
What awaited us inside the old Headlee house? That was what I was there with Shutterbat to find out that Sunday morning before work.5
The brief trek into the old house itself was uneventful but tense. Though my imagination filled the edifice with horrific terrors, what I actually saw inside the house was infinitely more bizarre than whatever my brain had come up with.
The first thing a visitor to this abandoned old edifice would notice is the massive wall-length picture window in the sand-colored living room to the right of the entrance hall.6 The word NYSTAGMA was scrawled onto the wall directly above the window, which lent the entire experience a strangely artsy vibe. Were the people who invaded this abandoned house after its residents had passed away occultists, urban artists trying to create a uniquely spooky experience, or just a bunch of bored 1980s teenagers who had seen way too many horror films? That’s a fantastic question that I still can’t answer to this day.
When I turned further to the right, three versions of me stared right back at me. An open air bathroom had three surprisingly clean mirrors set up at just the right angles so that the reflections were “looking” right at you the moment you entered the house. This didn’t seem to be something set up by the vandals that had transformed the old house into the “haunted house” experience it had become, but it still added an even creepier vibe to the already eerie living room area.
To the right of that bathroom was an unused hallway. Further right of that, set against the wall next to the entrance, stood a closet door with a dark hole punched into it. The words “LOOK IN HERE” were scrawled underneath in crayon alongside an arrow pointing up to the hole.
“F*ck that,” Shutterbat exclaimed, opening the closet door with his foot while keeping his camcorder at the ready.
We were immediately greeted by a scene of childhood horror. A teddy bear was hung from the closet ceiling with a jump rope, and several other dolls and stuffed animals were either beheaded or crucified onto the closet walls. Terrifying childlike drawings of the house covered the walls alongside the words “DADDY LEAVES ME IN HERE SOMETIMES.”
Having seen enough of the living room, we moved onward toward one of the principal bedrooms located in another hallway parallel to the living room entrance. I was immediately greeted by a large, semi-demonic face grinning in a sinister manner that had been drawn on the opposite wall. The floor had been carpeted, though it appeared that a massive portion of the center of the carpet had recently been cut away. Shutterbat informed me that the carpet had a cliche pentagram-in-a-circle design7 drawn onto it, but one of the people hired to tear down the house — devout Catholic Latinos (if the construction worker I met there later was any indication) — had removed it out of superstitious fear.
Several magazine- and newspaper-clipped images of local and national celebrities from the 1980s were nailed to the wall parallel to the living room with the nails placed in their eyes. Nearby, a prayer to the “Son of the Morning” was inscribed neatly in a rectangular portion of the wall… but the reader had to have the medical condition nystagmus in order to read it properly. Several New Testament religious figures’ names were inscribed on the wall catty-corner to this, like MARY, JESUS, PAUL, MATTHEW, and PETER, though the “T” in Peter’s name was rendered as an upside-down cross.8
Deciding I was done with this spooky-ass room, I followed Shutterbat through the hallway to the master bedroom. A makeshift electric chair had been set up on a platform. A lawn chair had been set up using barbed wire as restraints and a kitchen colander as a headpiece to place on the head of the “victim” that sat in the chair. This makeshift execution method had a decently-sized car battery tied to the armrests. Several small red stains that looked suspiciously like blood (or dried old red candle wax) adorned the chair and its barbed wire restraints.
At that point, being the “Shaggy” of our friend group, I was done with this place altogether and I made a beeline for the rear exit. Unfortunately, Shutterbat’s camcorder kept malfunctioning,9 so we would speed-run through the place two more times before Shutterbat gave up trying to record the house’s interiors.
On our final speed-run through the house, we encountered one of the laborers working on tearing down the house, a rather brusque Latino fellow. He was looting the place of any valuables he could find, and he was carrying out an old, large gray Samsonite briefcase.
He seemed in a hurry to get out of the place. Due to the language barrier, I never found out if he was inspired to leave the place because of its eerie accoutrements or because he knew the deadline to have the place torn down was coming up soon.
A few hours later, well after Shutterbat and I were done with work for that evening, the Headlee house was no more.
Only the chimney of the Headlee house — now called “Chimney Rock” — remains. Why the real estate development company left it standing after demolishing the rest of the house is anyone’s guess. In 2011, the Texas Historical Commission erected historical marker #16767, titled “Emmet V. Headlee, M.D.”, next to the old chimney, a lone sentinel keeping watch near the entrance to Chimney Rock Shopping Center to this day.
Mind the peacocks.
- I’ve already mentioned a previous jaunt he and I had made to an abandoned house next to the Sunset Memorial Gardens & Funeral Home.[↩]
- Marie Headlee was named “First Lady of Odessa” in 1957.[↩]
- Peacocks also get super aggressive during mating season and have been known to charge at humans while in heat.[↩]
- For whatever reason, the real estate developers opted to leave the Headlee house’s chimney behind as a historic landmark instead of, y’know, leaving the rest of the house there, too. Who knows what unfathomable notions lurk within the minds of real estate developers?[↩]
- Shutterbat already knew what was inside; he had explored the place without one of his trusty cameras the previous Saturday night. He just wanted to film the old house’s interiors before the place got torn down.[↩]
- Speaking as a born-and-raised resident of the West Texas desert: I hate sand. It’s course and rough, and it gets everywhere…[↩]
- In occult circles, the upside-down pentagram-in-a-circle design — a classic staple of American B-movie horror fare — is referred to as an “inverted pentacle.”[↩]
- Were the vandals who had transformed this house into an amateur haunted house attraction Catholic or rebelling against Catholicism? As far as I know, only Roman Catholicism venerates Peter enough that someone would deface his name over Jesus’ name.[↩]
- Suspiciously enough, Shutterbat’s camcorder recording went to static every time we reached the room with the makeshift electric chair.[↩]
