Every Sunday until my parents got divorced my Mom, Dad, and I would climb into the car – the make, model, and even color hasn’t stuck in my memory – to go to church. First Presbyterian Church was, I thought, the most beautiful building in downtown Greensboro. To me it looked like a castle, its red brick exterior flanked with stained-glass windows and continuing up so high that my tiny self figured the spires at the top reached heaven itself. Mom told me the bell tower I heard every Sunday was up on the roof, but in all the Sundays we went there I could never stand tall enough to see it. To me, that building had been around forever and ever.
I know now that First Presbyterian of North Elm Street was a relatively new building. The ground for the church was broken in 1927, and it was designed in the Gothic Revival style decades after it fell out of popularity among architects. Still, though, as I picture it in my head I can see the sun shining through the window depicting Jesus sitting on his throne in Heaven, painting the white hair of the older members of the congregation in hues of blue, red, green, and orange. I still long to climb the ancient magnolia trees outside, especially because they were all roped off to prevent kids like me from breaking limbs, wooden and bone. Like most children I was never over-the-moon-excited to listen to a church service for an hour in the morning, but there was another reason I dreaded the ride to church: the Haunted House.
First Presbyterian only had about 40 parking spaces at the bottom of the stairs leading to the sanctuary, so most of the congregation needed to find parking on the streets surrounding the church. Both of my parents had lived in Greensboro for years, which gave us an advantage when it came to finding backstreets to park on that weren’t too much of a walk to the church. We always took the same route, turning right into the Historic Fisher Park neighborhood and following the road before making a right again, leading us to a street adjacent to the church. Same route, same drive by the Haunted House.
I never knew if anyone died in that house, but even if someone told me no one had I likely wouldn’t have believed them. I watched Disney’s “The Haunted Mansion” enough times to know that sprawling stone houses covered in vines were filled with haunts (not happy ones, despite what the movie said). The Haunted House was – from what I could see from my position peeking out from the backseat of the car – two or three stories, constructed from stone and brick with a sprawling front yard. It was decorated with wooden slats like Snow White’s cottage, but I couldn’t tell how much of the exterior was ornamented because it had been overtaken with kudzu, like so many abandoned houses I’d seen before. The thing is, though, that house wasn’t abandoned; I could see eyes in some of the windows, I always thought.
Little eyes, all in the windows.
Ghosts going through walls, probably in clothes from different time periods.
Furniture covered in dust.
Candelabras floating down a hallway.
As it turns out, my imagination wasn’t too far off.
12 years after my parents divorced and we stopped going to church every Sunday, I was in homeroom. My homeroom teacher was talking about how the TV show Hoarders had been filming an episode in her neighborhood. Apparently the amount of stuff coming out of the house meant one of the main streets she used to get home was constantly blocked off with industrial-sized dumpsters and piles of furniture. I never watched Hoarders, but I was still surprised that I somehow hadn’t heard about the A&E film crew being in our town.
“You know that big house near downtown? That’s the house. The Julian Price House, where Sandra Cowart lives.”
That big house? My Haunted House? It had a name and a living occupant? And I had no idea for all those years.
When I discovered the name of the house, I looked it up to learn some basic information. The Julian Price House was designed and built in 1929 for the businessman Julian Price and his wife by Charles C. Hartmann, the same architect who designed the O. Henry Hotel on North Elm Street. It was not two or three stories, as I always thought, but four stories high with 31 rooms. Of course, though, the top search results on my initial internet sweep were all related to the Hoarders presence in Greensboro for more reason than one.
Apparently, the house was so massive and filled with so much stuff that the episode being filmed would need to be two hours long rather than a full hour. That cemented Greensboro in Hoarders TV history. That, and the fact that the situation the homeowner found herself in was particularly sad, which Hoarders is known to exploit. At one time, Sandra Cowart was a renowned interior designer. She built an empire on her own and moved into the house in 1975, with the house being listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. Sometime that same year, Cowart’s husband filed for a divorce. Rather than leaving the home, she made the decision to stay. That, according to her family, was when the hoarding started.
By 2017, all 31 rooms in the house were filled floor-to-ceiling with a variety of items ranging from massive furniture pieces to lipstick tubes from the 80s. Hoarding is considered a mental illness, and the physical manifestation of Cowart’s illness was these rooms filled with items she couldn’t seem to get rid of. She stopped working when she reached her elderly years, and she could no longer pay for the house. So, as a result, the home was foreclosed on in 2016. It was sold to a couple for just over $440,000 in 2017. The program not only planned to show the inside of the house as it was emptied, but also how the new owners of the house would claim the property Sandra had continued living in despite the foreclosure. No one from the bank could safely enter the house, so she had continued inhabiting it almost silently, as she always had. My homeroom teacher said Cowart had taken to spying on neighbors. She had even been known to trail people who were walking alone in the neighborhood, which was a common occurrence since there was a nature park right in the middle of it.
I remember when the opening credits came on because it showed the front room of the house in sweeping panoramic shots, and we couldn’t believe that the entire house was hoarded. I also remember it because of the eyes.
When the episode came out on TV, it seemed like everyone in town tuned in. My Mom, grandma, and I sat at the television while we ate dinner just so we could see footage of the inside of a historic home which hadn’t been seen by the public since the late 70s. On the show, crew members and a psychologist who goes to all of the sites tried to help Sandra accept the reality of her situation, but dealing with losing everything she had accumulated, her house included, proved to be too much. The couple who bought the house had no idea that she was still living there, and they tried as hard as they could to give her resources to help her, but she turned it all down. Hoarders is, by nature, exploitative. It films people as they are faced with losing everything and parades them to the world like they’re in a side-show. I remember feeling so much sadness for Sandra, and sadness for the couple who bought the house, and sadness that no one tried to step in sooner. Most of all, though, one thing sticks with me: the eyes.
In every window they showed, Cowart had placed dolls of all sizes and stuffed animals of all colors. Without fail, the windows were stacked from floor-to-ceiling with artificial eyes, as if each room was a spider perched in a web. The furniture, although it was all beautiful at one time, had deteriorated and collected dust. There were even candelabras lining the various mantles of fireplaces around the house, just barely visible from certain camera angles. Instead of a ghost there was just one woman, whose mind had slowly declined as she was surrounding herself with all those eyes.
