As you might expect, I have a sort of a thing about old houses. They spook me because I've experienced creepy things at every old house I've ever slept in. Just visiting one of them can open me to powers of suggestion that I really don't need to be open to--ever. That said, my price range for a new place is definitely suboptimal, and the housing options match that. I've seen a lot of run-down old houses lately, is what I'm saying. And like it or not, I'm probably going to be stuck with one of them for a little while, at least. So I accepted the inevitable, weeded out the worse-looking ones and sent them to my hard-nosed housing inspector of a real estate agent, Carol. Don't get me wrong because she is frankly a DELIGHTFUL person. However, she will sniff out and find every bad roof, every wiring problem, and every other possible defect that could make your life hell if you bought the place, and she will TELL you all of it.
It had been a long, tough-love day of it when we went to the last house. To this day, I'm not sure why Carol was drawn to it and forwarded me the address to look up on Zillow. I saw the first half of the photos and decided it wouldn't hurt to see one last house on the list, even if it did get me home way past the time I had hoped for. I hadn't had any other luck that day, so I hoped maybe this house would be the one.
As we pulled up the steep driveway, my point of view sort of shifted. It began to feel a little bit like instead of sitting in a car being driven around by Carol, I felt like I was watching a play-through on Twitch of me being driven around by Carol. I recognize this odd feeling as the first twinge of slight disassociation. This can happen to autistic people who have been over-stressed and over-stimulated over a protracted period, and I had. I just did my square breathing exercises to quell the anxiety that feeling produces, and pulled myself back down to earth so that I would say close to my own head, if not all the way in it.
As we drove up the steep driveway, I thought about how awful that would be to deal with in the wintertime. Literally, my thought was, "I could probably slide right down that hill and into traffic if there was to much ice on that driveway. No way in hell and in backing down it, either." Strike one against the house. As we pulled up, I noticed the barn. It had a heavy feeling, like maybe it was a place a party might could happen. My attention stayed on the barn as I opened the door. As soon as I stood outside the car, the feeling changed. It was more like, it felt like there were people actually hanging out in the barn and not necessarily that there was a party atmosphere. When Carol called out to come over to the door, I snapped my head around and immediately followed her.
She was standing in front of the chimney. "It's pointed wrong," she said. Carol was gesturing to the left side of the old brick chimney. "They repaired it themselves rather than have a professional do it. You'd have to fix that, eventually." Strike two against the house. I am handy as hell, but actual masonry is beyond my stars. Carol then took us to the door and unlocked it.
We entered the mud room. I remember being amazed at how clean looking it was, all things considered. It was a good, spacious, uncluttered mudroom. Which was odd to me, because I had never till that moment considered even wanting a mud room in my house. It then occurred to me I was dawdling on the threshold of the kitchen, and I have never done THAT before in my life. As I entered, I noticed a door to my left. It was the doorway to a relativeely newly installed micro half-bath. that was only about 36"-48" deep and 36"-48" wide. For some reason, I marveled at that little half-bath for a few seconds before pulling myself away to go inside the kitchen.
When I stepped into the kitchen, I noticed another door immediately to my left. I knew it was the basement door, and for some reason was surprised that the doorknob was brand new and had no lock on it. I noticed that the kitchen had been somewhat updated, especially the floor and the paint, but archaic electrics from the 1910's with the push-button switches were comingled with the updated sockets and switches on the walls. There was a large dining table shoved against the far right corner of the room. I had a vague sense of dour, serious men grimly eating dinner late at night, and huddled silently over their meal as if too tired from exertion to say much.
Overcome with curiosity, I ditched Carol and just went back to that basement. I didn't even tell her. I just was compelled to go over and see what was behind that door. Like when you jerk your thumb sharply on the controller to move your player character back to something he'd just missed.
