Caretaker's House, Church of St. Arilda

First murder-suicide: 1842, three years after the completion of the building of the Church of St. Arilda. (It should be noted that the original caretaker's shack is not the one pictured here, completion of which was not until 1912. The original shack was a wooden, squared-off, two-room building, thrown together in servants' style of the time. The pictured "shack" was built in 1912 to be a miniature of the church itself. The church was added onto in the mid 1950s and now has many growths and appendages that the shack does not.)

The first deaths, in the original shack, were those of widower John Hayes and his twelve-year-old daughter, Constance. Constance was bludgeoned to death with a length of red oak firewood. John Hayes hung himself in the same room in which her astoundingly bloodied body was found. Records are nearly nonexistent, and church records of the time politely suggest that John likely hung himself in horror after he arrived home and saw her pulped body. Research of local parishioner diaries suggest that John was routinely beating, if not fucking, his daughter, and that the community widely assumed his guilt in her murder.

The original wooden shack was torn down; the next caretaker lived within a back room of the church itself. Marley O'Donnell became a widower himself under suspicious circumstances six months after he took the caretaker's job; he murdered his twin eight-year-old daughters and himself almost two years later.

Seven caretakers killed their families and themselves in the shack or its incarnations. Once the hiring parties grew superstitious of family men, the deaths grew to include three single men (two of whom committed suicide and one who was murdered by his brother, who had traveled from Modesto, California to do it and was hit by a recycling truck while escaping), and four women (the latest two a lesbian couple).

The shack has been unoccupied for fourteen years.