Maria and I have been looking to buy a house, despite the fact that purchasing a home embodies all the fears I have of commerce: debt, huge debt, technical jargon, tricky financing, gargantuan debt, and peripherals. To avoid incurring too much debt, we weren’t looking at anything built after 1970. We also prefer older things because we like to have objects with histories. However, we opted not to tour a house where a murder took place. We didn’t want that much history (plus we had just seen The Grudge and we knew that a pale, gasping Japanese woman would surely come crawling down the stairs). After scouring the town, we found a nice bungalow from the early 1900s that we really like. Yesterday, after the home inspection, we walked next door and introduced ourselves to the neighbor lady. She immediately launched into her stories of the home’s history.

Apparently, a family who once owned the home were cantankerous weasels. We will call them “the Cantankerous Weasels.” There was a property line dispute, so the Cantankerous Weasels put up a fence right down the middle of the neighbor’s driveway. The fence was erected to create more parking for the Church of the Cantankerous Weasels they founded that supposedly met in their home. After a court ordered the Cantankerous Weasels to remove the fence, they took down the fence, but left the posts. Later, they rented the house to a young woman and her daughter. When the young woman found a house to buy, she told her landlords that she would be moving out, and since she already paid first and last month’s rent, she would leave her belongings in the apartment until her lease was up. The Cantankerous Weasels were OK with this arrangement. Then the Cantankerous Weasels arrived unannounced with the police and accused their tenant of stealing and selling their property. So they locked up all of her belongings for months in a storage unit. Once the Cantankerous Weasels lost the house in foreclosure they stripped the house of the french doors in the dining room, the beveled glass bookcase doors, and anything else that was or was not nailed down.

Not to be outdone, some of our friends were telling us about the woman from whom they bought their house. She had been injured in a car accident, and spent the rest of her time in fear that the insurance agency was stalking her. She was convinced that her house was bugged. She installed dead bolts on her bedroom door. She told our friends not to put any children in a particular upstairs bedroom, because she had seen an insurance agent sitting in a hidden room behind the closet taking notes. Even though they knew the woman was hallucinating, they are still a bit wary of that upstairs room.

This is why I like to buy used/old things. You can’t find stories like that in tract housing.

After unearthing our future home’s history from the neighbor, I was helping a friend erase her hard drive so she could donate it to charity. She was worried that some unscrupulous person could glean her personal information from the computer. I knew that I could strip the hard drive of most of the information, but I was also aware that the stories of it owner would always remain.