The Time I Delivered To A Haunted House

Let me paint a picture for you. 9:00 on a Saturday evening, you are 45 minutes away from being done with work. Of course you have to deliver one last pizza, and it just so happens that the house ordering the pizza decides to wait until right before we close to order their one medium pizza. I get the order and check the address. About 8 miles down a back country road and it's getting dark. Sounds like an adventure that only my blog could contain.

I check in with my boss to see where the road - Kime Farm Rd- is. He tells me it's off Benny Lineberry - which just so happens to be just below the cut off line on my map book (Yes, I bought a map, but I bought a Guilford county map and the restaurant is only about a mile above the next county over, so about 75% deliveries aren't on my map. Let's just say the percentage of me getting lost on a given delivery bares a striking resemblence to the percentage of deliveries not on the map.)

So Benny Lineberry Rd, then Kime (rhymes with lime? rhymes with seem? is of African Descent Kee-May? Apparently, rhymes with Lime is the correct answer). I make a mental note and start my journey. I find Benny Lineberry Rd and turn left on to it.

WERE YOU AWARE OF IT?

There are three types of "Lineberry" roads in the town of Lineberry NC. So far I have come across Benny, Fred and Mack and two are right next to each other with the third on the otherside of town. I hate the Lineberry family, WERE YOU AWARE OF IT?

So, I turn left on Benny and head down the road, battling with the glare of the setting sun and driving defensively to ensure a) I didn't pass the street and b) I didn't "accidentally" hit any locals hunting for quail or duck or dog (or whatever the fuck they hunt in these parts). When I say driving defensively I mean coming to a full on stop in front of every mailbox and pulling into the opposite lane to shine my headlights on mailboxes, if that's not defensive I don't know what is.

I make one pass down the road, passing about 4 adjacent roads and finding no luck. I get to the end of Benny where it connects with Old Liberty and quickly pull an illegal U-turn and re-trace my steps. Benny is about 5 miles long I'm guessing, so I make another sweep and by this time the sun is down, the stars are out and it's times like these where you see houses that make you think of horror movies and "home" owners say stuff like "We don't take kindly to you in these parts." I get to the end of the road where I originally started and decide to call the house.

Normally we are given tickets that have the order, address and phone number. However, apparently the phone lady decided that a phone number wasn't imperative to find this house (or the house doesn't have a phone) and so I start calling numbers of people that could possibly open google maps. Mom, Dad, Dan, Scott, Charlie. No one answered and in Charlie's case, he could be dead, I'll never know. So I call Kir. NOTE: As I was doing all of this I was sitting in a closed down gas station parking lot, the gas station had the old timey pumps and 12 - 27 cars with various pieces strewn about the lot. Needless to say, I was almost in panic mode.

Kir answers and I proceed to inform her of my strange predicament and I find out she is in Utah. I ask if she is buy a computer. "No, but I can be." Success. I give her the address and my current location (mind you I am ON the road that this supposed road is off of, at most I have 2.5 miles to drive.) She tells me that I'm about 500 meters down, I ask if she is in Canada, and she then tells me it's a dirt road, thanks to google maps Street View . This feat is amazing considering up until 2 months ago Chapel Hill, NC had not even been Street Viewed, but Lineberry, NC has, weird.

So it's a dirt road I'm looking for and on the right I see a house with a dirt driveway...this isnt it. Is it? I see no indications and I turn down the road. I am greeted with what seems to be a half mile stretch of gravel and nothingness. It was like driving into a scary movie, only I was missing 3 key elements ( 1) 2 dumb hot girls, and a douche bag football player, 2)copious amounts of alcohol/ecstacy and 3) the bravado to act like a fear nothing because I once beat Southpoint High under the Friday Night Lights with a broken pinky on BOTH hands. Luckily, I would probably get out because everyone knows that if you have sex in a horror movie you die and I would not be having the sex in this foursome.)

The first thing I see is two "houses" on my left - on a bend of the road. I look at the mailboxes and they don't have number (of course). So I keep going and the road bends back the other way and bends back again. It's basically like driving into a forest, I could reach my hand out the window and touch a tree stump. It just keeps getting darker and more narrow and I decide that no one lives out this far and I turn around. I pull back to the first two houses and see a number that is just one off from the number I am looking for, so I figure maybe one is the right house. I pull to this driveway looking thing (which is basically a dirt road that forks with some forest in between and some cars broken down for extra creepy effect). The house on the right is a trailer, so I guess it's not that. The house on the left might be a stand in for the house in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, no I'm not scared....much. I park the car and get out and in pulling the pizza out accidentally honk the horn. This brings out a man who is probably 6' 5'' 275 and pure blooded native american.

"Can I help you....BOY?" (He may not have said boy, but let's pretend he did.) Did you order a pizza?, I ask and he says no, the address I wanted was down the street. So I get back in the car and head down the windy road. Below, you will find pictures of what it looked like as I came around the turns. Fast forward past the scary car trip another mile and I finally find the house.






The house is gated in by a chainlink fence and I pull up to find a dog coming headlong for my car. I have to slam the brakes to avoid hitting it (he wins in this game of chicken) and I get out to finally deliver this pizza. However, the house has no front door at all. So I make my way on to enclosed patio, which somehow has a very loud TV blasting in it, even though there is no TV visible. I knock on the glass door and up pops a little girl from behind the couch. "PIZZZZZZZZA." She runs out to me on the patio and then runs up a flight of stairs that is so narrow I would probably get stuck trying to go up it. The mini stairs lead over the garage to a small door. She opens the door and uhh...smoke, comes billowing out. A gentleman wouldn't say if it smelled like pot for sure (it did). The mom comes down the stairs and I say "I gotta be honest, I could NOT find this place for the life of me." She responds with something like "I KNEW IT, I TOLD EM. I TOLD EM!" Which I took to mean, she tried to tell the phone lady at the restaurant, but she just decided it wasn't worth noting on the ticket. Good times.

I hopped back in the car and made my way back to the restaurant to pack up. The whole delivery took me about an hour, even though it was about 10 miles from the restaurant. Do I feel dumb? Yes. Was I scared shitless? Ummm...yes. Did I get a good tip? Not even enough to cover the gas mileage! Did I make it out alive? YES! The moral of the story as always - don't be a football player that gets to have sex with women in scary movies.

Fin.