The house of Dies Drear lay in a secret location near Columbus, Ohio, during the mid-19th century. Filled with with it's secret passageways, hidden rooms, and underground caverns, it was a key location on the Underground Railroad, helping slaves.
A hundred years later, the characters in Virginia Hamilton’s mystery novel about the place see it for the first time as it “loomed out of the mist and murky sky, not only gray and formless, but huge and unnatural. It seems to crouch on the side of the hill… It had a dark, isolated look about it that set it at odds with all that was living.
“It had a century-old legend—two fugitive slaves had been killed by bounty hunters after leaving its passageways, and Dies Drear himself, the abolitionist who had made the house into a station on the Underground Railroad, had been murdered there. The ghosts of the three were said to walk its rooms…”
In a 1984 film adaptation of the story, a young black man and his family move into a home in rural Ohio, and discover that during the Civil War it was used by Dutch immigrant Dies Drear to smuggle runaway slaves to freedom. The film stars Howard Rollins, Jr., Moses Gunn, Shavar Ross, and Joe Seneca.
Eery antics begin soon after the family moves in, and suspense builds as they seek to discover the secrets of the haunted house.
