When we first entered the house, the sheer amount of stuff was daunting. This was a small, two bedroom house with a partial second story, and there was enough junk in there to fill my three bedroom home. Furniture was everywhere, multiple beds, books, clothes, trash and all sorts of junk. The smell was awful, too so we took to trying to open the windows.
That's when we noticed the first bizarre thing about this house: the windows were caulked shut. Every window in the house had to be cut open with a razor knife and then a couple of screws removed to actually get the things open. We never did puzzle out why the windows were so airtight.
And the fact that they were airtight presented us with another situation. It appeared, having gone through the entire house one time, that the previous occupant had been a Camel nonfiltered cigarette smoker. That's right: a smoker who smoked inside his home and never opened the windows. You can imagine the smell in the place. The walls were nearly slick with nicotine stains as the man had lived in the residence for at least ten years that we could see.
Going through the house turned up all sorts of other odd things: books on governmental conspiracies, camping equipment, bows and fishing poles, tons of stuff. And while going through the house and trying to decide what to do with all of the junk inside of it was when we found the water.
The room pictured above was the master bedroom of the house. It's probably 20x15, a goodly sized bedroom. There was debris everywhere along the wall you can see under the window and beneath the crucifix. But the wall directly to the left of the photograph was lined with 2 liter bottles of water. I mean 2 liter SODA bottles that had been emptied and refilled with water. There were dates on all of them as well.
Going through the house we found more hoarded water. Seven 1 gallon milk jugs in the basement had been filled. More 2 liters were scattered around the house. There was a trash can in the basement that when the lid was taken off you could see dozens of smaller, old glass soda bottles from the 70's and 80's that had been emptied and refilled with water. Tab. Coke. Mello-Yello. The works.
But the most bizarre collected was in the yellow room. In the middle of all the collected bottles of water sat a 30 gallon trash can with a lid on it. We tenatively removed the lid, concerned about the contents and found...yes, more water. The can had apparently been filled with water, as if by a garden hose or pouring buckets upon buckets into the thing. Our homeowner had been a hoarder, potentially paranoid schizophrenic from the looks of the place.
As a side note, I'm going to post a second photograph from this house to show one other oddity we discovered. While cleaning the place out, we couldn't help but notice that the areas on the walls where the crucifixes were (and there was on the wall in every room) was particularly clean. The yellow stains from the cigarette smoke had been somehow washed off of the walls around the Christian symbol, just a few inches to each side. As well, there were tiny spatter marks of water all over the house, but only on the ceiling. It baffled us until I discovered the exorcism kit in the kitchen. Yes, he had a tiny exorcism kit, complete with vial of holy water and crucifix stand and everything.
What we had considered briefly as a some sort of bizarre house stigmata turned out to be simple Catholocism. He had been blessing the crosses with holy water, spattering it along the ceiling and around the crosses which would then run down the wall, washing the nicotine off.
It took us five coats of oil based paint to cover those walls.
No comments:
Post a Comment