Welcome to the Hannibal Lecter Basement

You know when you change the focus on a camera? At first a small object in the foreground, like a bee, or a flower, is all your eye can make out. But then when you change the focus, the grass or the other flowers come into view behind it. Well, imagine looking through what you thought was a lattice covered window in your basement. Instead of flowers, what my eyes made out in the dim light was that the wall did not end behind the lattice. Instead there was a secret, basement room.

It all started the day we got the house inspected. That day, I screamed out loud twice. Was I alone in the dark, cobweb filled basement? No. I was with two grown men. The first time it was because the wind blew across the top of one of the unused chimneys. There is this circular metal valve that does something...not sure what, and the wind made it scrape across its casing creating this really creepy sound. It's the kind of noise you might expect a monster to make in the basement...if you believed in that sort of thing.

But the second scare...that was worse, by far. You see, at one time there was a three season porch on the house. Somewhere along the line, a previous owner decided to enclose it and make it part of the house. Now it is a great, sun-filled dining room. Lined with windows on three sides, the light spills in and brightens the house throughout the day. That's upstairs. Down in the Pit of Despair it is a different story.

There is a basement underneath the sunny dining room. But that basement was built AFTER the rest of the basement. So it is sort of hidden. Okay, here is where it gets creepy. When the original basement was built, it had some of those little, rectangular windows along the top of the wall. Normal. What's so scary about that, you ask. Well, when the sunny dining room basement was added, it was added onto the outside of that wall.

When we went down in the basement with the home inspector I saw this regular basement wall with two little windows covered with raggedy, spider-webbed, red curtains. Using a stick, I pushed the curtain aside, expecting to look out onto the grass at ground level. But instead there was this little, plastic lattice thing. "Well that explains why there's no light coming through the curtains..."I thought to myself. And then my eyes adjusted.

Welcome to the Hanibal Lecter Basement. It is a low ceilinged room with spiderwebs hung from the floor to ceiling. The ground was dirt, not cement. When I shined my flashlight in, I could see that, other than the windows into the main basement, where I stood, there was no way in or out. The perfect place for a cannibalistic serial killer to hide his victims.

I screamed again.

This is what I have to deal with every time I want to do the laundry, or any time I want to gather up some hiking gear, or put one of the baby's old toys into storage. Sometimes - and I know I shouldn't be admitting this on the Internet - but sometimes I even sing songs from old musicals out loud to keep the mood up while I dash from the top of the stairs to the dryer and back.

And it has to stop. I mean, I have a kid now. I can't just say, "Evan, you can walk now. It is your responsibility to do the laundry because mommy is too scared to go in the basement alone."