My House...In the Middle of My Street

Above: My house with its new roof and driveway on the day the men came to put up the weather vane. It would look better but the landscaping got all wrecked during all the work.

I thought since this is a constant source of amusement and disdain, I would tell you a little bit about my house, which may or may not be haunted. My house was a major steal in a relatively ok, predominately black, urban neighborhood (I am a white girl from a very white county an hour away and this has taken soome adjusting to). It's 6,000 square feet of mostly scary and the only house this large left as a single family in this historic neighborhood. I like it, don't get me wrong. It's a nice house...but there's a lot of it and it should never have been someone's, my, first house. It's also four blocks west of Lake Michigan and built by Alexander Horlick, vice president of Horlick's Malted Milk and mayor of our fair city for two terms. He lived here with his wife, daughter, baby nurse and maid. First off, the house is in really nice shape. 95% of the original woodwork is still intact and completely beautiful and it is very spacious. The woman that last owned it, deceased, had it for 43 years and ran it as a boarding/care facility for sick old people so everything in here now, such as paneling and tile everywhere was done for the sake of durability. I am now working on un-doing all this stuff and making everything pretty again. Because of her use of the residence as a care facility, I also have locking doors in strange places that can block the house into 3 different sections...1 of which we do not even use because we don't need the space and it's cheaper to not heat it during the winter. So, everyone has declared my house very scary. BEG says it's very Amityville and the first time she came out here before we moved in, we went around checking to see if there were human heads in any of the high cabinetry. There's a very scary room in the basement with a hollow floor that our former boarder used to think was hiding the bodies. We have not looked into that, however the room is really creepy and I refuse to go in it for any reason. My mother calls this the Amityville room. Hubby found this creepy, grey wooden trunk with German language writing on it in the garage. It was empty but it was still freaky and now sits in the neighbors backyard mocking me. During the summer the door that separates the second story started to stick. I could still pull it open though, but one night I went up there to inspect strange noises and I literally had all my weight into it and still couldn't get it to open. I had to get Shortleash from across the street to come over and help. We inspected the whole upstairs and didn't find anything wrong. My dogs bark at my rocking chair, which no one ever sits in and has stuff piled on top of it. In the last couple of months, we have had the roof replaced and the driveway replaced. We've been taking a lot of pictures around the house with all the constant changes and some of them have turned up a little bit weird. Generally, I do not get pictures that come out well on the fireplace side of the living room. They are always full of strange glowing orbs and blur marks. This has been on-going since we first looked at the house back in July of 2004. I thought I would share the pictures...

This picture was taken when we did our final walk-through the day before the closing on the house. There seems to be a baby in the bottom left central area of the mirror and a woman's face on the right side of the mirror. I actually didn't even notice until I was organizing all these pictures to blog today. So strange...but wait...it gets stranger...

This picture and the ones to follow were taken around Halloween when all the work was being completed finally. I was basically sitting here, bored and noticing how strangely the items on the coffee table were arranged. I decided to take some pictures around the room so I could blog about by horizantal space issues. I was much more amused with what seemed to show up in the pictures and never got around to blogging about my space issues. In this picture there is an eyeball in a glowing orb and a young boys face on the right side of the mirror. This also freaks me out because he looks like this boy I went to school with.

In this picture it looks like an older man wearing overalls and a collared shirt is getting up from my rocking chair. Yes, the one the dogs bark at.

Check the angry demon face. Ever seen the movie Halloween movie, 'The Midnight Hour'? It looks like the zombie judge who was Peter Del...whatever, his dad's the fat guy Dom and I can't spell anything anymore apparently. Moving right along then...

This one looks like there's a woman with a headscarf on the right side of the mirror. Spooky!

This picture features Angus and many a glowing orb. This is generally what pictures taken on this side of the room turn out like.

Next, we have a woman's face in the left central of the mirror bottom. This same face appears again in another picture taken of the house from the outside (next picture)

Same woman's face...different place. This was obviously taken while the roof work was in progress.

And lastly, scary, poofy, face in second story window.

Creeped out yet? Just keep in mind that I gotta live here everyday with all the strangeness.