Suppose that you bought an old home to fix up and turn into a comfortable retirement place or a haven to raise your kids. Maybe a nice old pioneer bungalow or something from a few decades ago.
You would, of course, want to know if the home had once been a meth lab or was teetering on the edge of a bottomless sinkhole or was in a crime-prone area.
There are lots of things that real estate agents are required by law to reveal about the house you’re considering buying. What they are not required to disclose is whether the structure is haunted.
Yup, I mean by ghosts. You know, chain-rattling, moaning apparitions, unable to move beyond this mortal coil and whatever comes next?
Note: I don’t believe in hauntings or ghosts. I’ve never seen one — and I have one of the most overactive imaginations this side of utter insanity.
Here’s the thing: Suppose that 50 years before in the house you’re looking at, an occupant went nuts and chopped a family to pieces with an ax in the upstairs bedrooms. Would you want to know about it?
I was reminded of this last week when I drove through a community where I had once been a cop. As I cruised past scenes of old murders, I wondered if the people who lived in those houses and apartments knew what was just beneath the paint on their walls and the wood on their floors?
At one place, where children were playing in the yard, I could still see in my mind a bit of gristle and hair hanging off the thermostat inside the house.
Should I pull over and ask the occupants if they ever heard things go bump in the middle of the night? Would they lose it if they found out that the room where they blissfully slept for the past five years had once been the scene of a murder-suicide?
It wouldn’t bother me if someone had died in my bedroom years ago, but you never know how other people will react. And it’s not my place to freak them out.
Most of us are blissfully ignorant of what’s happened in the places where we live. It doesn’t matter if you’ve lived in the same place for 80 years, what happened long before you showed up remains a mystery to you.
Back to the new place you’re considering. It’s perfect in every sense. It’s your dream home. Gorgeous view of the mountains. Genteel neighborhood. Modern appliances. Best of all, a bargain price.
Would you back out if you suddenly discovered that, nearly a hundred years before, an elderly couple were gunned down there during a burglary?
Keep in mind that we all move through scenes of ancient tragedies. Downtown Salt Lake City is packed with them. There isn’t a section of sidewalk or alley that hasn’t seen its share.
There’s the hotel where a mother hurled her children to death from an upper floor, a tavern where a mass shooting took several lives, the dim quarters where criminals and cops bled their lives away, and the intersections of indescribable traffic crashes.
It all sounds terribly morbid, but the truth is that we all travel over the blood and the lives of those who went before us. And we’ll leave our own behind.
It’s just as easy to think of these places as wonderful — where you conceived your first child, the spot you were standing when you fell in love, and even places of heroism where death was averted.
Next week, our porches will fill up with horrible apparitions. Many of the costumes will be reminders of the inevitable. The trick is to treat the past by living in the moment.
Robert Kirby is The Salt Lake Tribune’s humor columnist. Follow Kirby on Facebook.
