Laura Wright 
Urban Legends
Their owners are documented. Their architecture is photographed. Their tragedies are repeated in books, television programs and ghost tours until every room has acquired its own story.
Then there are places like the Warlock House.
Hidden somewhere in rural northeastern Tennessee, the old house survives primarily through fragments of local tradition. There are no famous murders attached to it, no celebrated ghost hunters and apparently no carefully preserved history.
There is only the story of a reclusive man, an angry merchant, a mob carrying torches, a house that refused to burn, and a homeowner who seemingly disappeared without ever quite leaving.
Whether all of it happened exactly as remembered is impossible to determine.
But sometime around 1925, according to the old story, something happened there.
The Man They Called the Warlock
The man’s real name has apparently disappeared from the surviving legend.
He lived alone in a large rural house and kept almost entirely to himself. Neighbors knew little about him. He rarely traveled into town except when he needed supplies and apparently made little effort to become part of the surrounding community.
That was enough to generate rumors.
Isolation has always been fertile ground for suspicion, particularly in small communities where everyone is expected to know something about everyone else.
Why did he live alone?
What did he do inside that house?
Why didn’t he socialize?
Eventually gossip supplied its own explanation.
The recluse was a warlock.
There is no evidence that the man actually practiced witchcraft or even claimed to possess supernatural abilities. The name appears to have been imposed upon him by other people.
Eventually his home acquired the same reputation.
It became the Warlock House.
The Argument at the Feed Store
According to the story, the incident that changed everything occurred in 1925.
The recluse had purchased feed for his animals from a local merchant. Several days later, he returned to town furious.
He claimed the feed was rotten.
An argument erupted between the two men at the feed store. Several people reportedly witnessed the confrontation.
It was unpleasant, but apparently not extraordinary.
Customers argued with merchants.
Merchants argued with customers.
The men separated, and there seemed no reason to believe anything more would come of it.
Then things began happening to the merchant.
A Run of Terrible Luck
The feed-store owner supposedly experienced a succession of personal and financial disasters after his confrontation with the Warlock.
Exactly what those misfortunes were has not survived clearly in the story.
That absence is important.
Later folklore frequently becomes very specific about events that were originally vague. In this case, the tradition seems to preserve only the larger claim: the merchant’s life began falling apart after the argument.
One misfortune followed another.
His finances suffered.
His personal life deteriorated.
Eventually the accumulated tragedies became more than he could bear.
The merchant died by suicide.
For the townspeople, coincidence was apparently not an acceptable explanation.
They remembered the argument.
And they remembered the man everyone called the Warlock.
The Town Blames the Recluse
The merchant had been well liked.
His death produced grief and anger, and suspicion quickly turned toward the mysterious man outside town.
The reasoning was simple.
The two men had quarreled.
The Warlock had been angry.
Then the merchant’s life had inexplicably collapsed.
Therefore, the Warlock must have cursed him.
There was apparently no evidence of this.
But evidence wasn’t what an angry community was looking for.
A mob formed.
And sometime after the merchant’s death, townspeople headed toward the Warlock House carrying torches.
Burning the Warlock House
Their intention was apparently to destroy the house.
The mob reached the property and attempted to set fire to the structure and surrounding area.
Before the destruction could progress too far, other members of the community arrived and persuaded the group to stop.
The crowd eventually dispersed.
But they left fire burning around the property.
Given the circumstances, the result the following morning should have been predictable.
The isolated house should have been badly damaged.
Perhaps it should have burned completely.
Instead, according to the legend, the house was virtually untouched.
Some weeds and brush surrounding the property had been scorched.
The building itself remained standing.
That was precisely the sort of event guaranteed to make the Warlock’s reputation worse.
Why Didn’t the House Burn?
There are plenty of ordinary possibilities.
Perhaps the fire never became intense enough.
Perhaps the building was damp.
Perhaps the mob exaggerated how thoroughly it had attempted to ignite the house.
Perhaps later storytellers transformed a failed act of arson into something considerably more mysterious.
Anyone who has attempted to burn an old structure knows that buildings do not necessarily erupt into flames simply because someone touches a torch to them. Construction materials, moisture, wind and the location of the fire all matter.
But to people who already believed the owner possessed unnatural abilities, the explanation would have seemed obvious.
They had tried to burn the Warlock’s house.
And the house would not burn.
The Sheriff’s Investigation
Local authorities reportedly investigated the circumstances surrounding the merchant’s death.
According to the surviving account, the sheriff found no evidence that anyone had physically harmed him.
There was apparently nothing connecting the recluse to the death beyond the earlier argument and the community’s suspicions.
That should have ended the matter.
Instead, something else happened.
The Warlock disappeared.
The Man Who Never Returned
After the confrontation surrounding the house, no one reportedly saw the recluse again.
Perhaps he fled.
Considering that an angry mob had just attempted to burn his home, leaving would have been an entirely reasonable decision.
Perhaps he died elsewhere.
Perhaps he simply became even more successful at avoiding his neighbors.
But then came the peculiar part.
Although nobody saw the Warlock, the house continued to change.
It did not simply decay like an abandoned property.
Someone appeared to be maintaining it.
Repairs were apparently made.
The building changed gradually over the years.
