Kill Devil Hills – The last recorded customer visited the Kill Devil Hills K-Mart in 1987. Rumor has it a band of loyal employees held out for years in the sporting good section, slowly regressing to a pre-anthropocene state of existence as their food supplies dwindled. The group was supposedly captured by the Smithsonian’s famed Seal Team – 7 and relocated to Nags Head Woods to allow them to continue to live unmolested by modern civilization in their primitive state.
Since then, Mother Nature has moved in and set up shop. Sounds of honking horns and announcements of “blue light specials” have been replaced by the bellow of wildebeests and the lonely cry of the African Fish-Eagle. The ugly gray walls of the store have been covered by vibrant bow tie vines and Herald’s trumpets. A family of Gambian pouched rats have taken up residence in the former shoe section and a lion pride has staked its territory in ruins of the gardening center.
“A remarkable cross section of flora and fauna has made the old KMart its new home,” said local animal expert and former KDH Animal Control Officer Jack Hannah. “I believe they were initially released by irresponsible owners who forgot to lock their pets’ cages.”
With the lease on the KMart property ending in 2018, the Kill Devil Hills Board of Wise Masters must now determine what happens next. The liberal wing of the board has proposed turning it into a permanent animal sanctuary and allowing Corolla Wild Horse Tours to expand operations into the area. The more conservative minded board members would like to bulldoze everything, turn the lions into rugs and build 28 new McMansions on the lot.
A public forum on the fate of the former K-Mart property will be held on December 29th.
If only this was true…..