OUR SCARY BASEMENT!

        There are basements and then there was our basement-scary! Let me start with the enclosed landing and entry way from the west side of our house. A few steps would take you up into the main bathroom or straight ahead you would descend down the narrow stairs to THAT basement. 

      About half-way down those stairs there was an open stair back plate. You always knew that there was something or someone hiding under that dark and empty area under those stairs and just ready to reach out and grab your leg and then God only knows what after that. Why that plate was never replaced I will never know!

        If you did make it safely down to the bottom, you were faced straight ahead with the entrance to THE furnace room. But, there was also a door that stood open to that area, and, you always knew that there was the possibility that it would go flying shut in front of you with some sort of "thing" greeting you and saying "Howdy!"

      If you made it through the door and into the furnace room without your heart coming to a halt, your next huge test at survival began. Once into the furnace room, you were greeted with that huge coal-fed monster  with those huge steroid induced heating pipes ascending to the rooms above.  To the back and right of the furnace was another dark and vacant area that you knew something very bad could be lurking. 

       On a minor note there was a small room in one corner that cobs were kept for stoking the furnace. There was a small corner area in that room that someone could be standing without one seeing even though a real slight chance. 

      As a young boy after my dad died, it was my job to fill the stoker with small chipped coal that then was augured into the furnace. Also, the hard ash or "clinkers" that formed after burning needed to be removed daily and put into buckets and spread onto our drive-way.

        Now here comes the scary part. Each evening, if I made it alive this far, I would gather up enough courage to open the door to the coal room. Every evening before opening that door, the hair on the back of my neck would rise up and the feeling of true fear would over come me. We're talking bone-chilling heart-throbbing stuff here!

         I knew opening that door there would be something monstrous lying behind that huge pile of coal. That feeling never got any better, but, I had to take it like a man. It was my job. After all, I didn't want anything sinister happening to my mom or my little sister-right? `It did always seem amazing that my mom didn't find me lying there frozen in fright or at the very least sitting in a corner babbling to myself! The upside to all this is the fact that those nightly rituals,  nothing much ever scared me later in life.