{"id":4563,"date":"2014-01-12T21:47:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-13T03:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/?p=4563"},"modified":"2014-01-12T21:47:00","modified_gmt":"2014-01-13T03:47:00","slug":"my-brush-with-morbidity-by-dl-phillips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/?p=4563","title":{"rendered":"“My Brush With Morbidity” by DL Phillips"},"content":{"rendered":"

“My Brush with Morbidity” by DL Phillips<\/strong><\/p>\n

My tale actually consists of 3 brushes with morbidity, only one in which I was directly involved. But all 3 involved people I knew \u2013 and all occurred in the same building.<\/p>\n

Brush 1:<\/strong> My parents bought a pre-civil war era building to house a gift shop downstairs and our living quarters on the second floor. During renovation, we had our contractor install a central heating and air-conditioning unit. This required knocking out a section of an old interior wall. When they did, some bones were found within the wall. I can honestly tell you that they were the bones of a person, not an animal. The guy in charge asked my mom what she wanted him to do, and I guess she was thinking about the delay a police investigation would cause in getting the store open, so she said, \u201cGet rid of it.\u201d Once we started living upstairs, all kind of weird things happened \u2013 you could say the place was haunted. But since I\u2019m not writing ghost stories here, onto the next Brush \u00a0with Morbidity\u2026<\/p>\n

Brush 2:<\/strong> Well, the store was, at most, a moderate success and my parents eventually gave it up and sold the building. Almost a year later, on the morning of Thanksgiving Day, some friends who lived near the place called to tell us the building was on fire. My parents rushed over there. (They were concerned that the fire was caused by the heating\/AC system we\u2019d installed. It wasn\u2019t \u2013 it was caused by a gas explosion in the resident\u2019s stove.) They arrived to find a woman holding a baby and leaning out one of the front upstairs windows. Smoke was pouring out behind her. Folks were trying to get her to drop the infant to them. Someone had gotten a tarp from their truck and they were holding it out to catch the baby. But the woman screamed something about needing to find her son, and left the window with the child still in her arms. No one survived. The building\u2019s second floor was pretty much a fire trap, with only one exit \u2013 an interior staircase. They found the boy\u2019s body (a toddler) at the head of that staircase.<\/p>\n

Brush 3:<\/strong> The fire mostly damaged the interior of the second floor and the building was repaired. Another exit was added to the upstairs, leading to an external steel staircase. At this time, Leila (the youngest sister of my best friend) was dating this guy (let\u2019s call him Dave) who was trying to find out how his kid brother died. (I\u2019m not going into that story!) Anyway, one day Leila was with Dave and he was asking around, trying to locate this particular man for some mundane reason. (It was so mundane, I can\u2019t remember what it was.) Well, it turns out this guy Dave\u2019s looking for happened to be involved in his brother\u2019s death. So he got a call warning him that Dave was coming to his place, which was \u2013 you guessed it \u2013 on the second floor of the building my parents once owned. Leila later told us that she and Dave went up the outside stairs and Dave knocked on the door. It opened, Dave\u2019s head exploded and the next thing Leila knew, she was covered in blood and cowering in a side entryway of a church across the street. She didn\u2019t come out until the police arrived. The man had used a shotgun on Dave\u2019s head at point blank range\u2026 and he got away with murder.\u00a0 Seems he was related to someone high up in the county sheriff\u2019s dept. \u201cDefending his home\u201d was the excuse used.<\/p>\n

Is it just me, or does it seem kind of… wrong… to just get rid of human bones you find?
\nMy Brush With Morbidity Archives<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“My Brush with Morbidity” by DL Phillips My tale actually consists of 3 brushes with morbidity, only one in which I was directly involved. But all 3 involved people I knew \u2013 and all occurred in the same building. Brush 1: My parents bought a pre-civil war era building to house a gift shop downstairs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brush"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4563"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4564,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4563\/revisions\/4564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}