Tag Archives: Drew Mansion

Harry Crews’s Childhood Nightmare Northside

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The novelist Harry Crews chronicled how Jacksonville imported desperation from half the state of Georgia. It offered hope, but required human sacrifice. First coming to Jax when his stepfather-uncle aimed a rifle at his mother’s head, Harry lived in half a dozen houses across the Northside, all of which his family called “the Springfield Section.” When Harper Lee read Crews’s second novel, she said William Faulkner had come back to life.

The Buried Head Behind the Drew Mansion

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Something was down there. They knelt in the muck and bramble, peered closer, and finally one boy fished his fingers around in the hole and fell backward in fear.

Wire services reported that locals called it “the haunted house.” United Press International referred to it as “the Haunted House of Jacksonville.”