Chapter 52: Fading Transmissions from a Republic of Ruins, Part II
Shamrock Ghost House
Shamrock, TX
Note: This is part II of a mini-series that I’m releasing on the blog (adapted from an immersive audio theatre piece, currently in development) about my recent road trip across the country. I managed to visit a plethora of abandoned spaces and decided to focus on writing about four of them.
For context, please start with Part I here.
Standing in front of The Sumner School, thinking about Linda Brown, I kept realizing how different her upbringing was from mine. Childhood is such a fragile, specific experience. You don’t understand it until you’re out of it and can finally look back.
When I was six years old, sneaking into the abandoned dairy farm near my childhood home, I wasn’t thinking about civil rights or segregation or who was allowed to go to which school. I was just wandering through the ruins, letting my imagination run wild because I could. My circumstances let me treat an abandoned building like a whimsical fantasy instead of a harsh reality. It’s the part that sticks with me now: how different childhoods can be, how different the starting lines can be, how two different kids in two different cities can grow up in the same country but not the same reality.
My childhood home sat up the hill from that dairy farm — the house my family eventually left behind along with thirty-five years of our physical history. Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to walk into that house now if it were abandoned, all of the objects and decor left behind, intact. The original blue exterior, the red door, the tan and white porch that jutted sideways instead of straight out. The trees in the front yard that aren’t there anymore. I picture myself upstairs, door closed, listening to vintage radio dramas late at night on the Christian radio station in Colorado Springs. All abandoned buildings were once occupied. Someone lived there. Someone made dinner there. Someone fought with their parents, or fell in love, or got sick, or healed, or hoped, or gave up, or tried again.
What would it be like to explore my childhood home if, instead of selling it because my parents got divorced, we’d simply left everything behind?
The Sumner School faded in my rearview mirror as I turned my eyes towards the mythic American South, specifically Oklahoma, then onto Texas. Though Topeka felt void of people, certainly crowds, my thoughts began to drift toward a spiritual practice of mine, people watching. I can sit in a crowded place, anywhere, and invent entire stories about strangers who pass by, folklore, unsubstantiated by anything but their appearance, legends and fables about their own personal history, the ghosts they leave behind in buildings they’ve occupied, or the people with whom they shared an orbit at some point in their lives. On days where it feels like we’re totally done for, it’s an easy way to remind myself that there’s still a lot of good in the world. I have to believe we can still bear witness to an overwhelming amount of human kindness — we just have to remember what we’re looking out for.
Driving through Oklahoma, then into Texas, drifting away from the very real history of an infamous abandoned school dropped down like Dorothy in the middle of Tornado Alley, I found myself doing the opposite. Rather than people watching, I was ruin watching, making up stories about the open pasture of abandoned buildings my car barreled past on the interstate, lore borne out of my imagination, about the empty architectural strangers and the human beings they once protected, watched over, physical guardians of humanity. I passed by hundreds of these real, vacant spaces, filled with legends I made up about the people who used to exist in them, but only one of them stopped me in my tracks to the point that I had to flip the car around. It felt like an omen, lucky even, despite being buried amongst the brush of a frontage connector road off the interstate which was apropos because I’d just crossed into Shamrock, Texas.
Wheeler County, for context, is right on the border, a good two and a half hours from Oklahoma City. Population 1,789 in the 2020 census. A centerpiece stop on Route 66, if you’re trying to time travel.
It was there in Shamrock, Texas that I found the Shamrock Ghost House.
It sits in the camouflage brush along the service road that runs parallel to the echoes of the highway. As the house comes towards the car, I figure, in my oncoming fantasy, that the locals call it the Shamrock Ghost House — a place for teenagers to smoke weed and vagabonds to sleep soundly on their way to California.
At first, I don’t think I’m going to go in. The front lawn is covered in brambles and dried bush and tumbleweeds that block any smooth pathway to mount the front porch. But more importantly, I remember that, sometimes, ghosts are uneasy with human presence. I get it. They don’t know me. I’m trespassing simply by the fact that I don’t live here.
Anymore —
— I say to myself, tumbling into my imagination.
Have I lived a past life here? Was I a drifter, a carpetbagger, a train-hopping loner who lurched across the country hoping to churn water into gold or even just unearth my own tiny corner of paradise?
Maybe I recognize this place more than I think I do.
