The Alison House on Allison Road in Bluff City, Tennessee went from antebellum grandeur to ruins until it finally had to be demolished because of miscreants who continued to set fire to the landmark and because of the fires, the abandoned home began to receive the probably undue reputation for being haunted or perhaps even the residence of evil. Some of the most common pieces of misinformation were presented by someone posting on Ghosts & Spirits of Tennessee:I moved here 10 years ago and this is what I heard about the old Allison House.... That back in the 1800's, old man Allison had slaves that he kept chained in the basement at night. One day he died while they were still chained & by the time they were found, they were all dead. Then back in the 80's or 90's that Satan Worshippers took over the house & the county came in and tried to burn it down & it wouldn't burn so they bulldozed it. Any of this true? (Ghosts & Spirits of Tennessee)There is no truth to any of these claims. First, as revealed by Carolyn Sakowski’s 1993 book Touring the East Tennessee Backroads, the house was built in 1856 by Jesse Alison. The 1860 Sullivan County Census provided through TNGenNet documents that that year he was a single, 58-year-old farmer without slaves. Another misconception is that the home was the site of devil-worship. Stories from the time of “Satanic panic” can be instantaneously discredited. In fact, in 1992 the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia concluded there was no evidence of ritual satanic abuse at all. However, people who did trespass into the home did see quasi-Satanic imagery, which was popular at the time but did not indicate devil-worship.Another story that evolved from the times of Satanic panic and connected to the house was that there was a hellmouth, or an “entrance to Hell envisaged as the gaping mouth of a huge monster, an image which first appears in Anglo-Saxon art, and then spread all over Europe, remaining very common in depictions of the Last Judgment and Harrowing of Hell until the end of the Middle Ages, and still sometimes used during the Renaissance and after” (Wikipedia) underneath the ballroom on the first floor. This was because there was a well underneath the floor and in fashion with movies inspired by Kabuki theatre, the floor was partially gone leaving the insidious well exposed. Rumors that this was a hellmouth that spit fire every Halloween night began to circulate, but not because the well was a hellmouth but because vandals set fire to the house on the one night of the year when people think of supposedly haunted houses. Not so coincidentally, the movie The Gate, where "three young children accidentally release a horde of nasty, pint-sized demons from a hole in a suburban backyard" (IMDb) was released onto affordable VHS soon before this rumor began circulating. Another rumor about the disembodied screams of children began to circulate because of the number of fires in the home. The main story behind this myth was that the mansion was once an orphanage and that one night children were left to burn alive when the house caught on fire. There is absolutely no evidence that the house was at any time an orphanage or that anyone was burned alive inside. In 1993 Sakowski wrote about the desperate disrepair of the home and the attempts to preserve it:The Jesse Alison Mansion is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Unfortunately, it is unoccupied and is in a sad state of disrepair. The chain-link fence topped with barbed wire makes the house look like a prison camp, but locals say it does little to hamper the vandals and trespassers that have set several fires inside. In fact, locals say the fence simply slows down the firefighters a bit, since they have to cut through the lock to get inside to fight the fires. The structure has withstood these fires primarily because its walls are three to four bricks thick. The house boasts three full stories, plus a cellar and an attic. It once had three-story porches, but those disappeared long ago. Despite its current state, you can still envision how magnificent this house must have been when it was built in 1856. (Sakowski, ps. 83 – 84)The home and fence are gone now and the “hellmouth” has been closed, all because of the ridiculous stories surrounding the stigmatized property.