So, our house was built in 1956 and really soon afterwards, a kitchen was added on where the back door used to be. The basement is sort of walk-out, so the kitchen is way higher than ground level out back, so they stuck a little cement-block room underneath it with a cement floor. It’s mostly used for storage, and we’ll be putting shelves in there to use it as a root cellar for storing canned foods.
Anyway, last night Kevin was organizing bikes in there (he and his family are crazy bike people, have I mentioned that before?), and he noticed that the room was set up in a weird way. The floor to it is a full foot higher than the floor to the rest of the basement, and it was poured by somebody who didn’t know what they were doing. Instead of just floating the cement inside the block walls, they built a form on top of something else and poured it on top.
So, there’s a step to go up into the room, and I made Kevin pry up one of the boards. We found a layer of plastic sheeting under the cement floor.
Maybe I’ve watched too many episodes of Law & Order: SVU/Criminal Intent. Okay, I definitely know that I’ve watched too many episodes of them. And maybe it didn’t help that we had just watched Stir of Echoes the night before. But our first reaction was, “OMG, there’s a body under there!” If you look at the picture, along the far wall you can see how far up the floor was built above the ground, too. The bottom of the concrete slab isn’t even flush with the bottoms of the concrete blocks that make up the walls.
There’s also the fact that Kevin’s brother is convinced that we’ve got a ghost because the cats (and his old cat, from when he lived here as a kid/teenager) would often freak out in the basement for no good reason and tear through the house. I’ve witnessed this behavior. IT HAPPENS.
I suppose that another option is that somebody buried some treasure under there, but honestly? I’m wondering if we should call in one of those cadaver-sniffing dogs.
