Sometimes life imitates art

[sapphire]

Heh. Well, if it wasn't someone from the area, people just say "by the big house." And it's not hard at all to tell which one they mean.

Sadly, I was a bit young to really remember those things now. I have snippets of the memory of my parents showing me what the guys doing the actual work had found, and I know that we did read the letter - parts of it, anyway, because a lot of it was faded too much to really be able to read.
When we moved, we left those things with the new owners. We figured they belonged with the house. I would have liked to keep the tobacco tin, though.

It is a very strange thought that that house could have caught fire at any moment. And it was an old house - high ceilings, lots of wood. It would have been gone in seconds.
We think the dining room in that house was haunted, actually. It used to be a bedroom, so we figured someone probably died there. Our dog used to bark frantically every time someone went in there alone. We didn't use it much - too big, too formal. Strangely, she only really barked when it was one person - if we were in there as a family, like for Christmas dinner, she was fine. Makes you wonder what she saw.

All you have to do is watch a crime show for a few episodes before you find an example of people living with something they never suspected - like a skeleton.
One of my friends used to live in this house that was converted into two apartments - she and her boyfriend had the top apartment, and this guy lived in the bottom. The guy in the bottom apartment murdered a teenager in his living room while they were living there. They were probably asleep when it happened. They moved out as soon as they found out. The landlord was nice enough to let them out of their lease.

(And didn't this evolve into scary story hour?)

[sapphire]

Okay, odd story that has nothing to do with the above.

When I was little, I got cavities in my teeth a lot. As I grew older, I stopped getting them as much, but now they seem to have come back.
Also when I was little, I had a dream involving the dentist, a dark room with only a single bright light above me, my mom sitting nearby, and pain in my mouth.
Turns out that wasn't a dream. That was me getting the grooves in my teeth filled in because they're deeper than they really should be, which makes me extremely cavity-prone. (I brush twice a day, floss every night, and use fluoride, and I still get cavities.) The stuff they used to fill in the grooves has been worn down over the years and is pretty much gone now, so that's why I'm getting cavities again.

What gets me about that is that I really thought it was a dream. Normally, we mistake dreams for memories from childhood. But no, I mistook this memory for a dream.

[A Mask Among Many]

I went out to an old house like the one you described, Zoom, and it was exactly like you were saying. just old, abandoned, and holding a lot of stuff from the previous owners. It had the strangest feel of old, yet recently abandoned. Like, there were bills and mail piled under the mail slot in the front door, and old mugs, and mildew everywhere. The weirdest part was that you could still easily tell what the mail said. I never went through the dressers and stuff because I only got the chance to go there once, but the friend I was with, said that there hadn't been anyone there since he moved there. (like 10 years ago.) At one point, while we were there, a strange scratching sound began in the walls, and it was like way too big to be mice, so probably rats, which I absolutely hate.