Backstory “Haunted” mansion

By EMMA RUBY

Oak Cliff’s ‘haunted’ mansion

The time an exotic pet collection inspired paranormal rumors among high schoolers

Charles Kirtley was a high school student in the late ’50s when he began to hear rumors of a haunted house located at the corner of Camp Wisdom Road and South Hampton Road.

The house had been built nearly 30 years earlier, in 1933, and stood on nine acres of land. And, there were reports that screams for help could be heard from the property. The paranormal story sensationalized the teenagers of the area.

Unbeknownst to his classmates, the home was owned by Kirtley’s great aunt, and he grew up visiting her, and the house, often.

“I could not really say anything about that being my great aunt’s house because everybody in that school knew that was the haunted house,” Kirtley says.

Kirtley found himself amused by his peers’ whispers of ghosts as he knew the real reason behind the strange sounds that would come from the plantation-style mansion and its grounds.

Kirtley’s great aunt, Laura Suddarth, raised peacocks.

While peacock experts may have more scientific ways to describe the noise made by the bird, it is fair to say that to an untrained ear, the scream sounds similar to a high-pitched wail for help.

So no, Kirtley says, his great aunt never held hostages or hosted ghosts. She just really, really loved peacocks.

Kirtley thinks that Suddarth may have gotten the idea to raise peacocks from a friend in Kentucky, where she lived before moving to Oak Cliff. However, while the exotic breeding may have begun as a hobby, it eventually became a full-blown business.

“She incubated the eggs, and a lot of times she raised them herself,” Kirtley says.

The flocks lived in pens to keep predatory animals away, and Suddarth’s birds were sold all over the world.

Kirtley — a member of Kimball High School’s first graduating class — says he would often take his dates to the house to impress them as long as they swore secrecy about his connection to it.

As word about the peacocks spread around town, high schoolers would drive onto the property and attempt to startle the birds to hear their cry. Suddarth, not one to turn a blind eye to the mistreatment, spent evenings sitting in a second-story window with her .410 shotgun.

“She’d say, ‘Some of your friends or your classmates pulled up my driveway last night, and I shot one of their headlights,’” Kirtley says. “And I’d say, ‘Lala, you’ve got to stop; you’re going to hurt somebody.’”

Kirtley says raising peacocks was just one of a litany of quirks about his beloved great aunt.

Suddarth and her husband were some of the first members of Oak Cliff Country Club, where she loved to golf. Her husband, Robert Donnell Suddarth, was a board chairman for the Oak Cliff Bank & Trust Company and was known as “Mr. Oak Cliff” around town.

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Kirtley says Suddarth could often be spotted at a distance due to the signature pink cars she loved to drive, most notably a 1956 Cadillac Sedan DeVille.

When Suddarth died in 1978 at age 92, the house was sold and changed hands several times, Kirtley says.

At one point it became the set of a movie, Tender Mercies, starring Robert Duvall. Kirtley says the movie is “pretty good.”

The home is now part of a large swath of land owned by Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship after minister Anthony “Tony” Evans and his wife bought the property in 2003.

And the ghost stories that once haunted the home on the corner of South Hampton and Camp Wisdom have all but faded.

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Suddarth, who was known around town as

“Mr. Oak Cliff.” Photography by Emil Lippe.

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