You just know he mutilates little girls for fun.
Every winter, when the trees drop their leaves, a certain house in Laurelton, Queens, comes into full view. It is a decrepit Victorian on a cul-de-sac at 141-36 222nd Street, a structure whose condition has made it known as “the haunted house.”
To say the condition of 141-36 is woeful seems, well, woefully inadequate. Its siding is weathered to the marrow, and most of its windows are boarded over. An “X” painted on the cupola warns of weak floorboards. A locked chain-link fence seals it off from society. A small armada of boats lies beached in the yard under a sea of blue tarp.
Three yellow traffic signs posted at the corner announce, with a Cassandra-like quality, “Dead end,” “End,” “Dead end.”
…
Martha Barfield, who moved into her home nearby on 141st Road in 1971 with her husband, Oscar, and two children and is one of the last old-timers, recalls the couple who used to live in 141-36.
The husband was German and the wife stayed in most of the time, she said. She could not recall the family name. One of the sons, who appeared to be mentally handicapped, was friendly and waved when he walked to the corner store for cigarettes, she said.
“The wife got sick, then the husband got sick — they weren’t friendly people,” she said. The parents died, and that son eventually went away to live, she said.
The house was left in the care of the other son, she said. Already weathered, with a porch and yard teeming with castoff items, 141-36 fell into even greater disrepair.
The block association wrote to the city’s planning board, which once sent a tree-trimming crew.
Otherwise, the property has been left alone, and is still owned by the surviving son.
“He’s in there,” Mrs. Barfield said. “We all know this.”
