November 1st, 2026

“Oh… so you’re Vanessa…” he said, his eyes nervously darting side to side.

“Yup. I sure am.”

“I hate to meet the neighbors like this… under these circumstances… my roommate…”

I cut him off interrupting him, “Yeah it really sucks to not be able to trust your neighbors… to have them steal from you…” I made sure to get that last bit in. I wasn’t mincing words at that point.

“I mean my roommate… she ummm… they… I don’t have control over it…”

“Well tell them we’d like our laundry basket back too… and also don’t ever ask for a favor again. That bridge is burned. You all went through our stuff. That’s some fucked up shit. My name is very clearly marked on these two boxes. I can’t believe you’d go through our stuff…”

“I’m sorr…”

“And I’m pissed.”

I’m still pissed.

I’m also in full belief that homes… places… carry energy. Sometimes the energy is neutral… our last home was neutral. There was nothing palpable there. No discerning good or bad for that matter. Just neutral. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I think most places are neutral. I think neutral is the norm. Nearly every place I’ve been in has felt neutral.

The church?

I felt it on day one.

The second we came in through the door… there was no neutrality… there was an overwhelming feeling of good, of welcoming, of light, warmth, love.

I will die on that hill.

The church has ever since I saw the pictures, felt like a living, breathing, entity. A being in and of itself. I don’t know how exactly to explain it. It’s just this feeling… like goosebumps on exposed skin when you listen to breathtaking music or a powerful speech. It’s hard to put that physical response into words… but when you experience it, you know it… no one has to tell you what you’re feeling.

I’ve been into plenty of churches, I’ve been in Notre Dame, I’ve been in many homes… and the church is the first one that I ever felt this type of feeling… like the walls teemed with life, with love and memories.

Was it always like that?

131 years ago when the first stone was laid did the builders feel it too?

Or maybe when the first congregation paid off the mortgage and burned the loan papers… did they feel it?

Could it have been the two artists that turned it from a church into a home? Pouring themselves into the community and this building… did it start with them?

I’ll never know. How could I? What would that look like? Me tracking down past worshippers and owners… “say… so ummm… weird question but did the church feel… oh I don’t know… like a living, breathing, positive entity when you were there? Or ummm….”

I’m not trying to get baker acted.

Also… this place isn’t neutral.

On the opposite side of the spectrum I was once in a very evil place. Just thinking about it gives me the ick.

This was a long time ago. Our kids weren’t even born yet and David had just started working for a real estate investor that spent all their time and energy flipping homes in a very up and coming (and now mostly unaffordable) neighborhood in St Pete. The neighborhood was filled with adorable bungalows and craftsman style homes, many of which had fallen into disrepair. Homes that at the time could be scooped up for pennies on the dollar… and scoop them up this investor did. Sometimes they would flip five to six homes in a year.

While I wasn’t the biggest fan of the whole “stripping of all the character out of the homes to turn them into cookie cutter Home Depot flips as quickly as possible” thing… it did keep a steady stream of money coming in. What I did enjoy though was David bringing me to see the houses before the flip started.

David was always given a key to the newest home as soon as the investor closed on the property. He was always one of the few given a key because David never worked with the rest of the flip crew. At first he had, but that was short lived. If you know anything about flipping you know that speed is of the utmost importance… you’re racing against the clock… each mortgage payment made was less profit at the end. Each week that went by without that house finished and resold was that much less money in the investor’s pocket and so the last thing a house flipping crew wanted was for the frickin’ electrician to have to turn off all the power to work on the wiring. Every time David would have to work, every other tradesman would come to a grinding hault. Which meant that during his house flipping stint… David worked nights and weekends, opposite everyone else.

That never bothered him though… the working alone… My husband loves being able to go out to a jobsite and work without having to ask people to move their tools or tell the carpenter that he’s going to be without power tools for the afternoon. David loved showing up in the evening when everyone else had left for the day and turning on his radio and getting right to work with no distractions, interruptions, or people grumbling about not having their tools.

No David was thrilled to work by himself in 100+ year old homes with the power off and the attic just a tad cooler than it was during the late afternoon heat… and I loved to go with him, usually on the weekends when they’d first start a new job and he’d walk me through an old craftsman with built in cabinets and intricate molding that framed out high wood planked ceilings. We’d “ooh and ahhh” the attention to detail and pride in craftsmanship devoid of today’s modern builds and dream about maybe owning something as beautifully made as these homes one day.

