I don’t know if I believe in ghosts and paranormal activities and things like that…
But the second we opened the front door of this vacant, estate owned home we were hit with a wave of eeriness.
Or it could have been the face full of cigarette smell we were hit with as well… It smelled like the owner had chain smoked in the house for 20+ years straight! The weirder part was that it smelled like someone had very recently been smoking in the house, even though it was vacant.
The second after I recovered from smoke inhalation, I noticed that the “entryway” was actually just an old porch that someone had enclosed. And they didn’t do a very good job, it looked as though the porch was starting to fall away from the house! The walls and concrete slab were actually detaching from the house and you could see light through the crack in the wall (sorry for the dark picture…)
There was also a bathroom added in the entryway (also not built well.) That’s when I noticed that there were towels, clothing and shampoo bottles laying around as if someone had recently used them. I just kept feeling like someone was there so I double checked my listing sheet to make sure it was supposed to be vacant and we continued in.
The house was estate owned meaning the owner most likely passed away and left the house to his heirs, who obviously decided to sell it. It’s just very weird that the heirs didn’t come and clean up a little. They just left everything as is, where is, and put it up for sale.
In the living room, there was a couch with a indent where a man should have been sitting, with the remote still sitting on the coffee table facing the tv and a standing ash tray for convenience. There were drinking cups with straws in them still sitting on side tables. There was clothing strewn about as though someone had just kicked off their dirty pants after work and where they landed they stayed.
An open box of Stauffers chocolate, peanut butter and chips were all surrounding the empty space on the couch and the sour milk sitting on the counter and unpaid bills laying on the kitchen table only added to the creepiness level. I thought to myself “this owner had no idea he was going to die the last time he left this house.”
It was so unsettling that halfway through the tour I realized Todd and I weren’t saying a word to each other and when we did, it was in a whisper. So I turned to Todd and said whispered “why are we whispering.” We had been in this house for at least 15 minutes and not one of us was saying a thing.
He told me the house has a weird “vibe” and he was half expecting someone to be standing around the next corner or sitting in the next room. As the hairs stood up on the back of my neck I responded that I felt the same way. We agreed to just quickly look at the rest of the house because we drove all that way and why not? So we went upstairs and found the same situation as the downstairs.
In the only bedroom in the house we found an indent on the bed where a person should have been laying and the blankets looked as though someone had just woken up, threw the covers off and left the bad that way. There was also dirty underwear hanging from some knobs on the dresser and a toothbrush sitting on the counter of the bathroom with toothpaste on it… why?
In the kitchen there was a door made to look like a plain wall at the end of the galley and of course I had to open it… it wasn’t anything scary, just moldy newspapers and old tin cans. But really, why? Like why did someone put newspapers and tin cans in there as if they were collecting it? Just weird.
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To get to the basement stairs we had to squeeze by the 
couch that was almost slammed up against the door, you could tell the owner NEVER went into the basement and for good reason. The stairs to the basement were broken! The landing could barely hold Todd’s weight but of course he found another way to get down there – through the bilco doors outside!
The basement wasn’t even tall enough to stand in and there were dead moldy spiders hanging from the ceiling [skin crawls]. But I did find something kinda cool about the house… the main supports for it were made from actual trees, I know all wood is made from trees but these trees still had the bark on! It looked like someone went into the woods, chopped down some trees and brought them over to their future home’s spot and starting building.
I was so happy to get out of the house, only to realize we still had to look in the shed and the garage! But I reminded myself that it’s all apart of finding a house to flip.
The shed just had a lot of old junk in it. You could barely open the door to look in, but it definitely would have been at least a dumpster full of stuff, a very big dumpster. There was also some type of hatch next to the shed but we left it alone… we’re assuming it was probably access to an old cold cellar. To be honest, we were a little scared to open the cellar, you never know what we might find down there.
Lastly, the garage. The garage was probably the creepiest place on the whole property. You could tell the owner spent a lot of time in the garage tinkering with stuff. But again, it was left as though someone thought they’d be back to finish up some projects but never made it.
The chair was pulled out and a broken trophy just waiting to be fixed was sitting on the desk next to a used ashtray. Above the desk, on the wood beams someone wrote: “I feel like a mushroom, all they do is feed me shit and keep me in the dark.”
On that note we closed up the garage, double checked that the house was locked and left.
Even though that house didn’t even make our short list, it’s all a part of the house hunt and finding a house to flip!
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