Editor's note: This story was originally published (with additional photography) in the Spring 2016 edition of This Land.
"My ashes, as the phoenix, may bring forth / A bird that will revenge upon you all." —William Shakespeare
1. In a Lonely Place
A cold rain is falling in Enid, Oklahoma. Inside Garfield Furniture, customers bustle, their shoes squeaking on the burnished wood floor. I seem to be the only one waiting to see a historical oddity the locals call “the Death Room.” (They smirk when they say it.) When there’s a lull in the trade, the proprietor greets me and guides me up a narrow staircase.
A century ago the furniture store was a hotel, and on the second floor its honeycomb of tiny rooms is mostly intact, and mostly crammed with excess inventory. He takes me into the Death Room, the walls of which are covered with tatters of turn-of-the-century wallpaper. In this narrow cell—maybe six feet wide, with walls reaching far short of the ceiling—the furniture is a century old. It’s set up as if for living—an iron bedstead with a thin mattress, a wash stand and basin, a table and hard-backed chair.
An array of photocopied documents covers the bed: insurance maps showing the location of the town’s businesses 96 years ago, a handwritten will, newspaper clippings, and a photograph of a mummified corpse sitting in a chair, eyes wide, with a newspaper spread in its lap.