That was until that one home on Burlington Avenue. From the outside it was very unassuming. I don’t think anyone would ever look at that home from the outside and have their hair stand on end. They’d probably drive or walk right on by and not even think twice about it. It wasn’t until you went inside that you’d feel it…

There was a small entry way that opened up to a well lit living room on the left and right off of that was the open floor plan kitchen. Except that as soon as you’d step into the living room there was something not quite right about the kitchen’s darkness and the proximity to the living room’s numerous windows. Florida’s sun has a way of permeating even the darkest of spaces but not in this kitchen… it was as if there were invisible walls that kept the light from reaching the inner sanctum of the home’s heart.

Now if it were this impossible darkness in an open floor plan alone, one could write the whole experience off as maybe the angle of the light coming in or whatever shit you could come up with, but there was more to it than that. There was this feeling… this feeling of the house not wanting you there. There was a feeling of being watched. A heaviness to the space that only became more pronounced the further into the home you ventured.

Off the darkened space of the kitchen was a hallway bathed in light and right off the hallway, the first door on the left was a sterile white room with a 14’ ceiling that peaked in the middle then sloped to the walls sharply where there were four large windows on the exterior wall of the room. On the two short sides of this large room were two walls that because of the pitch of the ceiling, resembled a simple drawing a house: a square with a triangle on top.

Everything outside of the newly installed bamboo flooring in this room was a hospital white except for a small pitch black hole devoid of light on the top portion of the far short wall’s triangle top. This was the attic access and it made me incredibly uneasy. The juxtaposition of the alarmingly white walls against the black hole was unnerving and I couldn’t quite explain it but it made me feel on edge. I couldn’t shake the feeling that not only was I being watched but that my presence was not welcome in this space.

Now nothing at all outside of that feeling that I couldn’t quite shake happened while I was there. There was the kitchen that was too dark and that creepy room with the attic access and that feeling that David and I weren’t alone, but again… nothing happened. The only thing out of the norm was that David had brought me to “work” with him on the project. The times that we actively worked together on electrical projects since David started his business were few and far between… three times precisely in the 15+ years he’s been doing this and two of those times were helping him assemble finicky and expensive lighting fixtures. This house though he taught me how to do actual electrical work and I installed new switches while he worked in that creepy attic space.

Months later he admitted that he brought me along not because I was particularly skilled or fast or probably even that much of a help doing something he could practically do in his sleep faster than I could do fully conscious, but because it was the first time ever in all the hundreds of homes he had ever been in, that he had been afraid to be by himself.

He didn’t tell me about it when it had happened. He was probably in disbelief but I had noticed a change. He had always preferred to work on those flips at night… even in high crime areas where I always feared he’d be mugged or murdered if we’re being honest. To him heatstroke in an afternoon baked attic, was far more of a pressing threat than the OCD induced intruders I imagined targeting him… so when he stopped working at night and instead traded it in for steamy weekend afternoons in humid 110 degree attics I just assumed that the thought of being shot by a crackhead for his toolbox had gotten to him.

It wasn’t until quite some time later when we had just finished watching a show about paranormal experiences that I asked him, somehow knowing that creepy house with the dark kitchen and terrifying attic space would come up, if he had ever seen or experienced something in a home before. At that point he had been in hundreds of old homes and so I felt like if anyone would have possibly experienced something, it would be my husband.

He got real quite. He paused for a minute then said, “Actually yes… that house I brought you to to help me with the switches…”

What he told me next made my blood run cold and also didn’t surprise me at all.

David admitted that he stopped working nights after that house. David also admitted that he brought me along because after that one late night on that property, that he’d never go back there alone again… and he didn’t.

What happened up in the attic can’t be explained. We’ve tried. There is no earthly explanation. Period.

While David was up there in the wee early morning hours of a hot August night, the house pitch black and eerily silent, David’s brand new headlamp went out. He had been working on some wiring up in the attic and when the lamp went out he was engulfed in a deep blackness. He wasn’t afraid at that point, he just put his klein’s down infront of him. He had been crouched down on his knees and so he put his klein’s down right inbetween his legs and took off his headlamp, jiggled it around a bit and the light came back on. He put it back on his head then reached down for his heavy metal kleins that had been right between his legs except when he reached for where they should be, there was nothing there. His kleins were gone.

David panned his headlamp around the attic space wondering if maybe he was tired and not thinking properly and had in actuality put the kleins somewhere else except that they were nowhere whithin his reach. It wasn’t until he looked out further that he saw the kleins not beneath him but rather well out of his reach and off to the right.

