There is something even more frightening than famine, war and pestilence.
The Basement.
Those who live in parts of the country lacking basements (i.e. areas with high water tables like the Gulf Coast) may have had no experience with them. And people with fully finished basements will scoff at the idea that there’s anything disturbing about them. I’m talking about the unfinished, dark, dank and crawly kind.
My fraught relationship with cellars began at a very early age. Our home, built around the end of the Great War had a seriously creepy basement.
Now there were other parts of the house with disturbing aspects, like the attic where my parents stored unused personal effects and mothball-scented clothes in large, semi-opaque hanging bags which might have also contained bygone relatives, but probably not.
But, the basement…
Ours was “finished” only to the extent that someone in bygone days had put down ugly linoleum in the washer/dryer area. All the other semi-enclosed areas and rooms were primitive as could be. I never saw anything quite like it until viewing Buffalo Bill’s basement in “Silence of the Lambs”.
There was a low-ceilinged shadowy expanse occupied mostly by a maze of ductwork, fed by a hulking, cantankerous old dark green oil burner which clanked ominously and once, to the consternation of the family was the source of a midnight internal explosion which blew its front cover off. We had it fixed, but I never trusted it enough to walk in front of it again. There was a pail of sand left nearby which I first thought was for my dad’s cigarette butts if he was smoking down there, but maybe it was in case the oil burner really blew and we needed to battle the flames until the engine company arrived.
In later years I had a vivid nightmare about having hidden murdered bodies in the ductwork area, which were about to be discovered and I would be in serious trouble.
Other parts of the basement bred their own forms of unease, including dark and difficult to penetrate shelving/storage areas which held aging and unused appliances, rejected dinnerware, gifts yet to be regifted and an assortment of sporting goods, including my cherished George Kell and Early Wynn model baseball bats. A dark passageway led to another compartment surrounded by low crawl space windows which were sealed semi-permanently and looked out at nothing at all. This area was frankly loaded with unsightly junk which was not cleared out until many years later.
Most disturbing of all was the single sealed-off room which I was forbidden to enter as a child. It had a door on which was mounted a brass elephant’s head knocker, painted like the door itself in a lurid institutional green. What was behind the green door? I found out eventually, after my parents gave me a wonderful Xmas present - a basic photography setup including trays, enlarger and developing and printing chemicals. These were kept on a large built-in table, while in a dim and distant corner sat my father’s x-ray developing tanks on long metal legs (he may have been one of the last of the primary care physicians to have an x-ray unit in his medical office attached to the house, and to develop the films himself).
Many were the contented but somewhat uneasy hours I spent in that darkened room, which was slightly larger than the one Norman Bates brought Mother down to after the heat was on. I would carefully extract undeveloped film from the cartridges under the dim glow of the green safe light, while noxious liquids shimmered in the large x-ray developing tanks in a far corner. Nothing could possibly be lurking under those tanks, now could it? Of course not.
The unfinished basement of our last house had its unpleasant aspects, particularly when the plant stand grow lights would suddenly time out while I was down there, plunging the cellar into blackness. What’s that rustling noise? Rodents…yes, little rodents, no need for concern. My, that must have been a big one.
Our current basement is considerably less chilling than its predecessors, even though it’s in a hundred-year-old house. It’s unfinished, yes, but small and well-lit. If you ignore the extensive, contiguous crawl space that runs for miles under the house and which is accessioned by several steps and a minimally secured wooden door, there is nothing alarming about this basement.
I have however retained a single possession salvaged from my boyhood home - the green elephant’s head knocker. I’ve attached it to the basement door. Occasionally I feel the need to raise its trunk and rap on the door before I go down there. If and when something responds, I’ll know enough to keep out.
