Whateley house¶

The Whateley house (also the Whateley residence) is a cookie-cutter suburban home in Radford, Virginia where the Whateley family lived, with a shrine-like bedroom, a comatose son's room, and a root cellar under the garage that holds a mummified body, a spacesuit and, according to the police, Wilbur's journal.


Type	Location (house)
Aliases	Whateley residence; the root cellar; the hidden basement
Region	A neighborhood near the Lucky house, within a mile of it, bordering the woods
Inhabitants	Yobiah Whateley, Irene Whateley, Wilbur Whateley; formerly Abelforth Whateley
First appearance	Radford Horror 01 (mentioned); first visited in Radford Horror 02
Appearances	Radford Horror 01, 02, 06, 07, 08

Description¶

The house sits in a nicer, cookie-cutter subdivision than the Luckys' neighborhood. The yard is bare of toys, flags or signs and slightly neglected, with a double driveway (Radford Horror 02). The kitchen has a panoramic window by the mud door; the tree line is about fifty feet away. Upstairs are the parents' room and bath at the front and the twins' rooms at the back. The garage is crammed with dusty outdoor sports gear, a small boat and a jet ski. The whole house smells musty (Radford Horror 02; Radford Horror 06).

The woods behind the house are part of the national forest; dense ground cover hides tracks within about a dozen feet. Houses sit in enclaves, one direction leading back to civilization within a mile and others leading miles into forest (Radford Horror 02).

Notable places within¶

The kitchen window. Where Irene stood at the sink, dropped her pan and walked into the woods (Radford Horror 02).
Abe's room. An untouched shrine: a shuttle poster, star-and-moon pajamas, a UFO painting, and shelves of UFO and pop-science books. The Biz finds a hidden book of amateur alien-abduction illustrations, a hollowed-out Where the Sidewalk Ends holding $120 to $130, overdue library books, and a receive-only Circuit City radio tuned to the same Art Bell station as the Pay n' Stay clerk (see Abe's radio) (Radford Horror 02).
Wilbur's room. A boy in a wheelchair slumped by the window among pinned butterflies and insects (Radford Horror 02).
The parents' room. Prozac and lithium prescribed by Dr. Lori, both expired with pills left (Radford Horror 02).
The root cellar. An unfinished cellar under the garage, entered through rotten double doors under a tarp and padlocked. It is about five feet high and hung with ratty tarps. It holds a dog skeleton, shredded fibers, a root-like growth wrapped around a floor joist, discarded spacesuit pieces and a mummified teenager (Radford Horror 06).

History of events there¶

The Radford Horror¶

Radford Horror 01. Sheriff Roosevelt mentions that Mrs. Whateley, a neighbor less than a mile from the Luckys, saw something from her kitchen window while making dinner, put down her pan and walked into the night while her husband watched. The house itself is not yet visited (Radford Horror 01).
Radford Horror 02. The team visits the morning after. Yobiah ignores a glass of water while neighbors fuss; forensics has already dusted the kitchen. The Biz tracks two sets of footprints about the same size, one with a heavier shoe, lost after about a dozen feet. Yobiah says Irene looked "surprised" rather than angry or scared and thought it was a coyote. Neighbor Meg Gunderson blames Abe. The team learns that one son (Abe) robbed a store in a homemade spacesuit and vanished, and the other (Wilbur) crashed a car and has not spoken since (Radford Horror 02).
Radford Horror 06. After a stakeout from the water tower, the team sees a craft descend on the Whateley backyard; Huell tackles a spacesuited boy in a clearing and is lifted above the treeline (see Radford Moth). Later that night, treating it as hot pursuit, Kurt picks the lock and the team sweeps the dark house. Mr. Whateley is unresponsive on sleeping pills. In the third room, Wilbur lies in bed beside his wheelchair, smelling musty and clammy; smelling salts bring only a vacant stare and soft crying. In the garage Kurt finds the cellar doors; the Biz and Kurt cut the padlock and discover the mummified teenager nailed to the wall through the wrists and ankles in a NASA T-shirt, head stove in. The Biz hides a live radio bug behind the loose flag patch of the handmade spacesuit. About 11:30 p.m. Wilbur's room is empty: he went out the window. In the morning Mr. Whateley is led out nearly catatonic during the canvass (Radford Horror 06).
Radford Horror 07. The sheriff is dismantling the house for forensic examination, which Kurt fears will expose "the garage" (Radford Horror 07).
Radford Horror 08. The police theory is that a hidden basement contained the spaceman costume with a journal and the body of Abelforth Whateley, "never ran away," killed around April 17th; Wilbur is cast as a serial killer. The journal records the larva found June 3rd and hatching August 15th (Radford Horror 08). See Wilbur's journal and Spaceman suit.

Trivia¶

Dante repeatedly calls Abelforth "Albert" at the table. Ezra's summary of the cellar: "Corpse cellar alien really rolls off the tongue" (Radford Horror 06).
The team calls the space a root cellar under the garage; the sheriff's department, in Radford Horror 08, calls it a hidden basement under the residence. The police say the body is probably Abelforth but that DNA and dental testing is still under way; the identification is never confirmed on screen (Radford Horror 08).