Originally Posted: 2005-05-06 10:35 (no longer live)
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I'll pay you a dollar to stay in my creepy ass basement

A few weeks ago my wife and I moved into this house that's in what they call a "transitional neighborhood". When I moved in, the basement was boarded up and you couldn't get the door leading downstairs open. Eventually we broke the door down and discovered that it had been locked with a padlock that we couldn't just unlock anyway, even from the inside, because someone had gone at it pretty urgently with a hammer or a crowbar or something, anyway it was totally effed up.

Also down in the basement were a bunch of extra electrical outlets, the whole place smelled like bleach and piss. It was dark, since the lighbulb was broken in the socket and there was glass all over the floor. The kicker: the words "please help" were scratched into the wood panel of the wall.

We thought, creepy, but it's all just just from some former drug lab in our basement, which we could live with if we clean it up and use it for storage, right? So we swept and mopped and cleaned it up, and carried stuff down there to store in big plastic bins. Put out roach bait and rat traps, because we saw dropping and there's water crickets and roaches down there for sure.

That night the scratching noises started. They go on all night, desperate sounding, scritchle-schritchle-screeeeeeetch. I know, it's probably just rats or maybe possums, but aside from the fact that I have an orwellian thing about rats, it sounds like fingernails. Our cats won't go anywhere near the basement. We don't blame them either, it's creepy as crap, and the piss smell is plain old terrible. But I need to know what's going on down there and I'm too much of a pansy to stay down there for a few hours in the dark to check it out myself.

So here's the deal: I'll pay any brave soul a dollar to stay down in the cellar for a full night, taking notes and pictures about whatever they see downthere: roaches, rats, spiders, raccoons, whatever. We never got the lights working down there so it will have to be done by flashlight or candlelight. I can offer you a light bulb: I've cut my hand trying to change the broken one on two occasions, and I don't want to risk getting tetanus or something. And since I can't have some low-rent stranger creeping upstairs and stealing my DVD player, my wife insists that I'll have to lock you in down there. I can give you a sleeping bag to sleep in.

In return, I can offer you four shiny quarters, possibly from a mint somewhere bucolic like Denver or Philedelphia where they don't even HAVE ghosts and rats and rat-ghosts.

Anyone?




post id: 71948970