The "haunted house" where the "crazy" person lived back then

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Proclimation by President Nixon of "National Autistic Childrens Week 1973"

Both of the exhaustive Autism History books published in the last year "Neurotribes" and "In a Different Key" delve heavily into the "gold standard" treatment during the Refrigerator Mother era of the 1960's and 1970's institutionalization with the parents bieng told to remove all items related thier child and psychiatric treatment for the parents. "In a Different Key" describes early activist parents who kept their kids home in defiance of the scientific consensus.

What is not discussed is those families that could not afford to institutionalize their kids.
My neighborhood had such a haunted house. It was dilapidated suggesting a poor family. The local teens would get stoned and constantly throw rocks threw the upstairs window where the "crazy person" supposidly was. The sudden unexpected breaking of glass had to be terrifying for sensory senstive autistics. This theme of the crazy person in the attic was common during the horror/slasher film fad of the late 1970's and 80's. Some of the crazy people must have been undiagnosed autistics. If they wandered, chaining them in the attic probably was the solution. Did your neighborhood have anything like this?

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 10 May 2016, 8:42 am, edited 7 times in total.

There was a guy in my neighborhood whom everybody thought was "creepy." he lived in a sort of funny house. He had a musky sort of smell about him, and he wore anachronistic clothes.

That's why I wanted to hang out with him.

I don't think he was that creepy, though. He was an intellectual. He might have had pedophilic leanings--but he never tried anything with me.

Yes, when I lived in Austin there was a dilapidated house I always thought looked scary, and it turned out they were keeping an autistic girl in the attic in her own filth with rats as her companions. It was a terrible story, but turned out OK--the girl was removed from the home and got a loving foster family. It still gave me a shiver to walk past the "rat house" after that, though.


Here's a link to the news story about it, "The Face in the Window: A Ghost or a Little Girl?"
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2927841

Kind of a similar situation happened at Willowbrook State School in the 60s and early 70s--except on a much larger scale.

People who had intellectual disabilities were kept living with rats and other vermin, as well as their own feces.

Geraldo Rivera did an expose on the school in 1972. I saw every installment of that expose.

It would be instructive, in my opinion, for someone to Google it.

That news story is from 2007. Does anybody know what happened to "Victoria" in the years since? She would be in her late 20s, maybe 27 or 28, today. I suspect that she was conceived out of incest, since the mother didn't date-it's likely that the mom was impregnated by the grandfather. That, and the developmental disabilities her mom has, and the weird upbringing, probably would explain a lot.

Edit: I plugged in a few random keywords from the ABC article into Google and the only thing I came up with was this article from 2000:

http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/ch ... esser-god/

Apparently her name really is Victoria Barr. Maybe I will search for that next.

Edit 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8Oirc8xOwg An old ABC Primetime video. I haven't watched the whole thing.

Last edited by pezar on 10 May 2016, 8:44 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I always wondered why my bedroom window was a target for people with b-b guns.

Yes, there's been a few follow up stories. This video is from 2012.

I didn't see ariel's post until I'd already done my edit, and Cloudflare wouldn't let me do a 3rd edit. The collapsing house Victoria was raised in, 802 Blanco Street in central Austin, has been renovated and is valued at over $1 million! Apparently the current owner runs a carpet cleaning company out of it.

I believe it. It was a very expensive neighborhood even then, which made the run-down house stand out more as spooky-looking.

Rivera was a young investigative reporter for the New York City ABC affilate at the time. Rivera won a Peabody Award for this documentry that launched his career. I certainly remember watching this.



This is when the news was actual journalism, not gossip.

Wikipedia Article on the institution

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 11 May 2016, 12:12 am, edited 2 times in total.

Plausable explination for what happened to you.

In my town that's my house. It looks nice but everybody thinks I'm a witch. I'm fine with that

Where I grew up, in Trinidad & Tobago, there were two hobos I was aware of. One of them, when he walked down the street, used to stop every few minutes, prostrate himself, and kiss the ground. The second one walked around will all of his books in the front of his shirt. He looked like a man with a huge jagged doghouse tucked under his shirt. Very odd. Naturally, they were always alone and people just looked at them like they were crazy.

I forgot which of the two was called Commoner, but anyway, I appropriated the name and the characters' behaviors for my latest novel, Commoner The Vagabond. It's interesting how people I'd seen about 45 years ago are still fresh in my memory.

In T & T, I've always heard bums being called "vagrants."

There were some well-known eccentrics in my hometown, but no "haunted" house. I used to wish there was one.

A Boo Radley house? I have befriended several "Boo Radleys" over the years, but did not realize that kind of person was on the spectrum until I was an adult.

When I was a teenager there was a man named "Crow" who would buy you a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 if you bought HIM a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. He would also tell you unbelievable stories. A lot of us kids were friends with him, and he had at least one adult friend who had known him for a long time and once talked to me and my now husband about what was "wrong" with Crow. He said Crow had always been the way he was and used to be picked on for it.

Crow used to tell this story about how when he was 12, some men stripped him naked and tied him to a tree in the woods and just left him there, laughing. He'd tell this story over and over. We asked his adult friend if that really happened and he said yes, he was pretty sure it had happened. Crow lived in a Boo Radley looking house that he inherited from his mom, and had a couple of Banquet frozen dinners and a bottle of Mad Dog every day. He couldn't drive and lived on disability. He did not like to be touched. He always wore the same clothes, that looked like they came out of a 1970s Sears and Roebuck catalog. He smelled like he bathed about once every two weeks.

He was a good person. Not everyone is nice to teenagers.