Just bought my childhood house update (archive)

Alright, so with everyone telling me that going into it was a bad idea I decided to try and explore the house first to rule out something like a dumbwaiter or an Underground Railroad type situation. I started by going into the attic and dropping a small aquarium marble down into it (my fish have plenty more so no worries). It banged off the side once, and I can say with mostly certainty that the shaft is paneled with wood, which to me rules out any kind of duct system. I couldn't hear it hit anything at the bottom, though, so I suspect it's probably going into the basement, maybe to some kind of storage space or something. Again, a laundry shoot seems most likely. I had kind of a stroke of inspiration and decided to try contacting my realtor about the house to see if maybe he knows anything about it. I'm still waiting on a response but hopefully he'll get back to me tomorrow or Monday. Either way, it'll be interesting to see what he says.

So I dropped the marble in there and then decided to try and 'follow' it down into the basement. Along the way I tapped on the walls but it must be behind them because they're not hollow at all. Because of where they are there's only two rooms that might connect to it, and neither of those have a space for accessing it. The walls are definitely solid, and always have been. That, for me, conclusively ruled out the dumbwaiter theory. What would be the point of having a chute that's only accessible on two floors?

Right about then is when I started reading a lot of the comments and succeeded in scaring the shit out of myself. I act like I'm fine with it but I REALLY do not want to find a fucking body in this thing. That would suck on a bunch of levels. I know a lot of people are convinced that's what it is though, so I'm trying to brace myself for it.

Anyway I was 100% too freaked out to even attempt to go into this thing until I know for a fact what's down there so I limited the rest of my search to the basement. Which is where I noticed that the room isn't a perfect square. It's ALSO short on one side, by just a bit. If you stand in the middle and look around you can actually tell that there's something a little wonk about the way the angles and stuff are. My best guess is that the foundations have shifted, but it's interesting to have the two be similar that way. Old house, probably old carpentry. Handmade, that whole thing.

So the basement is mostly finished but it's not aesthetically pleasing or meant to be. There's an old bathroom down here that doesn't do much except exist, the water doesn't run to it so it's not usable. It's on the opposite wall from the tunnel though, so it's not related I'd assume. The wall where the tunnel is is solid, just like the other floors. The basement is underground so I can't exactly go busting through the wall to try and see if maybe there was an access hatch at one point. But after using a flashlight and going over just about every inch of that wall I can safely say that there is no access to it, and never has been. This, to me, means one of two things: The tunnel is either a failed attempt at installing some kind of laundry hatch, or it's just some weird quirk of the house.

My next steps are to get the glowsticks and drop those down in there to see where it goes. After that, I'll get a broom or something and test to see if there is in fact a ladder in there. I won't go in it until I'm sure it's reasonably safe, and I'll get a friend to come over and spot me just in case.

I did spend some time checking the tunnel out just lying on my stomach and looking in, and here's what I can say about it: the sides as far down as I can see are wood paneled, which I expected. No writing on the sides, and more importantly no brackets or mounting plates for equipment. The air in there is pretty much the same temperature as the house but it almost feels pressurized? I don't know if maybe it's the closeness of the space that makes the air feel denser but you can definitely tell. I also listened in there and can't hear anything. Shined my phone down but there's no light at all so I can't really say much about depth or anything. Once the glowsticks get here we can finally see what's at the bottom!

It's unrelated, but while I was going through things in the process of checking the tunnel out I found a really cool hand-crank flashlight in my parents' stuff. It looks really beat up but it works, it's pretty cool! I found that, some rope (from Christmas trees past I assume), and I bought one of those old-person grabber hooks so I can lower a flashlight in there to see what's going on if the glowsticks don't work for whatever reason. It's pretty insane having something like this in my house, to be honest. Now that I'm spending time thinking about it I can't seem to get it out of my mind. Like what is it for?? It's like finding a safe behind a painting and having it be full of feathers. Just totally nonsensical. Old houses have quirks but this just seems... excessive. I was thinking of all those stories you hear of people finding mourning jewelry in their walls, or worse. I did a little snooping around online and couldn't find anything quite like my situation. It did remind me of something though.

After my brother and I found the door, my Dad was really adamant about us not fucking around with it. Which I found odd, because how did he know what was inside it? He'd warn us that it was really dangerous and that we didn't know where it led. At the time I brushed it off but now I'm wondering if my Dad actually got it open and knew it was just a shute to nowhere? If so, why wouldn't he just tell us that? Maybe because he didn't want us to know it COULD be opened? I really wish I could ask them.

This whole thing really makes me miss them.

Cue today.

Right off the bat, there's something fucking weird going on with this tunnel. Like it was weird to begin with but I could really use some advice on what to do next. I'm like, 100% out of my league.

