There's a street near where I live, & on that street there are three houses that sit empty. One of them I call haunted. One is doomed, the other is just lonely. I regularly take pictures of the haunted house. I want to make a movie of its decline. The doomed house was still alive when we first walked past it, there were hoarders & perhaps drug users living in it, & around it - cars & campers with people living in them were parked on the street - the doomed house is on a corner. Come to think of it, the haunted house is on a corner, too, but the street it's on is a busy one, & no one lives in it so no one lives around it. The lonely house is just lonely.
There's a slightly sadistic part of me that's waiting for the doomed house to come down. A couple of weeks ago, its outer shell was removed, there are just exposed boards there now, with flat plywood over the windows. The same people that stripped the house surrounded it with a border of some material in black bags, which I suppose is supposed to protect from detritus & runoff. Nothing has happened since the stripping. Well, except someone pried the plywood from a window, & perhaps went in & looked around. That wasn't me. I would've liked to do it, but I was raised to obey 'no trespassing' signs. Also, I'm usually there with my dogs & who would watch them as I awkwardly shimmied through the window?
The lonely house hasn't changed at all since the first time I saw it. Looking straight at it, you might not think it was empty. It has a "no trespassing" sign on the front door which is conspicuously large, it pops out like an eye behind coke-bottle glasses. But a private person might have such a sign, why not. It's only when you look down the overgrown driveway to the side of the house that you see the windows have been boarded up. Like the haunted house, there appears to be no sign of improvement or development. It's just sitting there, lonesome, waiting patiently for its next act. Someone once lived there. Maybe someone will again.
Why leave the houses to be doomed, haunted, or lonely? Your guess is as good as mine but we happened a couple of weeks ago upon a neighbor who was chatty about the house across the alley from hers. We often walk by this house but never knew it was empty. She explained it had been, for years - since she'd lived in the neighborhood, at least. Now there was excitement - someone was doing repairs! painting! checking the foundation! all that good kinda stuff! But why now?
The neighbor (whose name I don't remember, although I do remember the name of her rescue dog, which is Neil) told us that the house had been inherited by a couple of siblings - a brother & a sister - who squabbled about its fate. The sister wanted to sell, the brother wanted to rent. Unable to compromise, the house sat empty for years, maybe even a couple of decades. What had changed? The sister had died, it seems. Now the house was being prepared for rental. Is it weird to imagine that the sister cursed her brother's win before she died? That, however she met her end, it took longer because of this certainly meaningless tiff?
The doomed house is almost certainly being demolished; its owner lives elsewhere, & tolerated the drug users & the hoarders as long as they paid rent. When the damage they inflicted to the house & property became more than the market share of rent, they were evicted, the house closed up, & plans to sell the place were made. It may no longer belong to the current owner, & people who live nearby worry what will eventually end up there. An obnoxiously large & "modern" home? A series of cramped townhouses? There are probably ways to find out that involve visiting city planning offices but there's a kind of nervous joy that comes from a guessing that feels like worrying.
The haunted house appears to be owned by folks who visit occasionally. I think we might have seen them once - they appear to be quite old. The property has a garden that is grown in the spring & summer - do the owners do it? Or do they allow the neighbors to use the property? One thing is sure, the place is falling apart. I suspect left alone it would crumble in a couple of years. & frankly it is left alone, mostly.
The lonely house remains lonely. It should be my favorite but it isn't. & that makes it even more lonely.
