Behind the Locked Door
By: Elizabeth Cowan
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Who willingly leases a house which includes a never-to-be-opened locked room??
The locked-door device is popular with thriller writers. Many of those gullible and manipulated female stories were written prior to the strong female literary device so popular in the twenty-first century. A change from times women were frequently considered property and had little or no protection from domineering authority figures or spouses.
Countless books and movies have incorporated the locked room concept which often tends to heighten the thriller element of a story. For various reasons, deciding between a plethora of selections, several similarly formulated stories remain firmly entrenched in this lady’s memory.
One is Charlotte Bront?’s classic tale, Jane Eyre. Eighteen-year-old, Jane falls hopelessly in love with forty-year-old Edward Rochester, who is a kindred spirit in many ways. He offers the affection-starve girl love and a home.
Like countless females, Bront?’s Jane is an impressionable young woman. She falls in love too easily. In some respects, her character is typical of the gullible girls we find in horror films.
As an orphan, Jane experienced abuse and loneliness at the hands of her family and the Lowood Institution. The school is similar to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, which Charlotte Bront? attended with her older sisters.
A more gruesome book this lady read and, warped as she is, enjoyed was The Locked Door by Freida McFadden. You need to read it to get the full effect of that story.
However, among the folk tales written down by Charles Perault, who introduced the fairytale genre was, Bluebeard. Like many of the original European versions of unsanitized fairytales, Bluebeard is a tale this lady has never forgotten.
As is the case with most folk tales, there is a true background for Bluebeard’s story. According to a notation on Wikipedia, it is based on “Henri Désiré Landru?(12 April 1869 – 25 February 1922) a French serial killer, nicknamed the Bluebeard of Gambais. He murdered at least seven women in the village of Gambais between December 1915 and January 1919.”
Fitting in with the attitudes of the nineteenth and earlier centuries, Bluebeard is a cautionary story of a predator who likes control over his women. He is ugly but still manages to negate that defect and win over the reluctant young women through extravagant displays of wealth.
While Bluebeard is away on a trip, his curious young wife opens the forbidden door and finds the bodies of his previous wives. Even though the story has a happy ending, it also delivers somewhat of a moral for young women. “Keep curiosity and temptation under control.”?(online British Library). ?
In hindsight, now that she is an adult, that room must have had amazing insulation to keep the smell of death from permeating the entire house.
This lady’s true locked-door story is not gruesome.
When she was in college, her father accepted a philosophy professorship at the University of Oklahoma. She was tasked to find and rent a home for the family.
Her parents sent her to Norman, on a 72-hour bus ride from Philadelphia. She spent the entire trip with cash stashed in her bra worrying about losing the money and hoping her choice would please them.
A realtor recommended by the people instrumental in hiring her father showed her several houses. But she picked a spacious two-story home only three blocks from the campus.
Once the papers were signed, the realtor disclosed that under no circumstance was the locked room downstairs to be opened. She shuddered as her mind immediately called up the tale of Bluebeard.
Thinking back, this lady recalls countless nights when she swore that door opened. Yes, her imagination was always on the wild side. And there was no limit to the places her imagination traveled.
But what if a killer lived in that room? What if he roamed Norman’s streets, slaughtering innocent people during his nightly wanderings?
What if someone lived in that room? Was it a recluse who shunned people? Did the person sneak food from the kitchen while the family slept?
The answer was disappointing.
The owner used it for storage.
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