post off: what do you know about your home’s history?
We immediately felt our house was “the one” the first time we looked at it with our realtor. Had we known a bit of its history beforehand…oh, we still would have bought it. But I’m kind of glad we didn’t know. Neighbors have filled us in on our home’s colorful past, including its stint as a grow house for a Weeds-style entrepreneur and how for a time it was the center of a small male prostitution ring! If these walls could talk, indeed! What about you — what interesting things do you know about where you live? –Mary T.
Photo by Nate Brelsford
November 13th, 2008 at 9:24 am
My neighbor who also grew up on my street told me that an elderly woman who lived in my house died, and he had to crawl in one of the windows to unlock the door so that her family could get in. That’s probably happened in a lot of older homes though.
The previous owners of the house I grew up in were the victims of a kidnapping for ransom. Some men who claimed to be from a newspaper wanting to do a story on the house kidnapped the wife and tried to get the husband to pay up. I wasn’t terribly bothered by it as a kid, but it made my mom very nervous.
November 13th, 2008 at 9:55 am
A previous owner of our 1765 house, back in the 1940s, was a foul-mouthed drunken farmer’s wife who used to chase her elderly milquetoast husband into the snow in mid-argument—he wearing only long johns, she wielding an axe. Must have been fun, no?
November 13th, 2008 at 9:57 am
Also when we were renovating, we removed a plaster wall to find (gulp) a long, thickly braided swatch of blonde hair, tied with a ribbon. Very weird. And spooky. And, yes, a few times my husband and child have seen a ghost of a young girl with a similar braid and dressed in 19th-century clothes. I, however, haven’t spotted her once.
November 13th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
We are the second owners of our house. The first owners, James and Carolyn Harper, bought it just after it was built in 1957. They had lived here together for two years before James had a stroke and died while cutting the grass in the backyard. He had worked as a technician at Cincinnati Bell and today the house remains wired for a telephone customer service department of about 200. Carolyn, who never worked and was known throughout the neighborhood as a lovely woman, lived here alone until she died at 97 years old. We bought the house from her daughter in 2004 and still get mail addressed to both James and Carolyn.
November 13th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
I love learning about the history of my house’s previous owners! It was built in 1898 and the original family lived there until 1939 (minus the first husband, who died a year after they moved in). You can read their story on my blog.
November 13th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
The house I just bought, well actually 8 months ago dates back to the late 1700s. I am restoring the house and in the process people have stopped by to tell me stories about it, they are all really interesting as the house is the oldest in the area, the main story of the house is the family of holocaust survivors who payed the Natzi’s blood money in the form of a great art collection and furniture which was not uncommon, they came to america and started the largest chicken farm in Ulster county on the property. The youngest daughter roomed with Anne Frank in boarding school and it goes on from there.
November 13th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Our house was built in 1935 and we don’t know much about it, but we do know there used to be little kids that lived here and played in the same stairwell that our son plays in today. Then for awhile it was BAD news and squatters lived here – everyone was very happy when it got fixed up and we moved in. Now every time something goes wrong I just blame it on the squatters.
November 14th, 2008 at 6:54 am
An Aesthete’s Lament – that sounds like a memento mori. We have several that were passed down in my family and were beautifully framed and displayed in the dining room. Yeah, that’s kinda weird.
November 14th, 2008 at 9:28 am
My roommate and I rent an apartment in an old manor house. It’s called ‘The Reynolds Manor’ and its located in a Victorian neighborhood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_West_End
The part of the building we live in used to be a nursery for the house. There are two sets of stairs inside, one was for the family that lived there, and one was for the servants to use. The third floor was originally a ball room, and the first floor was a library. We have all antique fixtures, 12 foot ceilings, hardwood floors, fireplaces, and built in bookcases, its charming.
November 15th, 2008 at 1:02 am
I don’t know anything about the apartment I live in, but I do sort of coax stories out of houses. I have a large collection of vintage photographs of houses and I periodically go through them and listen for stories. Sometimes they come and I write them down and then I publish them in a zine I do called Current Resident.
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=15764279
November 17th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
I live in an old house with many late Victorian/eary 20th century remnants. The old cold cellar still has the remains of a cistern, even though the room has been turned into a bathroom (complete with very short shower in the cistern!). Digging in the backyard has yielded bits of assorted glass and ceramic and brick. The windows are mostly original, as is the wood flooring, trim, and heating grates. old pipes in the basement show that the kitchen was originally in a different room, and careful examination of the inside wall of the current kitchen shows that it was a later extension to the outside of the house.
The one major modification has been to the attic entrance. It’s a small hatch in the ceiling that takes a ladder to get to. once up there, we have a large dresser that will not fit through the now smaller entrance. It’s a lovely piece of furniture in an otherwise unfinished space; we can’t figure out how to get it out without destroying it, and destroying it would be a shame! So the house will probably forever have an antique dresser sitting up in the unused attic.
November 25th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
I live in an apartment that was built in the 1920s, and the building used to be owned by Betty Grable! It would be cool if Betty haunted it, but I haven’t seen her, so no luck there. In fact, this is the first place I’ve lived that I DON’T think is haunted!!!