THE LAST CHRISTMAS OF THE LAWSON FAMILY

 THE LAST CHRISTMAS OF THE LAWSON FAMILY 

A few days before Christmas 1929, Charlie Lawson, a sharecropper from Germanton, North Carolina, took his family to town to buy new clothes and then take a picture. They seemed happy, but on the holiday he killed the entire family. The only survivor was his son Arthur, who had been sent out hours earlier to run some errands.

After saying goodbye to his two daughters, Carrie and Maybell, aged 12 and 7 respectively, who were going to their uncle's house, Charlie shot them at point-blank range with a 12-gauge shotgun, hiding their bodies in the barn.

A few minutes later, entering the house, he shot his wife and, going through the rooms, one by one, his other children, Marie, aged 17, James, aged 4, Raymond, aged 2, and Mary Lou, aged just 4 months. Except for the youngest daughter, whom he decided to beat to death, all of whom were hit with a shotgun blast.

After killing his family, he went into the woods and committed suicide. Near his body the police found numerous footprints, it seems in fact that the man before committing suicide, walked from one side to the other in that precise area, as if obsessed by something.

On his return Arthur, I repeat, the only survivor of the massacre, found himself in front of a scene that he would never have imagined, a decidedly terrifying scene, his mother and the rest of the family lying on the ground with their arms crossed and their heads resting on a stone.

To this day the reasons that pushed the man to commit such an act are completely unknown, however there are some hypotheses in this regard. According to some, it seems that the man had raped and impregnated Marie, his eldest daughter, and that out of shame, given that the family would also have been "branded" for life by such an event, he decided to exterminate her.

The other instead speaks of an accident at work that had happened a few weeks before and that probably, causing him a strong trauma, led him to commit the massacre.

But the story doesn't end here, what happened in the days following the funeral is no less shocking, in fact the brother of the murderer transformed the farm into a sort of horror museum, where among the various objects connected to the massacre, he even put on display the cake that the young Marie had prepared for Christmas.

Over the years, however, the tombs of the unfortunate family have become a tourist attraction for thousands of people, who still today, visiting them, hope to be able to see their ghosts