Brooke here:
While I wait on a plumber to make sense of the washing machine — it turns out we were right and waste water does not want to travel eight feet straight up and through a series of bends — here’s a lengthy article on the death of Randall Jarrell. It mentions the book, Fly By Night, and this house, and gives a relatively straightforward account of Jarrell’s depression, how he (most likely) committed suicide, and some dickering back and forth between two counties over who should pick up the bill for his autopsy. Stay classy, Greensboro!
Flying by night 
My husband says, “Eight feet straight up? That’s about a quarter of an atmosphere!”
And my son-in-law the plumber just walked in, and my husband said, “How much output pressure does a washing machine have?” Son-in-law saus. “Not much. Enough to bring it up to the level of the top of the washing machine, anyway.” I quoted your description of the current layout and he added, “What you need to do is to dig a sump, let the wastewater flow into that, and then have a Real Pump to pump it out. But then you have to maintain the pump.”
It is possible that that’s what your plumber will say too.
Yeah, that’s the $650 fix. We’re going to try the septic tank for a few weeks and see if there are any problems at all with the old lines. If there are, we’ll install an external pump.