A.B. Blass, who delivered newspapers in Monroeville, remembers,"The house of the mysterious neighbor was something like this one. I delivered papers on this street. I would go ... where the dark, shuttered house was. All of us my age were afraid of it.
"Well, I got up enough nerve to get up real close to the house and throw the paper on the porch. One day I threw it and it hit near the door, and I saw this hand come out to get the paper. So I got off my bike and mustered up my courage and went up and kicked it a little bit further. He knew I was there, so he didn't do anything. The next day, I went up and threw it right where he could get it, and watched his hand come out.
"You see, we'd never seen this person, except for maybe an eye through a hole in the slats of the shutters. After about a week or two of courage, I went up and took the paper and knocked against the door and dropped it on the floor. And he reached down and got it. I was taking the paper every afternoon about 4 o'clock. Finally, I got to where I would knock on the door with the paper, and he would reach out and take it out of my hand.
"The school ground was directly behind the mysterious house. If the children that played on the school yard would kick the ball over the fence, nobody would go over and get it.
"After the book came out, the thing that was really strange to me was people would ask me, 'How about the book? Do you think this is typical?' I would say, 'I think this could have happened in any small town in south Alabama'.
"I have a librarian friend in Mississippi to whom I gave an autographed copy, and she said, 'Oh, A.B., this could have happened here. We have a similar "strange" situation here in Mississippi.'
"I talked to somebody in Florida, and it's the same thing there, too." |
