Did People Really Die in the ‘Evil Dead’ Cabin? Here’s What Actually Happened.

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Turn off all ads on VICE.com Exclusive New VICE Documentaries Member Exclusive Features & Columns Join Now Digital Annual $ 20.00 / year Turn off all ads on VICE.com Exclusive New VICE Documentaries Member Exclusive Features & Columns Join Now Print & Digital $ 70.00 / year Turn off all ads on VICE.com Exclusive New VICE Documentaries Member Exclusive Features & Columns 4 Magazines Delivered to Your Door Join Now Skip to content Share: Share on X (Opens in new window)X Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Facebook Share using Native toolsShareCopied to clipboard Add Us On Google While discussing his first commercial film, The Evil Dead, in a 1982 interview, director Sam Raimi shared what he said was the backstory of the creepy cabin featured in the movie. According to him, the cabin had been built roughly 100 years prior, and the man who’d initially lived in it died within a week of its construction. Somewhere around 1910, a family of three moved in: a young girl along with her mother and grandmother. One night during a thunderstorm, the girl reportedly found her mom and grandma dead in their beds and fled to a nearby farm.

As Raimi tells it, the folks at the farmhouse ended up raising the girl, who’d coincidentally gone missing while they were shooting The Evil Dead in 1979. A man from the farm apparently came by looking for her at the cabin because she’d been known to wander over there when it was storming. It was this unidentified person that Raimi claimed to have gotten the story from. And as if that all wasn’t eerie enough, the cabin supposedly got struck by lightning and burned to the ground a week after production wrapped.

However, the validity of this information has been called into question more recently. Although it’s true that the cabin from the film burned down, the rest of the story appears to be made up. That doesn’t necessarily mean Raimi concocted it; he could very well have heard it from one of the locals in Tennessee, where The Evil Dead was shot. But a relative of the property’s former owner has come forward with conflicting details since then.

As it turns out, the cabin was actually built in the late 1960s, and was not the site of any mysterious deaths in the short time that it existed. T.L. Shockley, who owned the property, eventually grew tired of the unwanted visitors that the movie attracted and decided to burn the place down in 1982. This was done without permission from the county, but the police evidently just hung the blame on kids and forgot about it. All that remains of the iconic cabin today is an old brick fireplace, which was kept in the hopes that the house could be rebuilt at some point in the future.

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