The Truth About Owl Creek Farm

October 28th, 2007 at 07:02pm Post Staff 43

WOODY CREEK, COLORADO (Post Time News)—In a revelatory interview with the Guardian of London in October 2005, the widow of the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson drew the curtain back on Owl Creek Farm and the picture is not the roseate picture that predominated after the gonzo journalist’s suicide in 2005.

Anita Thompson said there was “dark side” to Thompson and she called him the “lord of the underworld.” Before his death, she had been recently staying with her mother because “things were so bad.” She also said that she succumbed to the drug culture that surrounded her husband, and that she and the writer had tried to have a child.

“'I was curious,” she told Rachel Cooke of the Guardian, “so I tried it all. I ended up with a serious drug problem. But after about two years I realized (sic), I can't keep up with this guy. There were so many drunk people around, I thought, someone's got to stay sober. It was hard to get off it because of the environment, but it was either that or I'd have to leave. He didn't like to lose a party buddy, but he was supportive. My rehab was in a drugs den! His motto was: it's wrong when it stops being fun. It wasn't fun for me; it was horrible. But it was fun for him right up until the very end.”

On her visit her to Owl Creek Farm eight months after Hunter Thompson's death, the British journalist found time was still standing still for Hunter Thompson’s widow.

“The experience is like being in some crazy, hippie version of Sale of the Century,” Cooke writes. “In the living room, I see: a cactus, a stuffed alligator, a small cannon, an exercise bike, a ram's head, a stuffed crow, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, an owl, a human skull and a blue candle in the shape of a woman with its wicks as nipples. In the kitchen, Hunter's handwritten notes--'Let's get stoned and have orgasms and laugh a lot' --are stuck to every wall. So, too, are photographs of him. In one, he is wearing lipstick and a pink wig. It is captioned: 'Hunter's aunt visits, September 2004.' On a kitchen counter is a lamp. On its shade hang some 30 pairs of Hunter's spectacles, their glass still smeared with his fingerprints.”

“I know,” Anita Thompson said to Cooke during her visit to Owl Creek Farm. “I have an obligation to let go. My family says that. My mother says, "You don't want to live in a shrine. But it isn't a shrine. I did let go. I had to. I just don't... can't change things, that's all.'

Thompson also told Cooke she and her late husband had tried to get pregnant.

“We were trying to have a kid,” she said in the interview.

The final months of his life—with the writer in pain from a broken leg and back surgery—were particularly difficult for his wife as well.

“You bet I felt worn down by it,' she said. “It was hard. He was hard on people. It was hell.”

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