The Haunted House at Dead Horse Canyon

When I was 11 years old, I lived in Thornwood, New York near the Saw Mill River Parkway. The Saw Mill River was little more than a stream not exceeding 3 feet deep at the deepest point. My friends and I used to play and go fishing there all the time. However, there was one place, deep in the woods which used to scare the pants off my friend and I all the time. This was the Haunted House next to Dead Horse Canyon. I will never forget that place.

The house itself was abandoned at least 50 years before we found it. Nature had done its worse to the building with partial collapses, ravaged floors and staircases and holes in the walls through which the wind would play with like a dead flute. It was a rite of passage for my friends and I to enter the house on the first floor and explore from room to room. Some of us would enter but not go into any of the other rooms since the floors were weakened by age and sounded like they would split open at any moment.

All this was made scarier by the vague but mysterious rumors of deaths which led to the houses abandonment.

No one would climb the staircase to the top floor. The stairs had no banister and were slanted in a downward position. Nor would anyone climb down the stairs to the pitch black basement. Oh, sometimes we went up the first and second steps toward the second story. We prided ourselves by the number of steps we dared to climb. I think that the third step was about as far as any of us got. It was quite wobbly and groaned mightily from our relatively meager 11 year old weight.

This was before the new guy moved in. Richard Slavin was from the Bronx and his Father had taken a job as a prison guard at the Prison at Ossening, NY (AKA Sing Sing). Richard talked big and would brag about how tough he was. He was just plain obnoxious. He was also taller than the rest of us and inclined to be a bully. In Richard we had the perfect guinea pig for that Halloween. He had never heard of the Haunted House at Dead Horse Canyon. We decided to see how much bravado he had in our house of nightmares.

We told Richard that we had all been up to the second floor of the house and that any new boy who wanted to hang out with us had to do the same thing. He had to do this and did not seem to hesitate. After all, if we had done it, he certainly would do it as well. We took one questionable plastic flashlight and several bottles of Coke.

None of us expected Richard to actually climb the stairs. We figured he might get up to stair three and then chicken out once he felt how precarious his situation was. We would then have one much more humble friend. We more than a little surprised when Richard hugging the wall side of the staircase went all the way up with little or no hesitation.

He started to explore the top floor which we later found out had beer bottles strewn about by previous and older explorers. Richard yelled to us that he was going to tell our parents that we brought bottles of beer up there when suddenly we heard a noise like none we had heard before. The whole house actually seemed to shake like it was in an earthquake. The floor above us bent downward and the floor planks cracked open, dropping Richard down to the main level and about 15 feet ahead of where we were standing. I can still see in my mind's eye Richard's puzzled look as he passed by us and made a six foot section of the main floor crack open finally depositing him in the basement of the house.

We were stunned and more frightened by this turn of event than we ever were of the house. Richard was probably dead and when our parents found out what we had done we would be too or worse put in jail. Thoughts of us being shipped off to Sing Sing robbed us of our voices for a while. Finally one of us managed "Richard? Richard are you all right?" Silence! We realized we had to go down in the basement even if it were only to retrieve the body of our dearly departed friend.

We switched on the flashlight and looked into the basement through the doorway, nothing. The weak beam could not penetrate the darkness and dust from the two floor cave in. One by one we gave up our fear of the haunted house for our fear of what had happened to Richard. We descended one by one using the same wall hugging technique Richard had to ascend the staircase above. Huddled together at the bottom of the basement, we saw Richard's body. Only we heard a noise coming from it. "Fu, fu, fu..." emanated from it, actually from him. He was not dead after all but did have the wind knocked out of him for sure.

We spoke to him and eventually he was able to get up and finish his thought. We helped him climb up the basement steps. We got him home and his Mother took him to the town Doctor. There was actually no damage done to Richard by the fall. Cuts and bruises galore, but no broken bones or major injury could be found.

We got our butts kicked in one way or another by our Parents. Yeah, those were still the days of the spanking. But Richard, Richard was a changed boy. He thought he screwed up an easy task which we all did and needed to be rescued by us. Richard became a normal kid.

To this day as far as I know none of us has returned to the Haunted House at Dead Horse Canyon. I can say that I never will return their again.