The (Mis)adventures of Jyl: Pazuzu’s House

Jyl is taking us to North Carolina for her dirtiest misadventure yet in the most mundane of places, Clemmons, NC…

Welcome back, misadventurers. This week, we’re heading to Clemmons, North Carolina, where one house became the whole problem. And yes, a lot of neighborhoods have a house people avoid. But this went far beyond that one house every kid swears is haunted.

Welcome to the home of Pazuzu Alagard. The house on Knob Hill Drive looked a little rough around the edges at first glance, but not uniquely so. Plenty of homes slip into disrepair. This one only separated itself once people understood what was happening beyond the front door.

The house belonged to Cynthia James, but it became infamous because of her son, Pazuzu Algarad. Born John Alexander Lawson, he legally changed his name in 2002 and built a reputation around Satanism, violence, drugs, and deliberate filth. He lived there with his mother, and the house deteriorated while it was still occupied by them, which is part of what makes the situation difficult to explain in any logical way.

Inside, the house was filthy in a way that made “neglected” feel like a compliment. Trash covered the floors. Graffiti on the walls. Used food containers, broken objects, urine, feces, and decaying animals had built up until the rooms stopped functioning as rooms. The walls were smeared and stained. Reports described flies, rot, and an overwhelming smell that seemed to settle into the structure itself. Think of the worst thing you’ve ever seen on Hoarders and then crank that up eleven. Even the front door was wild.

What unsettles me most about places like this isn’t just the state of the building alone. It’s that people were still living there and intentionally coming over. Spending time there. Sleeping there. Coming back. The house became part spectacle, part warning, and a place people talked about with the kind of uneasy fascination that manifests when something is clearly wrong, yet nobody did anything about it.

It’s not like there was a clear turning point where the house was abandoned and then collapsed into what it became because of squatters or teenagers braking in to party. It all happened in plain view. The filth accumulated and was allowed to continue. That makes the place harder to process than an isolated ruin or a sealed-off property. This was a lived-in space that crossed a line and kept going.

Then, in 2014, investigators found human remains buried on the property. Two bodies in the backyard changed the scale of the story immediately. Whatever the house had been before that point, the discovery narrowed it. The horrors stopped being abstract.

That’s the part that lingers. Not just the condition of the house, although that would have been enough, but the proximity of everything. The decay, the buried bodies, the nearby homes, the regular rhythm of neighborhood life carrying on around it. Just a house people passed by and side-eyed, and a situation that kept worsening until it went way too far.

The house was demolished in 2015. What’s left now is an empty lot, which feels appropriate. As far as the public record shows, it has stayed that way. If you’d like to read more about the full story behind the house, check out Darren “Ninetoes” Perdue’s May 1st article here.

Jyl Glenn is a writer, editor, formatter, anthologist, poet, and a medical-legal writer and consultant. Her lifelong love affair with horror began at a very early age when she was left unattended on the weekend Poltergeist debuted on HBO. And then she figured out she could read any horror book she liked as long as she hung out at the public library, even if the librarian deemed it not to be age appropriate. Jyl was born and raised in New York and now lives in Tulsa with her dog and kitten. She loves creepy art, dark poetry, and pink dinosaurs. When she isn’t dabbling in the macabre—she’s most likely asleep.

PLEASE NOTE: The views and opinions of the staff of Memento Mori Ink do not necessarily represent those of Memento Mori Ink or Crystal Lake Publishing. Thank you for understanding.