Haunted Houses
Dec. 22nd, 2013 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogComing soon to a real estate broker near you: "JUST LISTED: a 1,336 square foot two-bedroom, one-bath ranch on a quiet street. A bargain to die for!"
Okay, maybe the realtor won't be THAT tacky. But they're going to have to come up with some novel way of marketing a home, barely ten doors from this door, where the longtime homeowners both died in the house in a tragic, end-of-life, murder-suicide.
I posted when the word got out a few months ago, when we saw cops, then reporters, hanging around the place. The couple had lived there for years in, seemingly, absolute "quiet." Nobody knew (or at least nobody was admitting) the who's or why's of the situation. I never saw their names in print; no obituary ever crossed my eyes; and despite passing that house at least once a day since late September, I never saw any evidence of anyone mourning their deaths or moving on with the sale of the seemingly pristine home....
Until two days ago.
That's when both Eleanor and I faced the usual bottlenecks on our ways to work as the Grim Reapers of antique stores and other looky-loos lined both sides of their Quiet Street for the estate sale. It had started Friday morning and was already quite the traffic jam by the time I headed out for a 9:30 appointment; a day later, heading to the gym before 9, the line of early birds was already impatiently decamped outside the Quiet Front Door. By late Saturday, the house had retreated back into Quiet Anonymity, although I expect the unclaimed pickings will go out to the curb sometime on Boxing Day, and be picked over by the truly ghoulish among us before the town comes to clear it all away on the morning of the 27th. And then, no doubt, a FOR SALE sign will go up, as professionals somehow try to clear away the evidence, and (just as hard) the bad juju of what happened there.
It's not necessarily fatal. We bought our last Rochester house from an estate, fully believing that Gertrude had died at home (if not as violently); we joke to this day that she liked us so much, she moved here with us, slamming cabinet doors and unlocking locks just to get our attention from time to time. Local real estate law, as well as lore, will likely require these sellers (be they distant relatives or, perhaps, the county public administrator- there was some question about whether H. and A. actually had any heirs) to disclose what happened on the property back in September. It perhaps makes it more likely to turn into a Flip This House kind of short-term rental, as several in this neighborhood have become in recent years.
I resisted the temptation to look around when the doors were open. We did that deal once before- not in our eventual final Rochester home, but with one adjacent to it. It was a 19th century farmhouse, from the era when our Evans Farm subdivision actually was a farm, and the house fronted on one of the few through roads of early Brighton, New York. When we first became aware of it, it had acquired a Miss Havisham quality of both condition and mystery. We later learned that it was tied up in a contested estate, where two aged sisters were the sole heirs, hated each other, and thus couldn't agree on whether to sell. Eventually, the dispute was resolved either by settlement or attrition, and the house on Edgewood Avenue was put on the market. We stopped at an open house, out of morbid curiosity rather than intention to buy, and saw the ghosts of lives of a much older time. The rooms, all a rabbit warren along a seemingly endless stairwell, none accessible except through the trail through the entire house. Coal-fired furnace and stove. Plenty of evidence of livestock having been in the place, rather than on the grounds, for many years. Wallpaper likely older than any of our own (long-dead) grandparents. Before we moved, it did sell, and got updated into at least the late 20th century, so there is hope for the much newer home, same age as ours, ten doors away.
It will just be interesting to watch how, and if, the process goes from here.
Okay, maybe the realtor won't be THAT tacky. But they're going to have to come up with some novel way of marketing a home, barely ten doors from this door, where the longtime homeowners both died in the house in a tragic, end-of-life, murder-suicide.
I posted when the word got out a few months ago, when we saw cops, then reporters, hanging around the place. The couple had lived there for years in, seemingly, absolute "quiet." Nobody knew (or at least nobody was admitting) the who's or why's of the situation. I never saw their names in print; no obituary ever crossed my eyes; and despite passing that house at least once a day since late September, I never saw any evidence of anyone mourning their deaths or moving on with the sale of the seemingly pristine home....
Until two days ago.
That's when both Eleanor and I faced the usual bottlenecks on our ways to work as the Grim Reapers of antique stores and other looky-loos lined both sides of their Quiet Street for the estate sale. It had started Friday morning and was already quite the traffic jam by the time I headed out for a 9:30 appointment; a day later, heading to the gym before 9, the line of early birds was already impatiently decamped outside the Quiet Front Door. By late Saturday, the house had retreated back into Quiet Anonymity, although I expect the unclaimed pickings will go out to the curb sometime on Boxing Day, and be picked over by the truly ghoulish among us before the town comes to clear it all away on the morning of the 27th. And then, no doubt, a FOR SALE sign will go up, as professionals somehow try to clear away the evidence, and (just as hard) the bad juju of what happened there.
It's not necessarily fatal. We bought our last Rochester house from an estate, fully believing that Gertrude had died at home (if not as violently); we joke to this day that she liked us so much, she moved here with us, slamming cabinet doors and unlocking locks just to get our attention from time to time. Local real estate law, as well as lore, will likely require these sellers (be they distant relatives or, perhaps, the county public administrator- there was some question about whether H. and A. actually had any heirs) to disclose what happened on the property back in September. It perhaps makes it more likely to turn into a Flip This House kind of short-term rental, as several in this neighborhood have become in recent years.
I resisted the temptation to look around when the doors were open. We did that deal once before- not in our eventual final Rochester home, but with one adjacent to it. It was a 19th century farmhouse, from the era when our Evans Farm subdivision actually was a farm, and the house fronted on one of the few through roads of early Brighton, New York. When we first became aware of it, it had acquired a Miss Havisham quality of both condition and mystery. We later learned that it was tied up in a contested estate, where two aged sisters were the sole heirs, hated each other, and thus couldn't agree on whether to sell. Eventually, the dispute was resolved either by settlement or attrition, and the house on Edgewood Avenue was put on the market. We stopped at an open house, out of morbid curiosity rather than intention to buy, and saw the ghosts of lives of a much older time. The rooms, all a rabbit warren along a seemingly endless stairwell, none accessible except through the trail through the entire house. Coal-fired furnace and stove. Plenty of evidence of livestock having been in the place, rather than on the grounds, for many years. Wallpaper likely older than any of our own (long-dead) grandparents. Before we moved, it did sell, and got updated into at least the late 20th century, so there is hope for the much newer home, same age as ours, ten doors away.
It will just be interesting to watch how, and if, the process goes from here.