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A dark night investigating East Tennessee’s connection to ‘The Evil Dead’

by Mike Gibson

Traipsing through black woods on a dark night, we stumble over unseen boles and loose brush. Gnarled vines hang from bent trees in an attitude of serpentine menace; the hungry, matted foliage clings tenaciously to our bodies as we push through it. A light fog has settled over the valley, reflecting the scant moonlight filtering through the trees and imbuing the whole of our surroundings with an eerie lambency. If you could take a picture of creepy, it would surely look like this.

“Donna! Turn off that light! What the hell is wrong with you?” our guide snaps when one member of our party tries to illuminate her path with a tiny Wal-Mart flashlight. Then he mutters, to everyone and no one in particular, “Careful, though... there’s a lotta copperheads out here in these woods.”

After several minutes of grasping and stumbling in the hillside brush, we find level ground, and our feet strike something other than weeds and soft earth. Underfoot is the rusted tin roof from the cabin—brittle, crinkled and ancient, now more like crusty parchment than tin.

Next to it is a portion of the concrete foundation, dirty and matted with leaves. And as our flashlights come back on, beams struggling to push through the unyielding fog, we see it, less than 20 feet away: the chimney, jagged and crumbling, rising out of the murk like some doomed monolith, the last standing remnant of the cabin used in the filming of the 1981 cult favorite The Evil Dead. Collectively, our breathing stops.

When I was still an awkward college kid, it was considered a rite of passage within my geekish circle of friends to watch certain “classic” movies, most of them B- and C-rate horror flicks with lurid titles like I Spit on Your Grave and Blood-sucking Freaks. They were different in many ways, these films, trafficking variously in everything from ghosts to zombies to psychos. But they all seemed to have been filmed in the same demented spirit, marked by low-rent production values and a certain shabby ambience that somehow only made them creepier.

Chief among them was The Evil Dead, a movie about five kids who rent a cabin in the woods, only to find themselves beset by ravening demons after discovering an ancient tome—bound in human skin, no less—entitled Book of the Dead.

The movie was audacious, gory, funny, in a stretched-past-the-limit, almost self-parodying sort of way—but still plenty scary. And rumor had it that it was filmed somewhere in East Tennessee.

I would find out much later that “somewhere” was actually Morristown, just a few miles from Knoxville up Highway 11-E. It was there, thanks to the remarkably prescient efforts of the Tennessee Film Commission, that a handful of Detroit-area wannabe actors and film students (including now-heralded director Sam Raimi) found the cabin they use in shooting their feature-length debut back in 1979.

With Halloween upcoming, and with the help of a friend who grew up in Morristown, I trekked out to the old cabin site recently, on a proverbial dark and stormy night. Accompanied by my co-worker Donna Kelly, her husband Rob (also a native Morristownian), and her father, Don Keck (our unofficial guide), I essayed the trip with the twin objectives of unraveling the story behind East Tennessee’s scariest locale, and bringing my post-adolescent rite of passage full circle.

Located on the west end of Morristown near the intersection of Kidwell Ridge and Inmans Bend, the Dead cabin occupies a stretch of woods, surrounded by raw untended pastureland, that was wholly absent of commercial development at the time of the shoot. In his autobiography If Chins Could Kill, now-infamous B-movie actor Bruce Campbell (the de facto star of Dead, having played the dim-witted character named Ash who is the movie’s lone survivor) relates that the cabin was allegedly home to the family of a young girl named Clara back in the 1930s.

According to Campbell’s telling, Clara saw her parents brutally murdered by mysterious intruders one night in the midst of a thunderstorm. The killers were never found, and the girl was never the same; during rainstorms, it was said, she always wandered back to the cabin, searching in vain for her dead parents.

As we cautiously tread the old cabin grounds, Keck says that he has never heard the story of Clara, or her slain kin. But he did know of the family who lived here in the cabin; they were Inmans, he says, the namesakes of nearby Inmans Bend Road.

But even if the story of Clara isn’t true, the site is fraught with dreadful little mysteries, including a roughly six-by-four-foot hole, half-filled, that Keck declares is “probably an old grave.” Who could be buried here? And why does their final resting place seem to be in a state of flux? None of us really cares to speculate.

Compounding our unease is the presence of a narrow well, maybe 20 feet from the grave. Shining our flashlight beams down a fissure that looks too small for human entry, we see a new shovel with a logo sticker still pasted to the head, a hammer, and a couple of bottles (unbroken) settled at the bottom of the 12-foot shaft.

