Fire Tower Hill
USA
August 2006
This is a local urban legend that I've heard my entire life. There are several stories about this place, and I will share some with you.
The hills reside in southern Maury County Tennessee. They are surrounded by dense wilderness, and somewhere in those woods are two cemeteries. At the top of the highest hill it stands, a lonely sentinel forgotten by modern man, The Fire Tower. Here are just a few stories about this place.
THE BURNT CHURCH
Back during the 1800s there was an old gothic church that once stood near one of the lost cemeteries. Once the Civil War broke out, the church became dormant except for the occasional meetings there for children to worship and sing. One day, a Union arsonist burnt the church down with the children still locked inside. Within time, it was forgotten, until the roads were built and many motorists reported children running out in front of their cars. There were also claims that people's radios would pick up the faint transmission of children crying.
THE MAN OF THE WOODS
Since long before the Civil War, there were reports of a wild man that roamed the hills. He was tall, deformed, and had dark pits for eyes. People would often say that they heard his unearthly wails in the dark clutches of the night. Then for a while he disappeared, almost as if he was swallowed up by the woods he roamed. Then over one hundred years later, he returned. In 1971, the people who lived in the woods began to report their pets and chickens were being mutilated by something.
A guy was taking his girlfriend through the hills one night when his car suddenly died. He got out to check under the hood, but in the woods he kept hearing trees snap. He got back in his car and tried to start it. When it did finally come on, he saw a massive creature on the hood of his car. He began to drive as fast as he could, but he couldn't shake the thing. It finally jumped off when he neared the edge of the woods.
THE FIRE TOWER
The construction for the fire tower began in 1953. The contractors were to build a road and power lines leading to the tower site. The construction soon came to a halt when the workers complained of their tools missing and that someone within the woods kept calling their names. The tower itself though got completed in 1956. It had no electricity, and the only means of light came from an old kerosene lantern.
The first night the tower was used, the guards kept seeing fires in the distance, but upon further investigation, there wasn't even any singed grass at the location of the supposed fires. After their first night of watch, they noticed that on the support beams of the tower someone had burnt strange markings, but no one could have possibly been down there because they would have seen them. The fire tower was closed in 1958 because the guards began to disappear from it.
THE DEACON
In the early seventies, a strange cult began to meet there. They were led by a man named Abraham Marley. Marley was the Charles Manson of Tennessee. Many people still recall him to this day. Marley met his end when he led the cult to a family's house and slaughtered them, sparing only their newborn son, whom Marley took back into the woods with him. The police tracked the cult down only to find a mass suicide. Only Marley still remained. Before the police could apprehend him, he dowsed himself in gasoline and burnt himself to death. One of the policemen said, ''The flames were white, hotter than any other fire I've ever seen, I was fifteen feet away but it burnt my face just to look at it." To this day, the child's whereabouts are unknown. But there have been reports of farmers seeing a young man walking through their fields late at night, or looking through windows at people as they sleep.
Fire Tower Hill has remained silent for a while. Nobody lives there, and nobody goes there. The land is cursed and full of evil. The fire tower to this day still looks down on the hills.