Thanks to Robbyn for pointing this one out to me.

The old house where I used to live growing up is now the site of a haunted house. Well, okay, not exactly a haunted house, but more a haunted field. It’s called “Field of Corpses.” According to the intro at the website, Torrance White, the man who built the house in the 1880s, and his family “found something” during the harvest of 1801. They started disappearing. And then the question is asked: “Why has everyone who has since lived on the property suddenyl [sic] died?”

Well, I haven’t suddenyl died, and neither has my family! So I guess we have to allow them some creative leeway.

I always thought, as a kid, that we had the perfect house to do a haunted house, but the farthest I ever got was stringing up ghosts and bats and things, rigging them with fishing wire so they’d move every time the front door was opened. Now, while they have not gone and made the house itself a haunted house, at least my childhood home overlooks the terror of Torrence’s discovery.

As I grew up in the house, the vast fields around it gradually were torn up and turned into housing developments. You can see that in the satellite image. My dad had the idea, back when I was in high school, to try to save our house from this fate by turning it into a restaurant. People had always been curious about the house and would sometimes stop by and ask for tours (which we didn’t give them… it was our home!). A restaurant would be a good way to save the house and let people see it.

The running and eventual losing of the restaurant is a long story for another time, but the house has since been a place for spacial events (wedding receptions, parties, etc.), and the garage/barn my dad had built behind the house became the new home of a locally-famous pastry shop, Das Meyer. I used to go to the original Das Meyer in junior high, on French class field trips. That the now-old new Das Meyer barn is called the Das Meyer Fine Pastry Chalet gives me a case of the smirking titters.

My mom and sister and others swear that our house was haunted. As a small kid, I made up stories about it being haunted, but I never really saw anything like that. Apparently, the ghosts became more active after the house became a restaurant. My mom said lights used to turn on when no one was in the room. A couple of the waitresses refused to go into the storm cellar, where the wine was kept, because they said it was haunted. My sister and a boyfriend witnessed the sudden and violent opening of a closed door that, after our rec room was built, led to nowhere.

One night, when the house was abandoned and being readied for conversion to the restaurant, some friends and I went up to my old bedroom and gave a Ouija board the ol’ college try. Nothing interesting happened. No lights flickering or doors flying open or wine bottles being stored. Figures I never got to see anything like that.

Well, real hauntings aside, I can not tell you how hilarious this is, this new event at “my house,” and how… bizarre it is. There’s my old haunt (ha ha ha!), being seen by all! I guess my dad’s plan worked.