Adventures in Moving: Chapter 3 - deBasements

OK so let's move on to basements. The thing about house basements is that many people ignore them and use them just like a giant closet. Hey, open up the basement door and throw those boxes right down the stairs! But I grew up without a basement pretty much.

Well kinda, it was a log cabin (for real! but that's another story) and the main house had a "basement" that was a pit you crawled down a ladder into that had the furnace in it. I mean you could edge your way around two thirds of the furnace if you were thin. It was in the main house area. There was this thin door off the main hallway that had a ladder that led down about 5 feet into the pit where the furnance was. FUN. It was always super hot in there.. no ventilation at all, and if someone was down there it was to fix a furnace problem so it was a real event. Cussing. Sweating. Panicking. They should make a SAW sequel down there. Or have they? I haven't seen any of the Saw movies.


Oh wait there's more. The detached master bedroom (again, I lived in a very odd house as a kid) had its own basement. The entrance to this basement was past a bathroom that no longer worked and down another ladder. Stairs to the basement? That's for wussies! This basement was kind of like a normal basement except the ceiling was only about 4.5 feet off the ground and it was never used for anything. It had this abandoned workshop in it that my parents just left untouched.. long antique metal workbench.. old nonworking furnace.. all kinds of swollen wooden drawers and cabinets with strange old time tools and rusty bent nails. Cobweb city! Everything was coated in a thick layer of dust down there and my parents would never let me play there at all. So..I used to sneak down with a flashlight when I was a latchkey kid (parents gone from after school until later at night) and get scared by giant spiders and huge weird subterranean bug nasties and have nightmares about it for months. I would go down there... scare myself, and then run all the way back to my bedroom in the main house (up the ladder, through the abandoned bathroom, through the master bedroom, down the hallway, around the corner, up the stairs, down the hallway, into my room... a marathon of a mad dash) and shake under my covers.

Mom at work, dad out late... pitch black outside... weird noises of an old log cabin and I just upped the fear ante by venturing into the old haunted basement and saw about being attacked by mutant insects and giant spiders! Yea I was a sucker for scaring the life half out of myself. I would do stuff down there like.. turn off the flashlight and shriek as loud as I could to see how badly I could scare myself. Bang on a cabinet and scream to see how many bugs came out at me..

I just got creeped out actually, it's been a while since I remembered that creepy old basement. I will continue this blog when I shake off the willies.