Yet nobody seemed to see anyone living there.
The Green Roof
Approximately twenty years after the disappearance, residents noticed something difficult to overlook.
The Warlock House had acquired a new green roof.
Someone had installed it.
Roofing a substantial house isn’t exactly an invisible activity.
Materials have to arrive.
Old roofing may need to be removed.
Workers have to climb onto the structure.
Tools are required.
Yet the tradition maintains that nobody knew who had performed the work.
The owner had not been seen in decades.
No new resident was known to have moved into the property.
Nevertheless, there it stood.
The supposedly abandoned Warlock House.
With a new roof.
That detail may be my favorite part of the entire story because it is so wonderfully mundane.
A ghostly apparition can be dismissed as imagination.
A mysterious noise can be blamed on an animal.
But somebody had to put a roof on the house.
Was Someone Secretly Living There?
Of course, there are ordinary possibilities.
The recluse may never actually have disappeared.
He could have continued living on the property while carefully avoiding other people.
Someone else may have inherited the house.
A caretaker could have maintained it.
Local residents may simply have been unaware of arrangements concerning the property.
And the twenty-year interval itself may have grown considerably in the telling.
All are reasonable.
But the folklore preserved something different.
The house was occupied without having an occupant.
That is a much better ghost story.
The Teenagers Enter the House
The Warlock House remained part of local lore into the twentieth century.
By the 1970s, the original owner would presumably have been long dead, assuming he had survived the events of 1925 at all.
A group of teenagers eventually decided to investigate the place themselves.
Breaking into an allegedly haunted abandoned house is practically a rite of passage in American folklore, and the results are usually predictable.
Someone hears something.
Someone becomes frightened.
Everyone runs.
But according to this account, the teenagers experienced considerably more.
Once inside, they began seeing strange shapes and shadows.
Something seemed to move through the house with them.
The figures reportedly followed the group as they explored.
Eventually the teenagers fled.
Whatever they believed they had encountered remained inside.
Shadows in an Empty House
Shadowy figures are among the most common phenomena reported inside supposedly haunted buildings.
There are obvious reasons.
Abandoned houses are rarely completely dark.
Moonlight enters through windows.
Trees move outside.
Passing headlights create shifting illumination.
A person carrying a flashlight creates enormous moving shadows without realizing it.
And frightened people become extraordinarily sensitive to movement in peripheral vision.
A group of teenagers entering a house already known as the Warlock House would hardly have been neutral observers.
They expected something frightening.
Perhaps they found it because they expected it.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t experience something.
It simply leaves us with the same problem encountered in so many old ghost stories.
We know what people said they saw.
We don’t know what produced it.
Who Was the Warlock?
This is perhaps the most frustrating question.
The man himself has nearly disappeared.
Without his name, identifying property records, census entries, newspaper accounts or death records becomes extremely difficult.
That means the most important person in the story has become almost entirely a folkloric character.
He is simply the Warlock.
That is probably unfair to him.
If the legend contains a genuine historical core, he may have been nothing more sinister than an eccentric farmer who preferred solitude.
He complained about bad feed.
A merchant subsequently suffered terrible misfortunes.
People connected the two events.
Then they blamed the stranger.
There is an uncomfortable historical plausibility to that scenario.
Communities have always been capable of transforming outsiders into explanations for things they cannot understand.
Did the Curse Exist?
There is no evidence establishing that the merchant was cursed.
A succession of personal and financial problems can happen without supernatural intervention.
Once people know the ending, however, earlier events begin to look prophetic.
The argument becomes a threat.
The recluse becomes a sorcerer.
The merchant’s misfortunes become evidence.
His death becomes proof.
Then the house fails to burn.
At that point, every subsequent coincidence strengthens the legend.
Someone repairs the roof?
The Warlock never left.
Teenagers see shadows?
The Warlock is still there.
Folklore builds itself one coincidence at a time.
And sometimes it becomes impossible to determine where the history ended and the haunting began.
The House That Wouldn’t Empty
The Warlock House remains one of those tantalizing regional stories for which the surviving information is frustratingly incomplete.
There appears to be no widely documented history of the property.
No famous investigation established what occurred there.
The identity of the supposed Warlock has faded.
Even the exact chronology may have changed through retelling.
Normally those weaknesses would cause a story to disappear.
This one survived.
Perhaps that is because its central image is so difficult to forget.
An isolated house.
A man everyone feared but barely knew.
A merchant destroyed by a terrible succession of misfortunes.
An angry crowd marching into the countryside with fire.
And the following morning, the house still standing.
Then the owner disappears.
Years pass.
The house quietly changes.
And one day, someone looks toward the old Warlock House and realizes that the supposedly abandoned building has acquired a brand-new green roof.
There may be perfectly reasonable explanations for every part of the story.
The fire may simply have failed.
The recluse may have moved away.
Someone else may have maintained the property.
The teenagers may have frightened themselves.
Perhaps the entire tale grew substantially during a century of retelling.
But somewhere in northeastern Tennessee, if the old story is to be believed, there once stood a house that the community could neither explain nor quite get rid of.
The Warlock vanished.
The house remained.
And for years afterward, someone—or something—apparently kept taking care of it.
About the Author
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