Drawn & Quartered

So we've already established that I love Southern boys. Gimme a cute guy on horseback wearing jeans and speaking with a drawl any day of the week. No offense, Long Island boys, you're just kinda boring in comparison to these cobbler eating kings. You can imagine how happy I am when I strike up a conversation with a sweet Southerner (which I deduce right away from his accent). It's a beautiful day in the park and I feel like talking to strangers. Something in the air makes me feel like this is gonna be a good day to meet somebody. Maybe it's the summer heat, the impromptu jazz in the streets, or the fact that my hair is behaving nicely. Could be a combination of all of the above. I am brazen today.

I smile and ask him where he's from. He says "the South." I ask whereabouts (one of my favorite words) and he replies "the South of the South."

Wow, ok so really, REALLY Southern. Got it.

He asks where I'm from and I tell him: Long Island. He wants to know if I live anywhere near the Amityville horror house. Now, I know I'm a bad Long Islander for admitting this but I've never been anywhere near the horror house. I don't even know the details of the stupid place (though I will probably Google it when I'm done writing this post.) Apparently, some mass murder happened there like a million years ago and it was really tragic and everyone knows about it but me. On my list of things I'd mention about Long Island: the Hamptons, the beaches, the malls, the parkways, the lighthouses, the Big Duck, Splish Splash... but the Amityville horror house??? That just wouldn't be something I'd talk about, but it's the only thing he has to relate to me, so here we go.

I respond that I live only a few towns away from Amityville, I have a friend who teaches in the town, and it's a very pretty community. He says "No, you wanna know something? You ain't got nothing on horror. You want a real scary story? You come on down South. We got real scary shit in the South."

Alright, now I'm scared. He continues before I can check my watch, fake a rescue call and run away. (Please forgive the following transcription: it is written in the vernacular.)

"This one house down the road a bit from where I grew up, right, it was a plantation and the owners, they had all these slaves, right, so they decided they didn't want the slaves getting too close to each other and marrying and stuff but there were so many of them, right, so they take all the men slaves, right, and they sell them off to other plantation owners, right, and the womenfolk, they're pissed, right, so they decide they're gonna kill off all the childrens, right, and so they poison like fifty kids, right, including their own kids, so the plantation owners have nobody to work the fields or in the houses or stuff, right, so the master of the house, he decides to kill the women too, right, only he doesn't just poison 'em, no, no, he hangs 'em up by the necks right outside the house, as a warning to other slaves and stuff who might be thinking of running away or doing something stupid, right, and he makes their husbands watch and their children that they hadn't killed yet, and they all just standing around watching these women die, right, only they don't let 'em die, no, no, not yet, they hang 'em til they almost dead and then they cut 'em down real quick and draw and quarter them, right, like in England where they did, you know how they used to do, but they take all their entrails and bowels and stuff and they burn 'em in a huge fire and they throw all the body parts on the fire and then they make the other slaves cook dinner over that fire and eat their meal from it."

*Pause for breath*

"See, I told you we got some scary shit in the South. I bet you ain't never heard a story like that before."

*Insert rescue call here*

So, who wants to go to Amityville?