The family’s nightmare began before dawn Thursday.
It was already pouring outside when the husband woke around 4 a.m. The rain wouldn’t stop for hours. It would end up as the wettest March 10 ever recorded in Vicksburg, Miss.
The husband swung his legs out of bed. He picked up his 5-year-old son. Then he walked toward the garage to start his wife’s car.
That’s when Rafael McCloud slipped out of the shadows with a knife.
McCloud had escaped from a nearby jail, where the 34-year-old was held on charges of raping and murdering a woman more than twice his age. For eight days, he had evaded authorities by shuttling between abandoned properties. Now he had found a new home.
Never mind that it was already occupied.
McCloud tied up the man as his wife and their son watched in terror.
Three hours later, police would receive a 911 call from the residence.
They would race through the rain to the yellow brick house on Fort Hill Drive.
And there, in the bathtub, they would find a dead body — just not the one they feared.
A real-life American horror story
The past nine months have tested the residents of Vicksburg, a city so far south its nickname is the Gibraltar of the Confederacy. It sits on the edge of the Mississippi River, within sight of Louisiana.
It is a place haunted by its past: by slavery, by lynchings and by more recent horrors.
Few are as fearsome as the tale of Rafael McCloud.
It is a real-life American horror story, involving rape, murder, kidnapping and a haunted house.
And like many horror stories, it begins and ends with a corpse.
The first body appeared last summer.
Rafael McCloud, 34, is shown in this undated picture released by the Warren County Sheriff’s Department, in Mississippi. (Warren County Sheriff’s Department via Reuters)
On June 29, 2015, a group of ghost hunters sneaked inside the Kuhn Memorial State Hospital. The abandoned hospital had long been considered haunted, drawing supernatural thrill-seekers from across the country. It was even the scene for a locally produced horror flick, featuring an evil clown.
But the blood that the ghost hunters spotted on the hospital floor was all too genuine. They followed the trail of gore through the collapsing hospital, down a flight of stairs and outside. In a patch of tall grass, they found the body of a woman.
She had been raped, beaten and shot in the head, a coroner would later determine.
Earlier that day, police in Leland, an hour north of Vicksburg, pulled over a stolen car. Inside sat Rafael McCloud, his 20-year-old nephew and a stolen gun.
When police ran the car’s plates, they realized it belonged to Sharen Wilson, a 69-year-old woman in Vicksburg. They called Vicksburg police, who found Wilson’s house ransacked.
“We checked, and she was not there,” Vicksburg Police Chief Walter Armstrong told the Clarion-Ledger.
Under questioning, Rafael McCloud admitted to robbing Wilson, but said he left her near the side of the road, according to CBS.
Cops were searching for Wilson when the ghost-hunters found her body.