Our house was perched on the edge of a mountain, overlooking the Southbay. You had to climb up 76 stairs to get to our front door from the street. The hillside was so steep they needed to build the house on top of a retainer wall 20 feet tall. I used to hang from that retainer wall and scare the shit out of my older sister. Beyond the retainer wall was where the neighbor’s property began.
Truth is, I didn’t really pay attention to who lived in the next-door neighbor’s house before. I never remember seeing people go in or out, except that one day an ambulance came to the house during the night and took someone away. Someone old.
The house was three stories tall and old and derelict. It was built 100 years ago and had fallen into disrepair. The surrounding forest of weeds forbade any kid who god forbid might lose a baseball near it. My siblings and I weren’t sure if any one even lived there any more. So naturally, after the storm of 1994, when a bunch of trees fell and school was canceled, nobody noticed that the neighbors hadn’t repaired their broken windows. I guess we just thought they hadn’t gotten around to it. I remember their red-orange curtains blew in the wind for days. Then weeks.
Periodically I would notice someone’s shadow around in the house but never really saw who it was. Did I really see someone? Were any people still there? Maybe I saw the light inside the house turn on. Did I?
After a few months all of us kids knew something was up. We convened for a sibling council and proposed to my mother that we investigate the dilapidated neighbor’s house. We knew there were a few possibilties. Did the residents pass away? Were they still in the house but needed our help? Did squatters take over? Is this the house that “IT” lives in? (that was my question)
Not knowing what to expect, we geared up with protective gear, weapons, flashlights, (I wore all my hockey pads and face-mask) and us four siblings set out on our Goonie adventure. Even Mikey came. Mikey was my oldest brother -- the leader. He was way too responsible to lead us all into trouble, so I was stoked he was there.
The property had a weird layout with a dank, mildewy concrete garage cut into the mountainside. The metal bars across the front door barred any front-entry, so we had to bop our way through the forrest of weeds to reach the back of the property. When we finally breached the weeds we walked into the back yard and noticed a sink.
The water was running.
We were sure there must be someone around. But there was no sign of anyone. For a moment I thought of the Twilight Zone episode where the guy finds himself alone in an abandoned town.
We turned off the faucet and looked around but the house was barred up from the backyard too. We eventually found a giant window that had been smashed in during the storm. We hoisted each other up into the house and into a giant room where we found ourselves surrounded by ceiling-high piles of plastic Safeway bags filled with God knows how many countless and nameless items. There were piles and piles of this stuff everywhere. It was like a bad dream. The entire room, an old dining hall, was filled to the brim with these bags. I was only 10 years old but I understood what kind of mess this was -- the folks who lived here were hoarders.
We finally made it into the interior of the house, opened the door to the main hallway on the first floor and fifteen stray cats scattered across the house. Our house had been a stomping ground for a pack of stray alley cats and now we knew where they had been shacking up.
Did we hear footsteps?
Throughout the old house were dozens of piles of boxes with old antique items. I remember we found a old camera, a pair of really old eye glasses, and then, a box of old family letters. We didn’t read them in detail, but we could tell the letters were old. They were dated from at least 1930’s. The letters were written in a beautiful cursive and written in a distinct Southern dialect. I specifically remember one letter began with “Dearest Mama”. As I looked at the letters part of me felt a haunting sadness. The letters were a collection between family members over multiple generations spanning across multiple states and now they sat in a box, in an abandoned house. Should we stop reading them? Were we invading there private lives? I wondered.
We climbed up a narrow spiral staircase that spun 360 degrees and finally reached the top floor. It had a long hallway that came to a green door at the end. We walked down the hallway and passed by the room with the broken windows and red-orange curtains, still blowing in the wind. At the end of the hall we found a sign posted on the window of the green door. It was written in a messy childlike way.
Don’t Come In, it said
Sissy’s sleeping
The note froze us in our tracks. None of us could take another step forward.
What was behind the door? Was someone there?
We didn’t go into that room. We left it just they way it was.
We went back home and reported what we found to our mother. The house was eventually claimed by distant family members months later and now some yuppy probably owns it.
And the truth is that it didn’t matter what laid behind that green door nor did it matter the contents of those letters. The neighbor’s memories were for them alone. Their family, their special time and place.
And as for me, I went back to hanging from the concrete wall and now felt comfortable fetching my lost baseball from those forbidding weeds.
