One House We Will Not Be Buying 👻…

Hi there.

Two weeks ago I didn’t know if I could continue this blog because I got a real job.

And the last two weeks have been crushing, overwhelming and crazy stressful, and it’s been trial by fire and I’ve been thrown into the deep end but…

I haven’t drowned yet.

Yet.

I’m slowly, painfully, finding my footing and, as a result, sat down to finally write a blog last Sunday night after missing two weeks.

But my old Dell PC chose that moment in time to …die?

I gouged out time to finally take it in Thursday night and the tech told me that it was either the ram or the motherboard.

Therefore, I naturally assumed the worst, convinced that it was the motherboard, and my computer was now officially dead.

I haven’t made it this far by being an optimist.

In any case, the techs were going to check the hard drive too to make sure I could recover and save all my data. In other words, funeral plans were being made.

And yet, that very night, the tech called me to say the problem was the ram — not the motherboard — and my computer would be as good as our shitty wifi by the next day.

So old computer is back from the dead

and we are back.

Great. Where’s the Flipping Ghost Story

Right. Well, the whole point of my husband and I working ourselves to death is so we can get a mortgage and escape from our dodgy, scary, bad neighborhood where we’ve now lived for two years.

Accordingly, we are now ✨preapproved✨ to purchase a home and are house-hunting with our realtor.

So this is where the story starts.

One House We Will Not Be Buying

Last weekend David and I left our house to meet our realtor for an evening house showing.

However, we couldn’t drive down our street because there was a sex transaction taking place in the middle of it.

At the middle of the middle was the woman we recently helped after my husband saw her lying on the ground in the early morning, looking dead.

She wasn’t dead then. And she is still not dead and she is also back in business.

So we had to force our car through the sex transaction. Since it was a very tight fit, she and I inevitably locked eyes and I mouthed “Where is my Badger cup, neighbor?” and we then proceeded to drive forward to meet our realtor, now adamant that we start making offers on houses because we really have to move out of this neighborhood.

Therefore, our hopes were desperately conceived and high as we entered the front door of 2451 s. Burrell Street, Milwaukee.

Cute, right? Well, if you look closely ☝️ the vinyl “hello” lettering doesn’t fit into the space.

This was a good indication that the people who tried to rehab this home focused mostly on the cosmetic stuff (still coming up short) and they did not focus on all that was genuinely wrong with the house.

Beyond that, the house sits on railroad tracks. We joked with our realtor that this particular area had some issues with homeless folk and transients because they often camped in the woods that line both sides of this particular track.

Beautiful backyard but…

But that’s city life.

And the most interesting thing about this house was how it was the oldest house we had seen. It was built in 1885, only a couple decades after the state of Wisconsin had been officially deemed a state.

House was old. Oh the history! But, as we walked through it, we saw that it needed far more work than we had either the time or money to invest.

At the end of our tour, we stood in the basement and were giving our verdicts on the house when our realtor put his finger up as to say “stop talking” and said, “Do you hear that?”

There was a slight rumble which sounded like a train and which also made sense as the house was on the railroad tracks.

But then it stopped almost as soon as it had started.

“Was that the train?”

We shrugged and felt it must have been something else as no train was that short. We joked about how it must have been either our imagination or a super heavy handcar.

But our laughter was interrupted by the sound of heavy footsteps clomping across the floor above our heads.

We immediately froze.

We didn’t think it was anything but perhaps one of the transient people who was seeking shelter in an empty house which had its doors unlocked as were actively touring it.

We simply didn’t know for sure who was upstairs but it was very clear someone was.

As we continued to listen to the footsteps which continued to clomp across the floor above us, our realtor took out a small utility knife he had on him…

and we slowly worked our way to the basement stairs.

The footsteps suddenly stopped.

We again froze but now we stood, huddled, at the bottom of the stairs, looking up.

We weren’t terrified of ghosts … we were terrified of the organic creature who was with us in the house without legal cause or reason.

“REALTOR! HELLO! HELLO!” our realtor called up the stairs. “We are coming up! Finishing our house tour!”

There was no response and the only movement we heard was the sound of us slowly ascending the stairs.

No more footsteps.

We peeked around the doorway of the stairs landing and looked to our right to where the empty living room stood and… no one was standing there in it.

Relief washed over me.

I had been emotionally bracing myself to find a wild-eyed, disheveled person standing in the middle of the room and looking right back at us.

But no one was there.

We breathed a collective sigh of relief but then a new fear gripped us.

If it wasn’t a person who had wandered in… who or what had been walking around the living room moments before?

We shook off the spooky feeling and continued to do a quick investigation of the first floor (no one was there) and then, against our will, we also raced up the stairs – our blood pumping pure adrenaline — and checked all of the upstairs rooms and closets.

And we found no one, no one who could have explained what we had all heard.

The new fear blossomed within us. It couldn’t have been a person.

Feeling as if we had done our due diligence upstairs, David and I flew down the stairs and ran out of the house with our realtor lingering behind to quickly lock the door behind us.

Soon we all stood outside on the front lawn laughing and staring back at the house.

So it seems as if the train sound we had heard was perhaps a ghost train which dropped off a ghost passenger who then came home to their house.

To find that it was now for sale.

In any case, the three of us were only in the house for maybe fifteen minutes and in that time we had experienced a freaky event which had no rational explanation.

We didn’t have an answer but one thing was clear: We were not going to buy that house.

But we wish it and its occupants the best.

So the hunt for a non-haunted-and-in-our-price-range house continues.

We Gotta Get Out

Two nights ago the police were outside with a loudspeaker telling our neighbors across the street to come out with their hands up because the police had a warrant.

The thing about the loudspeaker approach — we have learned this since living in this apartment building — is how the police will just repeat the same sentence over and over on the loudspeaker-thing and the people never come out right away.

This causes the police to then start a countdown.

So I just laid back on the bed and and braced for the gunfire to start.

Our hunt for a home continues!

And, in the meantime, what’s the checklist?

___ Jesus

___ Pepto Bismol chewables

___ Whiskey

___ Music

🖤