Leigh Kimmel says:

For as long as I could remember, the big old house had always stood empty. Every day the school bus would go right past it, and I’d wonder who lived there, what they’d done. But whenever I’d ask my parents, they’d quick change the subject, and when efforts to redirect my attention failed, they’d switch to punishments.

So I learned to keep my curiosity to myself. As I’d see the old house on my daily bus ride, I started making up stories about it. Some of them were mundane, about misfortunes and dysfunctions of the sort I’d read in the sort of books adults approved of, and others were more fanciful. Lost princesses and kings in exile, dimensional doorways into realms of monstrous eldritch horror, all the sorts of stories that my teachers derided as “escapist trash” and refused to let me write book reports about.

And then I graduated from high school and headed off to college. For the first time a whole world of research materials was opened to me, including microfilms of old newspapers and public records. It enabled me to find the answers to the questions my parents refused to answer, and finally punished me for asking. The truth proved more mundane than my imaginings of lost kingdoms and eldritch portals, but more interesting than mere financial mismanagement or ugly divorces.

The oldest part of the house had been a station on the Underground Railroad — until it had been betrayed by a person who should’ve been the most trustworthy. They’d been lucky and gotten warned in time to send the escapees on their way to the next station before the raid came. But it had been an ugly one, and one of the stationmasters had been shot in the process. Years later, people claimed her shade still haunted the place.

Amidst the prosperity of the Gilded Age, a new owner had expanded it, completely surrounding the little clapboard pioneer house with new construction in the style that was coming out of the UK and is still called Victorian. It had been something of a showplace amidst the more modest small-town environment, and while the parties might’ve been staid events by our standards, they still made the local papers.

By the Roaring Twenties, it was widely suspected to be a bootlegger’s hideout, its basements a storehouse for illegal liquor brought across the Canadian border by fast cars and even faster boats across Lake Erie. Yet no lawman had been able to find anything, and the rumors ran faster than any rumrunner.

It looks like WWII was when fortunes turned downward. The family who’d owned it lost their only son. Their money had been able to keep him from being sent overseas, but the supposedly cushy billet as a supply sergeant proved to have its own hazards. A stupid accident on a Saturday night, and he was one more name on the local newspaper’s daily list of the fallen.

As the bereaved elders lingered, they either lost interest in maintaining their house, or post-War inflation eroded their means to do so. It no longer was a showplace, the house on the hill that aroused envy in some and ambition in others. Somewhere around the 1970’s I could no longer find any telephone number for that address, and while the property taxes continued to be paid to the county every year, there’s evidence that the lot was entangled in an ugly inheritance battle with multiple collateral claimants to the estate, none of whom were willing to compromise.

It’s sad to think of what has been wasted because each of them wanted it all. If they’d just sold the property and divided up the proceeds, it might well still be someone’s home — although given how hard it can be to heat and cool such old structures, the various energy crises of the 70’s and beyond might’ve led to its abandonment, or at least a very expensive retrofitting with insulation and modern windows and doors. Instead, it’s deteriorated to the point that it’ll probably have to be torn down when either the surviving claimants decide to cut their losses or they all pass on and the state takes it.