I used to work for a company that clears out foreclosed houses for banks in upstate New York. Most of the time I removed broken electronics, old TVs, soiled mattresses, beat-up furniture. The type of things that people wouldn’t want to move and leave as a big middle finger to the mortgage company. They may be losing their house but at least someone associated with the bank is going to have to haul away their cat-scratched recliner or open up a refrigerator filled with spoiled meat. That was me.
The job was pretty boring. Nine times out of ten the house was in a cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood but now and then the job took me out to more rural areas.
I want to tell you about the time I went to clear out one of these rural houses and the things I can’t unsee. It was early October eight or nine years ago now. The leaves were changing and I remember the drive up was beautiful. My GPS directed me out of the city and the suburbs. Expressway became state highway became county route became gravel road became dirt path. I drove past cornfields and farmhouses and through a thicket of pine trees as the dirt road curved up and around a hill. The road was a dead end and at the dead end the pine trees gave way to a house that seemed completely out of place: a low-slung but expansive midcentury modern ranch that was mostly glass walls and steel beams. It looked like it should be on a beach in Miami or up in Beverly Hills.
Large willow trees surrounded the house to the side and the rear and their leaves were falling and carpeting the ground. I crunched through them as I made my way to the front door. The bank always pays for a locksmith to change the locks, lock the house back up, and send a set of the new keys to my company. I always double-checked to make sure the doors were securely locked, especially when I was out in the middle of nowhere. They’re always locked,I told myself, but I turned the doorknob and I could feel the unopened door give way. I pushed and the door swung open. I stood still, listening, not making a sound. The house was silent. I stepped inside.
As was typical of foreclosures, most of the house was empty. With houses this nice, there was rarely anything left behind. It was going to be an easy day and a light load to the nearest junkyard. There was an old tube TV/VCR combo in the living room. It sat in a built-in shelf. I left it and went to check out the other rooms. There was a mattress and box spring in one bedroom and a couple of beat-up dressers in another. Some old paint cans, tires, rusty tools, and boxes of dusty canning jars cluttered up the basement. After a couple of trips to the box truck, all that was left was grabbing that old TV and looking through the kitchen cupboards for expired food, Tupperware, cleaning products, pots and pans. I remember feeling hungry and convincing myself it wasn’t sad if I ate any food I found. I always hoped for an unopened sleeve of crackers or a box of cookies. What I found instead made my eyes water and made me turn around to see if anyone was looking at me through all those glass walls. What I found instead, standing on its side, was a VHS cassette with a piece of masking tape with the words “Play me Benjamin” written on it. I grabbed the tape and thought to myself, “This is a strange coincidence. Nothing more. Nothing less.” It was just a coincidence. What could it be but a bizarre and random coincidence? I composed myself. I have to play it, I convinced myself. I had to know what was on the tape right then and there. I walked over to the TV and pressed the power button. It turned on. The electric company hadn’t shut the power off yet. I wish they had. They were oftentimes more forgiving or more forgetful than the bank. I put the tape in the VCR and pressed Play.
At first the tape was wavy snow and I thought maybe that’s all there is and I felt a tinge of relief and nostalgia for simpler technology and simpler times. Gradually though the snow disappeared and the recording stabilized and on the screen was the living room. It was as empty on TV as it was as I stood in it. There was no sound. The camera gently shook. Someone was holding the camera but stood almost perfectly still. A minute or two went by and the cameraman held this shot. Then through the glass walls in the distance, there was movement. Something started moving closer and closer and closer to the house. When it was 10 to 15 feet away, it was clear the movement was a little girl, maybe five or six years old. She ran right up against the living room’s glass wall. Her white sun dress was torn and bloody and as she banged on the glass, her mouth opened and closed frantically. Seconds later, there was more movement behind her coming out of the woods beyond the house. It was an elderly woman, 85-90 years old if she was a day, and she was completely naked. Her skin was liver-spotted and loose and it hung on her skeleton like a stained nightgown. She snuck up slowly behind the little girl and hovered over her and stared into the camera. Her eyes were wide and piercing. She stared for a good ten seconds and then grabbed the girl by the hair and ran. Fast. She dragged the girl behind her and was out of frame in seconds.
My heart raced. The camera turned to the kitchen. A young couple, early 30s, sat at the kitchen table. They were tied to the chairs and their throats were cut and blood was everywhere. The camera moved across the living room. A glass door slid open and the camera moved across the lawn into the woods. It was dark in the woods but I could make out that the camera had turned around and could see the house again through the trees. Then whoever was holding the camera ran back toward the house.
I had a fight or flight response and scrambled out the front door, jumped in the truck, and peeled out down the dirt path. I went to the sheriff’s department and told them what happened. I gave them the house keys even though I was pretty sure I left the door wide open as I ran away. Two deputies went to check it out. I waited. When they came back, they told me the house was locked up and when they opened the house and looked around there was no VCR, no VHS cassette. The house was empty, save for some pots and pans in the kitchen cupboards.
I asked if a young family with a little girl lived there and they told me that a family fitting that description had bought the house (the sheriff’s sister was their realtor so he had the inside scoop). They were supposed to move in but when the movers showed up with their things the family wasn’t there and the house fell into foreclosure. “Families change their minds all the time about houses and locations,” the sheriff said.
No one, past or present, associated with the house was named “Benjamin” and the sheriff couldn’t even name a Benjamin that lived in town.
I quit my job the next day and haven’t gone within ten miles of that town since that day.
Submitted September 26, 2017 at 08:18AM by vitainmorte http://ift.tt/2xtblBy nosleep
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