Family Story - The Haunted House at 276 Gemini Drive

Later on, we moved to 276 Gemini Drive in Salt Lake City. I believe my parents had this house built. My father had the intention for us to live there forever - this would be the last house we owned. But his gypsy blood would prove to be too powerful.

These pictures were taken from the side of the house, and it looked positively like a castle. Felt like one to a kid. There was so much more room inside, and I loved that about that house when we first moved in. If you Google it today, it looks like an overgrown haunted house, which is what it felt like inside later on. But I digress...

The backyard was spacious. We had a clothesline out back, and Mom would hang the clothes and sheets and my brothers and I would run between them and knock them down and get in trouble. They smelled so good when we brought them in.

There was a group of apartments next door that I have no memory of visiting ever; they were pretty shady. My brother and I played with the kids from over there sometimes. I remember shooting marbles with them on occasion, and those marbles were so fascinating and beautiful. I would beg my parents for marbles, and keep bags of them in my drawers.

My father's parents lived down in our basement - the green station wagon in the picture was their car. Sometimes we got to go for a drive with them. There were no seat belts in that car. I don't remember the red car...our car was big and brown...could be the one in the next picture.

The Wasatch Mountains could be seen out of the windows, and they were so beautiful. I used to sit and watch them, and sometimes draw them, for hours.

But there was something off about that house, and I could never quite figure out what it was. Something shadowy would follow me, like a thought in the back of my mind.

I think my parents started having some marital problems then. Probably financial problems too - things were a lot worse than they ever let on. My mom tried to sell Amway for a time to make some money. I used to sneak into her sample case and eat her food bars (they were good).

I came to hate the basement, for several reasons. The stairs that descended down to the staircase were very short, and I was always afraid of falling. The stairs turned sharply downward, and with the back door closed, the staircase wasn't well-lit, so walking down into darkness brought up all sorts of fears for me. It felt haunted down there.

My grandparents lived in the room to the left at the bottom of the stairs, which didn't help. I didn't have a very close relationship with them. I don't know why, but something about them scared me, so I avoided them, for the most part. Then the basement went further back into a laundry room, a bathroom, and over to the left, some sort of a family room. The room was largely underground, with tiny windows near the top that let in some light at the ground level.

The basement was also largely unfinished, so you could see the bones of the house down there, and the insulation. There were spiders down there occasionally, which freaked me out, so I always went down there on a heightened sense of alert.

Sometimes my mother would have me do the laundry, and I would have to use the washing machine.

This machine was new to us, but I'm willing to bet it was incredibly old. The only other time I've ever seen anything like it was in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American History - THAT'S how old I am, people. I grew up with stuff you can only see in museums now.

It was fun to watch it wash, but then you had to put it through the wringer. And that was scary, because it could catch your fingers and squash them. If the clothes were thin, that was fine. It would roll the clothes through and into the laundry basket to hang on the line.

But if it was a thick blanket, and the wringer couldn't squish it properly, the wringer would open and stop with this intense banging noise, which would scare me. As a child, I was incredibly afraid of sudden loud noises, and the possibility of this happening caused me no end of anxiety.

Lots of other memories in this house. Once I tried to hold a community carnival to raise money for the Jerry Lewis telethon - got a whopping nine people to come out, and raised a grand total of around nine dollars. Still, I sent in my money, and got a thank-you certificate with Jerry Lewis' face on it.

We played broom hockey in the front yard, and one of my brothers hit me in the face with the edge of the plastic broom. There was so much blood in my eyes I couldn't see. I thought I was dying. But it was just a tiny cut on my forehead.

My brother and I took a gerbil out front, out of his cage, and my brother threw him up in the air. I don't remember why, but he dropped the gerbil and it broke its back. We watched that poor gerbil suffer for weeks in its tank, dragging its body from side to side, paralyzed from the waist down. Finally it died, and we buried it under those steps in the front yard.

My dad's brother, Uncle Tommy, would come to visit us every so often, and he was so cool. He had a Jeep, and would take us out riding in it.

At one point, my dad moved away. He'd gotten a job in Las Vegas, and we were going to sell the house and move over to be with him. But selling the house took a long time, so he was gone for months and months. When he came back to visit one day, we went to Liberty Park with my dad. He was in really high spirits. I remember him sliding down the slide at the park with his legs up in the air. It was so funny. Then he landed at the bottom, and he didn't get up. I came over to try to sit on him, and he yelled at me to get away, and I didn't understand why. He just laid there on his side, and yelled at my brother Michael to run and get Mom.

He'd broken his ankle. Had to get a cast and rest it. We had to avoid getting close to him because it hurt him a lot. If we made him mad, we'd get spanked. Then he was gone again, and it was just us again for a long time. It was a very uneasy time.

One evening, there was talk on the news that the governments had bombs and they were going to bomb the whole world with bombs that made huge clouds and destroyed everything. I went out that night on the front porch, and sat and wondered if I was going to live to grow up. I was only ten years old. Was I going to live to be older?

Finally my mom managed to sell the house, and we got a huge moving van and filled it to move to Las Vegas. Mom did all the packing, and there wasn't a spare bit of room anywhere in that van. We drove away and never came back. My parents never bought a house again for another thirty years or so.

Next week I'll share some stories of the wider neighborhood we lived in in that house.