Which was impossible. There was no way to explain how that tool, that heavy tool that didn’t roll or slide on the flat surface of the attic’s floor could have gotten out of his reach. He rationalized it anyway.

David quickly went back to work but it wasn’t long before the headlamp went out again and he had to put his kleins down again between his legs to tend to the blackened lamp. At this point he said he felt as if he was no longer alone, that something or someone was up there with him. There was no way that anyone or anything could enter the attic without detection and yet he felt a presence… an ominous one up in that space. He raced to get his lamp back on and when it finally went back on with a good whack of his palm, once again his tool was missing.

This time when he swung the light around in a wide arc that somehow felt like a wall of protection against the darkness his kleins were on the ground far behind him, a good eight feet out of reach. “What the fuck?“ He had said to himself.

As if in reply, even in that 90+ degree attic an unexplained chill came over him, every hair stood up on his body, he felt as if he had just walked into a freezer and then his light went off again.

“Fuck this shit. I’m out.”

And he left. He did what he had to do as quickly as he could, simply to ensure that the house wouldn’t burn down and then he gathered his tools and got out of there. He told me that he felt some sort of dark presence, this unexplained feeling that he wasn’t welcomed there, that he was being watched and that whatever was watching him didn’t appreciate him being in its home.

It was the exact same feeling I got in that home in the short time I was there. That nonsensically darkened kitchen, that creepy ass attic hole juxtaposed by the sterile emptiness of the high ceilinged room… this feeling that you were being watched, sized up, stalked…

The energy in that home was pure evil and during a real estate boom that had houses being scooped up within hours of going on the market, that place sat empty for almost two years before it was finally sold.

A few years later he got a job down the street. The customer had wanted to know if David had worked on any houses in the neighborhood… David told her that he had worked on quite a few in that particular area, matter of factly he had worked on that one place a few houses down… The customer’s entire disposition changed, “You know that place is evil. I was in there before… I used to know the man and his mother that lived there… they were bad people… you could feel the energy in there. I’ve never been in a place like that before or since… it’s an evil place… you couldn’t pay me to go back in there.”

And apparently you couldn’t pay my husband to go back in there alone either, which says a lot considering he’s not one to worry or scare easily.

So while I wouldn’t add “home energy assessor” to my resume’ I would say that I can sense shit about places… the good, the bad and the neutral and I’ll say this… I haven’t been in our neighbor’s house here next to our church but I’m starting to wonder…

The last tenants left when the husband beat his wife so badly she could just about walk and he was sent to prison for a few years. The newest tenants fight and go on at all hours of the night. The wife is routinely bruised up. Last night she had a black eye… and while I get it… I did just fall down a flight of stairs here not too long ago… I have my suspicions that her black eye had nothing to do with the stairs. On top of that there’s some serious drug activity there… as confirmed by my latest call to our local police department when they stole my packages the other day.

I feel like there’s some really shitty energy going on over there… and as someone who is pretty good on reading the room… or in this case the home… I’m putting some weight in that belief… even if it does sound stupid.

On the flip side though we’re continuing to make progress here: almost everything from the swap has been cleared back out of the sanctuary. You should have seen the people at the thrift store when we started bringing in the clothing donations. If you’re curious a Honda pilot can fit 51 large paper bags packed with clothing while still allowing the driver to see through the rear window. The two employees processing the donations were a bit taken aback after I brought in the 20th bag and told them I still had 31 left to go.

The basement has also mostly been cleaned, sorted, and packed up of all the shit that we had to quickly dump down here to prep for Harrison’s birthday party and the SWAP. AND… I finally unpacked the last box… an artisan made lamp David bought me years ago. I knew the lamp was in there and it survived the move (yeah!) and also just happened to house the missing crockpot that we’ve been searching for since August 1st 2025. Which is in my opinion… the light and the missing crockpot… just another example of the good light and energy feeding our souls on this part of the block.

As for next door… they did bring back the laundry basket of ours that they had taken… with a weird note about our kindness for hosting the SWAP and Odin (I believe the God of Norse mythology) causing disruptions in the universe that will hopefully settle down… I think it was an apology… or maybe it’s meth… either way… at least we have our laundry basket back and my packages… and the cops are keeping an eye on the “problem house” and I’m just happy to have found my crock pot and that my light survived the move and that the last box is unpacked and that my basement is no longer eliciting the flight response in my nervous system: thank you to the restoration of organization and order.

And also… I’m pretty sure that house next door has got some bad fucking juju.

Again: a hill I’d die on.

Rocky cat sitting triumphantly on the final box. The camera adds 20lbs.