Since living in a camper means weekly trips to a laundromat in a nearby small town, a friend’s offer of letting me use her washer and dryer at the house was a welcome change. Instead of sitting idly and listening to the washers run for 26 minutes… yes I have it down to the exact timing… and then being hypnotized by the sight of clothes tumbling in the dryers while I sit and twiddle my thumbs, I can now sit over coffee and enjoy the time while the clothes get done.
Her offer came with a word of warning though…”You’re more than welcome to do your laundry here if you can stand my creepy basement!”
I’ve seen creepier!
It’s an older house most likely built sometime in the 40’s. The steps going down are sturdy but uneven and slanted due to the settling of the house over the years once you hit the 4th step from the top. The walls and floor are of heavy concrete. Spider cracks run the walls from over the years. The venting over the washer is low, causing me to duck my head when I load and unload clothes unless I want to risk concussion. The dryer sits in another concrete room with the furnace and a workbench. And the piece de resistance??? Directly across from the bottom of the inside stairs lies the outside cellar door entrance. You know the kind I’m talking about. The Wizard of Oz “c’mon Dorothy get your rearend down to the cellar” kind of double cellar doors that are SURE to fly back in a stiff wind if you were running from a twister. The view of them from the inside fascinates me though as I walk down the stairs… a crack of outside light peeking through the gloom that leads to them, promising a blinding light if they were thrown open to the world.
Creepy??? Nah, just a basement with character. However if I were a kid I might think differently! 🙂
At sometime in their life, everyone has encountered a creepy basement. It doesn’t have to be in an older house either… it can be a brand new house for all that matters. My great uncle’s basement creeped me out bigtime… stairs steeper than my little legs could handle, a light that turned on from the ceiling only AFTER you got all the way down into the basement, cobwebs brushing your face and hands as you went, sure that there was a little troll underneath the stairs who would trip you as you scampered back up. The house I grew up in had a place under the stairs where the sump pump was. Of course I was positive that the minute I came close to that one there would be long arms or tentacles or something equally as spooky reaching out to drag me down. Though these stairs were enclosed from the back, I would still race up to the top like I was being pursued by a pack of wolves stopping at the top to try and appear calm, cool and collected to everyone upstairs.
Amy was no different growing up. Even in a house of new construction with a well lit finished basement, she was SURE there was a little troll living in the room underneath the stairs. Despite the fact that it was sealed off with a door AND a lock placed there to ease her young fears, she still pounded up the stairs at a furious rate while pausing just as I did at the top to nonchalantly re-enter the upstairs. When she wandered into my childhood basement, she was just as creeped out as I was years ago. And when we forgot to mute the Haunted Mansion screensaver on the computer downstairs??? And we heard Mickey Mouse and the ghosts moaning and groaning from down below us??? And despite the fact that we both laughed hysterically when we finally figured out where all the creepy sounds were coming from???
She didn’t go down there for several days and I have to admit I wasn’t comfy with it for a bit even though I knew full well what had happened.
We were both a little creeped!
Very little creeps me out nowadays. As I grow older, I tend to look at things with slightly different eyes… new perspectives.
No Diana…. you don’t have a creepy basement. You have a basement with character… with a story to tell. I don’t feel the need to race up the steps like a madwoman being pursued.
But I DO hurry up the steps so that I can step back into the warmth and laughter and chatter that is becoming my laundry day.