What greeted me was an odd sight. The house roof angled sharply and narrowly down at a 45-degree angle. There was maybe 5-and-a-half feed between the bottom of the roofline and the surface of the stairs. It was a tight squeeze. Then, I noticed that the basement steps went from a 45-degree angle to about a 75-degree angle halfway down into the basement. That meant you'd shift from walking down the stairs to climbing down a ladder halfway into the basement. It honestly seemed like it would be tough to go down into. The strangest detail I noticed was the carpet of staples sticking out of the plywood panel above the stairs. And I do mean carpeted. Whoever installed the shingles on the other side really, really, wanted those suckers stapled in because there were maybe a thousand of them, matted along a 3-to-4 foot stretch as you went down that ended right before the ladder part.
By the time Carold found me, I was already halfway down into the basement. I was hesitating because I didn't have any light, and it looked tough to get down. I just sort of loitered there. "You shouldn't buy the house if you're afraid to go all the way down into the basement," Carol said as she turned on her phone's flashlight app. I had forgotten my phone even had one. I decided that I wasn't afraid of anything, and to prove it, I was going all the way down into the basement.
I was surprised how gray and stark it was. There was an abandoned built-in shelf to my left. In the far right corner sat an abandoned bucket. In the far left area of the basement, I could see what looked like a surprisingly serviceable furnace. There was nothing else down there that I could see, not even cobwebs. I jerked forward a bit because I wanted to get a closer look at what was on the other side of that furnace, but thought better of it. I turned to go back up the stairs.
The first few ladder rungs were not too bad, but right at the joint of the ladder part to the stairs part is where the overhead staple carpet loomed. I had to crawl up at a 45-degree angle with my upper body scraping the surface of the stairs. At one point, I got a twinge and my back. Just before I tried to straight up a bit, Carol barked, "be careful, you'll cut your head open on those spikes." I'd momentarily forgotten about the staple carpet. It took me at least a full minute to get out of that basement. As I approached the threshold into the kitchen, I had a mental flash of LaKeith Stansfield from Get Out. In fact, it was that scene where he told Daniel Kaluuya to "GET THE FUCK OUT!" As I began to straighten back up, my feet shuffled on the steps and I fell into the doorjamb-HARD. Like, it felt like I had been stabbed in the front of my shoulder. "Did this house fucking body check me just now?" I thought to myself as I lurched into the kitchen.
Carol saw me emerge. I told her, "I think this house just body-checked me." She pursed her lips a bit and said, "I don't think this is the house for you. Do you even want to see the rest of it?"
For reasons I cannot explain, I said, "Well, we're here. I don't think it's for me, either, but I'm awfully curious about it." As I said this, I noticed a weird push-button light switch beneath an ancient red night-light looking-contraption. I pushed the button and the light glowed red. "The power's still on," I noted. Carol was already halfway up the stairs. I rushed to catch up, repeating, "This is not the house for me." I noticed that the great room was half carpeted, and half laminate flooring.
The dining area and living room had been recently cleaned and redone. It looked okay, kind of. The tiny, stuffy stariwell lead to a dismal second floor. I didn't even go into an of the rooms, I just loitered in the tiny foyer at the top of the stairs. I was only curious enough to peek out the windows of each room to get a better idea of how the hosue was laid out. I barely peeked into the master bedroom. I guess it was a master bedroom because there was a bed in it. Not for me, I finally concluded. As went back down the stairs, an odd thought occurred to me. The stairs on which I was standing were exactly parallel to the basement stairs. I thought that was strange, but couldn't say for sure why it was.
We wasted no time in getting our of that house. As I walked past the broken chimney once more, I realized that I had not at any point seen a fireplace on the other side of it, inside the house. It also looked like the chimney was immediately on the forward side of the rear wall of that microscopic half-bathroom. But I did not see a hearth in the great room with the half carpet and half panel floor, and I should have. Given where it was positioned, it really should have been on the first floor above the basement and near the wall of the house. I did not see it, and the pictures on Zillow do not show it. On the way back to the car, I avoided looking at that barn. Carol and I drove back to the office and bid our farewells. I continued in a slightly disassociated state until I pulled into the sideyard at the house where I am staying with a friend.
