When we first start talking to people about the fact that we own a house that is 125 years old in an historic district, one of the questions people tend to ask is "So...Is your house haunted?" Some want us to say no (usually the people who think they may eventually stay with us), some want us to say yes, but almost everyone wants to hear some sort of story. Well, it is almost Halloween, so there is no better time to satisfy all of those people that want a little story of the not easily explained that comes along with our house. This is just one story, there are others, but this is a good one to start with.
When Wendy and I moved into our house in January 2003 we were met with a pretty tall task. Sure, we had a lot of renovation ahead of us, but the first task at hand was the daunting effort to clean up our newly purchased mess of a house. The house had been lived in by single men for going on 15 years, and their level of cleaning had left something to be desired.
During our cleaning adventures, we worked inside, outside, in open spaces, and tight corners, we cleaned everything we could. One of the common things that we kept finding everywhere oddly enough was peanut shells. This may sound a little ordinary, and we didn't think anything of it at first, but that would soon change.
At first we found them all over the flower beds in backyard. For these we just chalked it up to the squirrels we would see running all over the place. Then we started to find them left in front of the doors and on the sidewalk. We started to think that maybe our neighbor Paul, who perpetually "patrolled" the alley, ate peanuts and dropped the shells wherever he happened to be...and maybe even threw them over the wall into our backyard. At any rate, these shells were popping up all over the place, and we didn't have any explanation for it.
We just sort of laughed off all of the peanuts and shells outside, but then we started to find them in some of the strangest places inside. We found several in the corners of the basement, and a couple thrown about in the dirt crawlspace. We even found one or two in the sun porch area. Then, during our cleaning process, Wendy started to clean under the sink in the kitchen. There was a removable piece of wood that covered the bottom of the cabinet. When Wendy picked up the piece of wood she found dozens of peanut shells piled together. They had been there for who knows how long, but they had been put there on purpose.
After the mass finding of peanuts, the "excitement" died down a little bit. We would still continue to see them around in the backyard and in front of the doors, but not much more than that. It was about this time that we started to joke that we had a "peanut ghost." He seemed harmless, but had a serious love of legumes.
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