I've driven by the place my whole life. It always looked cool. At one time you could see they had an in ground pool and you could see there were multiple buildings on the property. As time went on it became a little overgrown but the yard was always mowed. At night you could see that there was always one light turned on. I often thought of knocking on the door one day and leaving a business card and asking them to contact me if the place would be for sale. A cool old "project house".

Then one day last year I noticed the truck that was always parked there was gone. I always felt like this place had a story. Turns out I was right. In the attached newspaper story it was revealed to me that this was the estate of a pretty prominent family in town. I learned that indeed a person grew old here and passed. I can't link to the auction site but this place was quite the haul of interesting antiques, etc. It said he had lived a very simple life.

So one day I walked over to the place with the idea of just walking around to see what all was there. I walked through the grounds and realized much of it was once ornate gardens with pools, fountains, and benches. Next to the main house was a smaller house. Was this for in-laws, kids or guests? There were three barns that appeared to have been storage and maybe a wood shop. There was a dedicated shed for housing the pigeons that are mentioned in the article. Every bit of this place had been picked clean by the auction company.

When I made my way into what I thought was a detached basement I made an interesting discovery. It was not detached, at least not originally. The old man had nailed and sealed the basement door shut. Once in the main house I realized that he had done this on both of the stairwells effectively sealing off the main floor from the basement. I had assumed he only lived in a small portion of the house during his later years but the odd thing was I couldn't tell. The whole damn place looked like it had been abandoned 20 years ago. It was like at some point the old man decided he was no longer going to maintain the house but he was still going to live there. There was no "master bathroom" like one would expect. From what I could tell the bathroom that he used had no shower, only an odd 4'x4' square bath tub. He apparently watched TV as there was pretty new direcTV hardware. There was a ton of VHS tapes of Catholic Mass's. It seemed to me like a view into such an odd life for someone that had as large amount of money as he was known to have had. He donated his entire estate to 2 churches and his best friend.

As I left one of the few things that was left behind was a large pile of framed family photographs. Being that there is no family left they had no value to anyone anymore. There were also a few photo albums 2 of them were extensive collections of photos taken at this estate. The gardens, summer by the pool, pets, shots of the family painting and taking care of the place. A very eerie thing to see as I stood in the broken remains of what was once such a beautiful place.