I went through my closing of the day routine at record speed. All I wanted was to get in the shower with an entire container of kosher salt and scrub the day off of me. Especially that last house. About halfway into my shower I started having these images in my head. My highly suggestible and even more highly spooked unconscious had begun patching my observations of that house into a series of phantasmagoric images. It wasn't a party in the barn, it was...people burying something, or something. It happened a long while back....it might have happened more than once.
The basement door was grimy with faint streaks of a dark rust color smeared in places. It was an old doorknob with a lock of the sort that took a skeleton key, and there was a key inside the door. I opened the door, and all of a sudden, I was standing in front of myself. It was earlier that day, and I was watching me crawl up the steps. Simultaneously with this image, I was also reliving walking up the stairs. My feet did not shuffle clumsily on the stairs. I was shoved into that door frame. From this dual vantage point, I could see it was some small, dark grey mist-looking thing. The overwhelming feeling coming from it was fear. At the top of the stairs, I looked myself in the eyes and said, "This is not the house for me." Then, I had flashes of walking through the rest of the house and noticing weird details like a grimy footprint in an otherwise clean carpet. A floor that was splotchy with rusty red circular smears. The floor in one room tracked red smear all the way to a doorway.
At that moment, I summoned all of my attention and focus and said loudly, "I don't want to see this." Then, I rooted around for some image to snap me out of it. My brain spat out the snippet after the end of Pink Flamingos when Divine eats the dog turd. As I watched Divine drop it in her mouth, I could feel the water coursing on down onto my skin as the smell Dr. Bronner's Liquid Peppermint Soap I'd used to scrub myself clean waft up to my nostrils. The images were gone. I held my head under the shower for several long minutes, as if I was literally washing that nightmare off of my head.
As the waking nightmare channeler in me receded, my inner Sherlock Holmes came out. That is the slightly psychopathic part of me that is single-minded and absolute in its pursuit of quarry. I call him my inner Sherlock Holmes, because he only ever comes out when there is a puzzle to figure out or a dire problem to solve. I really like this part of myself because he doesn't deal in fantasies or speculation. He deals in observing the minute details and their specific contexts and then strings them together to build a picture of what is going on. He is relentless. He does not stop until he gets to the bottom of whatever he's hunting. He's sharklike that way.
Inner Sherlock fully ascendant in my psyche, I went out to the porch to smoke a cigarette and think. After at least half an hour and three darts, I reached one conclusion and several questions. Conclusion: There is 0% chance That my nightmare daydream was anything other than fancy. It's certainly something my unconscious dragged up in response to the details I observed at a creepy-as-hell house.
These were the questions:
- Why have your stairs be at a 45ﾟ angle until halfway down, And then change them to a 75ﾟ angle like a ladder? Why would you want your basement staiers so hard to navigate?
- A bucket in a basement is not unusual. A bucket being one of only 2 things in the basement is kind of unusual. Why was it there in the corner, and what was it used for?
- The roof shingles explanation I improvised on the moment was obviously false. That thing would really hurt somebody if they came up the stairs too fast. Why would you want to slow people down if they're coming from the basement?
- The kitchen floor had been sort of redone, and the living room had been modernized a bit. But the upstairs sure had not. Half of the archaic electrics had not. The stairs were still in that condition. Why only improve the kitchen floor and some of the downstairs and not there is the house, especially your basement? Why would the most recent tenant leave it that way why wouldn't they have changed it to make it easier on themselves?
- Why go to all that trouble to refresh the inside of the house and not fix that chimney properly, at least for aesthetic value? Why fix it yourself if you aren't even using it because you walled up the hearth and covered it.
- Where in the fuck did the fireplace go? Obviously it was still with the house, but where, exactly, was it located inside it? I saw all of the first-floor rooms and that is where it should have been. Where was the hearth walled up?
In answer to these questions my inner Sherlock concluded:
The only reason to have basement steps built in that way is to slow down somebody who wants to get out of it. Without doubt the contraption mounted mounted right above the stairs was meant to cause grievous bodily harm to anybody coming up from the basement. There is literally no other reason for something like THAT to be THERE. That basement was certainly meant as a place of torture for somebody trapped in it to be unable to get out of.
