PICHER, Okla. — Three abandoned houses in Picher burned to the ground Sunday night, authorities said.
Two of the houses were featured in a recent hard-core horror film, “Bad Girls Burn in Hell,’’ that was filmed in Picher earlier this month by deathfactoryinc.com.
Johnny Seeling, with the Twin Bridges Co., said two of houses were to be demolished, but that one of the houses had been sold to a family who was planning to move it to a new location outside of Picher. Seeling said the family had placed a deposit on the property, which he said he has refunded to them.
Seeling said he received a telephone call at 4 a.m. today that the houses had been torched. Seeling said the houses were unoccupied and that the utilities at each house had been disconnected.
“It’s obvious someone intentionally set them on fire,’’ he said. “That side of the street has been cleared of houses.’’
A spokesman for the fire department in Picher could not be reached for comment.
The Twin Bridges Co., until recently, held the contract to either demolish or move structures that were bought out by the Lead-Impacted Communities Relocation Assistance Trust. Residents of the town are being bought out and relocated by the trust because large areas of the town could cave in. The town, once a leading producer of lead and zinc ores, is heavily undermined.
The company gave the filmmakers permission to use the houses, but the trust shut the operation down after rumors started circulating that a porn film was being shot there. The trust denied access to the houses because it controls the land on which the houses sit.
Todd Ingold, a spokesman for the film company, who was interviewed at the site when the filming stopped, denied that a porn film was being shot there.
One of the filmmakers, Joe Hollow, in a recent YouTube post, said that 75 percent of the movie had been shot. He said the film crew was planning to return to Picher in January to finish the movie.
Hollow could not be reached for comment.
