The New House

THE NEW HOUSE

The house is haunted.  About 10 years ago our place was surrounded by some 40  acres of woods.  A miracle in small town suburbia, just 20 miles from  New York City.  Then a developer, a Mr. Levine, a shyster by all accounts got permission to build on land which we knew was wet lands property.  There was a pond out there just beyond our woods.  I used to take my young son out there to catch tadpoles. 

The land was a peat bog.  On fire ever since we were kids. The smoke could be see most days drifting over the highway beyond.  We were under extreme caution by our parents never to walk in there.  They said, and rightly so, that we could break through what looked like solid ground and end up in a burning hot pit.  Even firemen didn't go in there unless the brush caught on fire.  They just waited year upon year for the underground fire to burn itself out.  The place came to be known as Burning Hollow.

When the EPA came to take plug samples they look them from the edge of the peat bog.  Of course they came up clean.  Somebody greased somebody's hands.  The parcel was worth many millions of dollars.  Our Mr. Levine got permission to build on 8-10 acres.  We had had our land surveyed and somehow the line was misjudged by Mr. Levine.  And a house went up on a 1600' lot in a AA rated zone where houses should have been on no less than 2400 foot lots.

The New House went up.  We checked and rechecked our line.  The town upheld Mr. Levine's maps.  Soon the monstrosity went up, tall enough to block the sunrise on that side.  The house was painted charcoal black looking like a slag heap of my youth in Pennsylvania.

There was quickly a buyer for the house.  The realtor told her client that our back acre was a park, common land.  Common land!  I called the realtor and told her that common land didn't exist in Ridgedale.  It's something they have in parts of England.  Everyone makes excuses to us for their lies. Our lives were busy.  A kid in college, both of us working day jobs, and nights fixing up our own house. Not a lot of extra money to hire a lawyer.

A man moved in The New House for which he paid 2 million dollars. He married a typical type.  She was a woman who found herself a stock broker husband, and with voice lesson was attempting to lose her Bayonne accent.  Hair, nails, skins worked on each week.  Dressed just so.

They had a couple of kids.  She decided she wanted a pool in the back yard of the house which was much too close to our line as it was.  She was insistent.  She made threats against poor Jeffrey Bitner who had the bad judgment to marry her.  Jeffrey had trees cut down over our line.  One, a pink Dogwood given to me by my students when  my son was born.  A 20 year old tree.  I called the police.  Jeffrey's surveyor came out and we heard the buzz of his metal detector right where we told him the pin was under a pile of stones at the corner of our property.  We heard him swear and say, "I'm screwed.  I have to tell my employer that  you are right and he's wrong."  The pool went in anyway.  And the iron fence sits today not six inches from our line.  Not code!

The pool dug, it rained for a week without stopping.  The ground around the new pool turned to a mud pit.  The new pool filled with silt.  The wife said if she couldn't swim in the pool by the 4th of July she would leave.  She got her swim.  A couple of years.  She and her friends swam and sunbathed naked- the kids farmed out to camps somewhere.  Then the shouting began. 

The woman showed up at a neighbor's place in a silk kimono one night.  Banged on the door saying she needed help.  She had bruises all over her face and a split lip.  She had them call the police.  She moved out with the kids, Jeffrey sold the house.

Couple number two.  A prominent doctor.  Wife and three kids.  A boy, a girl and another boy, the youngest.  They bought a summer place on a small lake just over the border in New York.  They were enjoying their boat on the lake when a drunk drove his boat out of a side cove and hit their boat broadside.  Everyone in the water, hurt, but OK.  Except for the wife.  She had been decapitated in the accident.  The kids saw it all.

The little girl cried day and night for her mommy.  The  youngest told us that his mom was coming home for Christmas.  A series of nannies came and went.  Most had stories to tell of harassment, and other ill treatment.  The kids would become emotionally attached to one and she would be gone with no explanation.  The house was sold to couple number three.

A nice Chinese couple.  Quiet, hardworking.  They owned a cleaning establishment in the area.  They sold the house in less than a year.  We figured the walls of The New House were taking.

Couple number three are in there now.  A second marriage for both.  Her two kids and two boys they had together.  The shouting began two or three years ago.  We chalked it up to PMS, hers.  The children screamed. The teenage girls stormed out of the house.  Doors slammed, furniture thrown off the deck. Windows open all summer, we heard the uproar almost daily.   

A couple of months ago we saw about four policemen in our back field.  My husband went out to see what was going on.  There had been a home invasion.  The couple in The New House they said were each having affairs and had gone out for the night with their respective lovers leaving a 12 year old daughter to babysit the younger kids.  She woke when a stranger put his hand on her leg in the dark.  She screamed; the man ran; she called 911.  The police said in addition to their investigation of the break in their might be a case for DYFUS.

Last night, the weather turned mild, the windows were open to more terrible  screaming.  Words, threats.  They went inside and we could still hear the melee continuing.  The boys were outside beating the bushes with their hockey sticks, no doubt in frustration, fear, loathing.  They will have caught the infection.

There are demons in that house.  It is said a girl fell into a burning peat pit over there.  Indians cut peat for their fires centuries ago.  Who knows what strange spirits walk?  Who knows what a place absorbs?  There needs to be an exorcism over there. The New House is haunted.