But all of that is quickly forgotten when we spot the chimney, a looming eight-and-a-half foot tower of tumbling stones, some of which are still tenuously cemented by a grout of hardened mud. Surveying the decaying structure in the misty light of our beams, Rob observes that it is the equivalent of “a big tombstone... a monument to where this house used to be.”

As we approach the chimney, we see that it is covered with a number of very large spiders, including one roughly the size of a child’s fist that prompts all of us to blanch and step back at least a foot or two. Also visible on the mossy, moldering stone are a few coarsely scratched words, including coal-black lettering that reads: “Eric the Dead.”

By way of explanation, Keck relates the story of the strange events that came in the wake of the movie’s release in 1981. As its cultish popularity grew, purported devil worshippers held clandestine gatherings at various locations on the outskirts of Morristown, the most popular of which was the Inman cabin. Their leavings invariably included blasphemous graffiti—pentagrams, invective, dark praises, and other vile inscriptions.

Keck knew a man who lived not too far from the cabin, a goat farmer who was spooked by reports that the Satanists might steal some of his herd for ritual sacrifice. “The old boy was on drugs, and he wasn’t wound too tight,” says Keck. “He stayed up all night, once, lying outside, looking after his goats with a shotgun.”

Keck says the Inman house was eventually burned to the ground in the mid-‘80s to discourage further shenanigans

When we finally clamber out of the woods and back to the safety of Keck’s flatbed pickup, Donna suggests one more stop. A couple of miles up the road, we pull into the parking lot of Kidwell Ridge Baptist Church, disembark, and start walking the length of the churchyard.

I notice that a number of the graves we’re passing have “Inman” etched on the headstone. Most of the Inman family is buried here, says Keck, although none of them died from any kind of foul play. He thinks that the last male members of the clan, brothers Martin and Poker, died some years back from simple small-town misadventure; Poker’s death coming as the result of a fall from a horse, and Martin’s as a consequence of his tractor overturning.

Keck does say that one of the Inman matriarchs spent her final years in a local nursing home. On one occasion, she disappeared from the facility, only to be found several days later, demented and wandering in the woods near the old family home. Repeated and embellished, that story was probably the seed of the faux-legend later perpetuated by Campbell and his fellow filmmakers.

But we didn’t come here to commune with the restless spirits of departed Inmans. As we approach the latter portion of the cemetery in back of the church, Donna points her flashlight at a trio of six-foot wooden crosses bunched and planted in the ground. It was here, she says, that the post-movie Satanism hysteria reached its gruesome climax. Just a few days before Halloween of 1985, churchgoers pulled up to Kidwell Baptist on a Sunday and found an awful carnage of slaughtered dogs and cats in the cemetery, some of them hung from the crosses, and some of them laid before a makeshift pentagram altar. Many of the tombstones in the yard were cracked or overturned.

The hill on the other side of the crosses slopes down to Cherokee Lake, Keck says, and the water is especially deep at that point in the shadow of the cemetery; it’s known to area fishermen as the Devil’s Hole.

The series of malign gatherings that transpired in the wake of The Evil Dead petered out quietly after that terrible night, Donna tells me later, though no one was ever held responsible for the rituals, or even suspected of the crimes. For a time, dark rumors persisted that another group of occult practitioners were coming down from Greeneville, intent on finishing the vile business their brethren had started. Nothing ever happened.

We’re riding in my car—Donna, Rob and I—when she finishes the story, wending our way back to the interstate on the back roads of Hamblen County. Suddenly, she demands that we stop. I dutifully pull over to the side of the road as she points up at a jagged, foreboding shape looking down from the bluff on our right. It’s an old, decrepit mansion, which in the dark of this night takes the form of the most terrifying silhouette any of us have ever seen. The old house was a source of endless speculation when Donna was a local high school student, she says; breeching its grounds was a challenge frequently dared, but rarely accepted. Rob suggests that we park, walk up the hill and explore.

We look at each other. We think about The Evil Dead; the cabin; the well and the half-empty grave and the chimney; the church cemetery; the Inman ghosts; the ritual sacrifices and the Devil’s Hole.

There’s a slight, spitting rain outside, and the night is getting colder as it wears on, but that doesn’t account for the chill in our bones. I pull back on the main road, turn up the radio, and set a course for home.

October 28, 2004 • Vol 14, No. 44 © 2004 Metro Pulse