Story by Dana Martin

The 1950s were a decade marked by simplicity. Life was good.  Neighbors helped one another eagerly, and there was no such thing as a stranger. Some say that's how the carnage began.

The Heywood family settled on 10 acres of deserted Appalachian swampland in the summer of 1958. The forgotten property, overgrown by weeds and half-covered with remnants of rusted cars and a pack of feral dogs, was close enough to the rural highway that passersby could vaguely distinguish a single flickering light glowing from inside an old wooden house.  Hitchhikers, truckers, even road weary travelers looking for food or a tank of gas often misread the flickering light as a welcoming sign on an otherwise deserted stretch of forgotten highway.  That was always a mistake.

The Heywood Family was a bit off.  Jerry Lee and Norma Heywood were peculiar people who offered no explanation for their family's aversion to polite society.  During their single trip down the mountain to town, Ma Heywood, along with her oversized son "Tiny," said only that the Heywoods were mighty partial to their privacy ... and left it at that. A storekeeper would later report that Pa Heywood purchased at least a dozen porcelain dolls that day and handed them all to Tiny.

For decades, the Heywoods went unnoticed. The family existed so long in total seclusion that eventually no one remembered they were there.

But one day, that changed. The town newspaper broke the story of a young woman found wandering along marshy swampland beside the highway. She was emaciated, paranoid, and stringing together nonsensical words like "Bad doll!" and "Skin tips." Confused authorities decided she was a member of the Laslow Family, who'd vanished eight years before during a sightseeing trip. When asked where she'd been for eight years, the girl could not say-but she could draw.

The sketches the young woman produced were bone chilling and depicted acts so heinous that even the most seasoned troopers and reporters fled the room with nausea. The girl mindlessly drew horrors of hanging heads and skinless bodies, but when she sketched a detailed illustration of a ramshackle crawl space and live victims trapped beneath a rundown farmhouse, local authorities began to suspect the Heywood place.

The rest of the story is only rumored, but urban legends say that three out of the four state troopers dispatched to the Heywood house that night never returned. The fourth trooper got as far as the highway, where a passerby reports with confusion that the trooper's last panicked words were, "Not the freezer!"

No one ever approached the house again. Some fear that the Heywoods’ two eldest sons, Lester and Bart, did to the troopers what they'd done to travelers since the '60s. No one can say exactly what horrors befell the troopers that night, but to this day, if you pull along the deserted mountain highway and stop in just the right spot, the terrorizing hum of chainsaw buzzing splits the silence in the distant night as surely as it splits perfect skin. Just don't stop too long.

MEET THE HEYWOODS INSIDE TALLADEGA FRIGHTS...
IF YOU DARE!!!