So I got the glowsticks, and I also found some Christmas tree lights. Some of the ones on the end were broken but luckily it still worked. I didn't know what all I'd need, so I brought up a bunch of stuff. I can't believe I'm saying it but I even had my fucking handgun in case some rabid bats or whatever flew out. Stupid but I'm so freaked out about dead bodies and rats and shit that I had to do it. Thanks a lot for that. The other stuff was just things I figured I'd need, like a first aid kit and a few more marbles. I used a book to brace the door open and I tried to be pretty systematic with my tests.

First was the marble. I did one and listened REALLY carefully but I still couldn't hear it hit anything. Then I broke a glowstick and dropped it in there. It fell.

And fell.

It didn't hit bottom. It just kept falling until I couldn't see anything. Now I'm not a fucking genius but I should be able to see that even if it's in the basement, right? The house is two stories, with the attic as maybe a half story. There's no way it can be deep enough to lose the glowstick in. I dropped the entire fucking pack down there. Nothing. Wherever they're going it's not visible from the attic. I broke out the Christmas lights and got them working. I lowered them in to see what would happen. With the added light, I could see that the walls are panelled with wood most of the way down. At what I'd guess is basement-level, it appears to stop. I don't know what it's made of after that. What I DO know is that I had about 20 feet of light in there before the lowest bulbs blew out.

I hauled the string back up and saw that they literally BLEW OUT. The bulbs were shattered and while the string WAS admittedly very cold it's winter and I imagine that space isn't heated. Possibly a faulty wire or something in there but it's just another weird thing in this chain of weird things.

Which leads me back to something I noticed the first time I really examined it. The short side of the tunnel isn't that noticeable at first, but it looks like as the tunnel goes down it gets much more pronouced. But the width stays the same. I think it's curving, but I still can't decide if that's intentional or not. Again, no markings of any kind, no nails or brackets inside. I DID confirm that it is a ladder that I can see, it goes down as far as I could get my light to go. I think the time for me to go down is fast approaching but that begs the question of how to do it without killing myself. Should I use rope? Get a harness of some kind? I'll have to do more research. Maybe ask my friend who's more outdoorsy than me.

Oh, I got some private messages asking about my parents, and if I think that they might have gotten killed by something in there. I'd like to clarify a few things about that.

My parents were really great people even though we had some hard times. Things got especially tough when I was little, maybe in the sixth grade. My Dad lost his job and things were tight. His relationship with Mom really suffered. It seemed like he got very distant and... not cold, really, just kind of distant. Things got better once he got a job at a construction site, but he and my mom didn't seem to really 'click' the same way anymore. That's not to say that they weren't happy, but I'm sure the emotional toll of not providing for us was a big blow to him. I left for college and after that I didn't hear much about their relationship. I'd go home for the holidays and stuff but everything seemed mostly fine.

Then my mom got sick, and Dad COMPLETELY turned a corner. He wanted to be by her side constantly, was always checking up on her and making sure she was okay. Her cancer, unfortunately, was very wide-spread and there was very little the doctors could do for her. Once it was obvious we were looking at paliative care instead of a cure, Dad's health started to take a turn for the worst. He was very close-mouthed about his own illness, probably because he didn't want us to worry. The only time he ever even hinted at it was when he made it clear that if something happened to him, he wanted us to move on and not mourn for him.

It was a really hard time. Both of my parents were basically dying and there was jack shit I could do. My mom passed away about a year after getting diagnosed, and in her will she made it clear she didn't want us to see her body. I'm sure people will think it's some kind of way for us to prevent seeing the 'real' her but the truth is that she wanted us to remember her alive, not as a body. We had her cremated and spread the ashes in her garden. Shortly after, I got a call at school from my brother letting me know that Dad had passed as well. Same deal, cremation and spreading the ashes where we spread Mom's.

Maybe it was melodramatic but I couldn't help but think, like, 'I'm an orphan now.' That's why I don't like to talk about it much. My Dad wasn't be best person but I loved him and he never did anything to hurt me or my brother. Everything he did, I know he did out of love for us. The only time he ever got mad at us was when we really fucked up. Like when he warned us not to play around the tunnel. We ended up ignoring him at first but when he caught us he was LIVID. He probably knew that we could have really hurt ourselves. He was really caring like that. He took care of Mom to the end, and died right behind her. I remember once, after we knew that the cancer was fatal, he did all this research to try and find out EXACTLY how much time she had left. I asked him why and he said he wanted to know, down to the minute, how long he had with her so that he could be by her side the entire time. In the end he was pretty close, off by a couple weeks but still. That's how well he knew her. That's why I say none of us were really surprised when he got sick.

I think I am gonna go down it, though. The more I think about it the more I kind of just want to solve it so I can stop thinking about all this. There's so much emotional stuff tied up in it that I really just want to solve it once and for all so that I can go back to my normal life. For some reason it feels like I'm just spriraling downward into these memories and it's kind of overwhelming. Maybe I never really grieved for them. I dunno.

I'll probably go down tomorrow night. I'll call a friend and tell them to hang out with me in case I fall and kill myself or something. Or fall into a pile of corpses. Either way, it'll be good to have someone there.