My fantasy ushers me onto the porch. I can’t decide where to put my step. The floorboards are busted up, like a tornado burgled the enclosed entryway leading into the house. A polite trio of sibling runaways lived here undetected for a while.
(That’s what the house tells me, anyway.)
A voice echoes in my head, indulging my imagination with the story of the outlaw Snyder Siblings. The eldest, Juniper, had been thrown in prison because he was late to pay a water bill — once — after the post office failed to deliver the notice on time. A crumbling system failing a crumbling family. After a few months in the joint, he escaped, scooped up his siblings, and whisked them away in a criminal caravan, traveling only at night, laying low in campsites or hiding out abandoned houses along the way, trying to get to Joshua Tree. I hear him whisper this through the walls.
Maybe it’s a real memory.
Maybe it’s my imagination.
Maybe it’s both.
As I step onto the porch, a couple appears, sitting in the easy chair that’s plopped under the overhang that faces I-40. They don’t speak at first, but the woman smiles.
“I’m not uneasy,” I feel myself saying, “but I am a little bit nervous.”
This clears the air, somehow. I don’t know why.
“We are too, to be fair,” the young woman says.
As these situations with the ghosts of America’s ruins tend to go, we start with awkwardness, but we end with pleasantries.
“Jane,” she says, coyly.
He follows: “Troy.”
“Blake,” I whisper back.
We stand in silence as they decide — wordlessly — whether to invite me in. Like the Fox and the Little Prince, learning to trust one another. This is how it goes with the echoes of America’s ruins: we sit cross-legged and face each other until we’re ready to scoot baby steps toward each other, carefully, gently, with compassionate caution in our hearts. At least in mine.
I can’t speak for the ghosts.
From outside, I get a whiff of the inside of the house. It smells like time left out to dry in the panhandle sun. I still don’t necessarily feel welcome in this space. It feels uncomfy, somehow. Every once in a while, I have to reason with a ghost, convince it to let me in. With Jane and Troy, I don’t have to go that far. They sense I’m not a threat — that I’m only here for the story, that I’m not going to steal anything or destroy anything, but the house itself doesn’t know that, and it’s uneasy.
I tried sleuthing online — Google Maps street view, message boards, county listings — but nothing. No dates, no history, not even an address. Just that six years ago, the first time Google Maps Street View captured it on its 360 degree camera, it was already in ruins. Nothing explains why this house became a ghost. That’s rare. Usually, I can find something, even a small glitch in the matrix. Not here. In moments like this, the discovery of an abandoned space feels more confounding than it does anything else.
Here it is: a Texas house, open-carry laws and all. Beat-up interior. Not a “No Trespassing” sign in sight. Worn down by the time droning away in ticks on an heirloom grandfather clock that some nameless vagrant stole. A small box that was definitely lived in after its official life ended. Inside, everything sits rotting alongside the minutes and hours and years and years: old Christmas cookie tins, a Veg-O-Matic food cutter, lemon furniture polish, boots, another easy chair, crutches, a four-slot Toastmaster, an unopened copy of the 2010 Census looking forebodingly across the house at an old vacuum cleaner covered in dust.
In the kitchen, I pick up a pair of glasses beside a rusted can of Meadow Gold sweetened condensed milk. I can feel Jane watching me while Tony flips through the channels on the TV and lands on Cops. They’ve followed me in, leaving the blue easy chair to sit on the broken porch alone, staring out at the westbound lanes of I-40, swallowed by brush and weeds.
I don’t stay long. Not because I feel unwelcome — Jane and Troy have been nothing but gracious — but because I feel sad. Embarrassingly so. Tears come fast, uninvited. I don’t feel like the saltwater belongs to me, so I let it run freely. Jane and Troy begin readying their arms to get high. I know what’s coming. I know it all too well, the ritual of escape. The practice of ending the day through the sting of numbing oneself. For me, it wasn’t needles, but it might as well’ve been.
“Please,” I whisper. “Don’t do this.”
Troy ignores me.
Jane turns and forces a weak smile. “Got any better ideas?”
I leave the Shamrock House, but it doesn’t leave me. Ghosts will follow you, right on out the door of any abandoned space you might explore, whether they’ve been invited them or not. Later, I find out that more than 5,000 people died at the hands of an overdose in Texas in 2024, roughly 16 drug overdose-related deaths per 100,000 people, which is, unfortunately, well below the national average of about 24 drug overdose deaths per 100,000 people.
Though the national average has dropped significantly since 2021, that still feels like way too many deaths.