That would explain why the furnace and the bucket were the only things in that basement. You don't necessarily want human excrement piling up in the basement because then the house would smell. the kitchen would smell, because it's right there by the kitchen. And that would be the only thing down there other than the furnace because you don't want new lovers down there to be able to clover you or get help or get out. They won't be touching the furnace cause it's always hot were just dangerous to go near. And it's not like they're strong enough to rip something off of it and beat their assailant.
Those thoughts settled on me about as you might imagine they would: Like 20 pounds of lead buckshot and arsenic packed in the gut. The things I imagined maybe didn't happen, but after thinking through the details, I would bet anything that something awful did.
The 99K price tag for that place was ridiculous given that only half of the house was redone, and poorly at that. Any house-flipper worth their salt would have finished the job. So it wasn't a house flipper that did it. The reason why could only be that whoever had lived there never received enough visitors to justify refreshing the rest of the house. They only "lipstick-on-a-pig"-updated the part of the house that was visible to visiting outsiders.
Moreover, there is clearly 4-foot to 6-foot cavity between the staircase wall and the exterior wall where the hearth of that fireplace should be located. Walling it in on one side is the rear wall of the great room. Walling it in on the opposite side is the micro half-bath. On the other side of the innermost wall of that cavity is the basement. The fireplace hearth is awfully small to wall-in like that.
The last big question to come from all of this observation was this:
Parts of the house had been redone and made nicer, sure, but why didn't whoever lived in it between the monster who built that basement and this past week change those torture stairs, at least? The thought that came next chilled me to the bone.
"Because, my dear Watson, the person who died in that house before it hit the market is the monster who did awful things in that basement." Literally, anyone else who bought that house to flip it properly would have taken care of those stairs at least. They also would have finished refreshing the rest of the house and updating the electrical system. Maybe the kitchen floor was replaced because there was stuff on it that the owner didn't want seen but could not get rid of while he was alive. Maybe that's also why only half of the great room is carpeted. Either way, the last guy who touched those stairs is the same guy who built them in the first place.
That last thought dropped on me like an anvil. Whoever did whatever they did to at least one innocent person in that basement got away with it. I suspect that whoever passed this house along to a realtor after the original owner's death might know more than they are telling about that house. There are no laws in New York State to say that a person selling a house has to disclose anything about it--even murders that happened to the house. That's even if anybody officially knew anything about what went on there, which I am pretty sure they don't.
So I sat there, smoking a cigarette on the porch amidst the loud droning of the cicadas, almost completely certain of some horrible crime and torture being done to an innocent person in that house, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about bringing it to Justice. What the hell would I even say to the police? "So I'm moving to the area, and toured this spooky house and saw all these creepy things, and then later on in the shower I had a waking nightmare hallucination about murder and torture, and then I realized all those things meant there might have been a murderer or something in the house. Can you go and find out?" That is completely bonkers and might have earned me a mental health wellness check from the police. We know how well those tend to go...my eyes watered as I realized that there was literally nothing I could do.
So I did what I usually do in times like this: I prayed. I didn't pray that Justice would come to whoever that monster was. In my experience there's not any such thing as Justice in the world. Evil people do things every day and they just get away with it, and there's nothing I can do about that. Hell, this GUY definitely got away with it whatever the fuck it was--and it was bad. Even at the best of times, I'm not sure there is any point in praying that the evil will pay for their deeds. It would not have made a difference in this case.
But one thing I know for certain is that you can pray for the innocent. So I did. I prayed. I prayed that whatever horror and pain and trauma and suffering had been mercilessly and unjustly and evilly set upon the innocent people trapped in that basement would be lifted up from them. That whatever horror and agony from that torture would be cast off from them and that they would he would be free and at peace. Because while there may not be any point in praying That Justice finds the guilty, I can always pray that Mercy finds the innocent. So I do. And I did.
Sometimes all you can do is send up a message and hope it does what is intended.
