Jan. 19, 2010 - First full day in new house.

For the record, since this is the first blog I’ve ever published and since I am not interested in making a web-faux-paus, and since I am not interested in notoriety for myself nor for my family, and since I have no interest in exposing the lives of any friends or neighbors or acquaintances to public scrutiny, I’ve decided to alter the names and certain identifying features of details herein.   

That said, when we had dinner on our first night here in our new weekend getaway / summer-house, and we heard a thumping on the roof, we just assumed it must have been a raccoon or skunk.  It may have been. But now I’m not so sure…

This blog will be titled “The House Behind the House” for reasons that will soon make themselves evident. 

I don’t usually blog but what we discovered today was so unnerving, it seems blog-worthy.

First, a little background.  I’m typing on my laptop from the living room of our new weekend getaway /  summer-home, located off the Pacific Coast Highway just South of Mendocino on a road called Salmon River.

The property is on a hillside, surrounded by a thick forest of redwoods overlooking the ocean, about a mile below. 

My daughter Juliet would normally be in school this time of year, but my wife June and I decided to home-school her for the next semester (which we are perfectly capable of doing) and come to our summer house before summer.  We drove up yesterday, on Martin Luther King’s birthday, and spent most of the car ride here lamenting the fact that the great State of Massachusetts was about to elect a George Bush look-a-like to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat.

Anyway, I know some of our friends and family think our decision to take Juliet out of school is selfish, but frankly the idea seems beyond reasonable to me.  Nothing is more important than being with family, and those intimate bonds, so why shouldn’t we spend a season together?  Why must we conform with every single one of society’s norms?

Juliet will have plenty of time in the future to lose her identity in a big public school and bond with her friends.  And frankly, I needed the sabbatical desperately (thankfully my financial and work situation allows for it) and a chance to reconnect with my wife and child.

In any case, out the floor to ceiling window, at the moment as I type this, there’s a dense fog and I can’t see a thing.  My wife June is asleep in bed with Juliet.  Juliet didn’t want to sleep alone tonight and, well, I don’t blame her. 

When our realtor Alice Witt of Redwood Realty showed us this house in the fall, we were sold within minutes.  The isolation and quietude was a big selling point.

Our family normally lives in San Francisco in a busy part of the SOMA district, in a loft.  We have noise problems with our upstairs neighbors, who are always getting into late night fights while we try to sleep, so the prospect of a quiet getaway in nature was our fantasy.

To be utterly frank, June and I have had so many problems with our neighbors in SF as of late, the problems have began effecting us—kind of severely, actually. For example, sometimes they wake us up in the middle of the night, and my wife can’t go back to sleep and her insomnia sours her mood all the next day and this rubs off on me and then we find ourselves arguing about how to solve the problem of the noise upstairs and our opinions differ and pretty soon we’re at each other’s throats barking like dogs... just like the people upstairs.

Point is, when we first got here today, we were very happy to get away, like I said. 

But today that happiness took a creepy turn…and it’s why I’m awake typing these words…

At about two o’clock, while we were enjoying a late lunch, my daughter Juliet realized our family dog Bono (half blind from cataracts) had gone missing. So Juliet and my wife June went searching in the woods.

They didn’t find little Bono (who is still missing), but they did discover something that our realtor hadn’t mentioned when she sold us the property… 

About fifty yards behind our house, hidden by the dense Northern California flora (ancient, actually), on what our realtor had told us was public land, in a small clearing, they found ANOTHER HOUSE.

Smartly, they didn’t go inside to see if anyone was there, but instead quietly turned tail and rushed back to tell me about it. 

They said the house was constructed entirely of obsessively woven branches—like a wicker chair. My daughter said it looked like the kind of place where Shrek would live.

And so we returned together.  And I could hardly believe my eyes.

From the outside, my first impression is that the house was made by an unskilled, but dedicated craftsman—something, it seemed to me, a mad man had spent the better part of his (or her?) life piecing together.

From top to bottom, the house looks as such:

The walls are made of braided twigs, like a dark wicker basket, and there are no glass windows, but instead shutters made of similar twigs, except of another variety so the house appears two-toned.  The roof seems to be made of multiple layers of curved redwood bark.  There doesn’t seem to be any kind of foundation and there are no roads leading to or from the house.  There are no electrical boxes or water tanks or any other signs of utilities.  There is no mailbox but there is a pair of old cowboy boots left by the front-door. When we approached the boots (cautiously, as you can imagine), I was relieved to find that, inside the shafts of the crusty old leather footwear was a labyrinth of cob webs which meant to me that no one had put them on in quite a while. 

I called out to see if anyone was present but got no answer.  I told June that we should go inside but she thought it was a mistake.  We argued about it a moment but then Juliet just pushed open the door, making the choice for us.

And so we followed our fearless daughter inside the odd lair…

Inside, the place is strangely modern—a total contrast to the exterior.  Orange shag carpet lines the floor. All the décor has an easily recognizable 1970s motif.  I’m not sure if it’s the smell or the visual aspect of it, but being in here reminds me of reading the old Playboy Magazines I used to buy at garage sales when I was a boy.

Poking around a bit, I find a sink with a faucet that does not work and pipes that go to nowhere but that is not the strangest thing.

In the refrigerator, which has a plug but no outlet to plug into, there’s a rotten chicken surrounded by shriveled old roasted winter vegetables but the meat does not appear entirely dried out—it is still somewhat moist, meaning, it’s not that old. This fact quickens our pulses very suddenly because it indicates that someone has been living here not too long ago, even if he has not used the boots on the stoop for ages.

And in the bedroom, where we wander next, there’s a waterbed with another pair of cowboy boots by the side.  These boots have no cob-webs in them.

Juliet jumped onto the waterbed and started wiggling around before June told her that was extremely inappropriate.

We looked about some more, and there was nothing much more of note…EXCEPT,  on the dining nook table there is an old Scrabble board and a half burnt candle nearby it and the word  YOU spelled down the center.

Fearing the big bad wolf might suddenly jump out of the shadows to devour us, we gathered up Juliet and drove the coastal route ten miles to town to speak with the woman who sold us our house.  When we arrived at her office, she was out to lunch, but we decided to wait.

While we sat on her stoop, we speculated about what this odd house behind our house might be.   Naturally, we listed a catalogue of horrific ideas, but of course we were laughing the whole time because the notion of our discovery seemed absurd to us, even if it was genuinely frightening…

Before long our realtor Alice came back from lunch, and of course she was astonished by our story.  She told us that the house we’d bought had not been occupied in two years and that the previous owner was an elderly woman (deceased for as long as the house had been vacant) who’d lived alone for over two decades, as far as she knew...

Of course, Alice was dead curious to see the place herself. So we hopped in our cars and went back.

Like us, Alice was shocked by the sight of it and like us, wanted to see the inside.

By now Juliet had scared herself into believing something wicked resided in there, so she held my hand tightly, her palms sweating, while we wandered around and then I heard my wife make a strange sound—a gasp I’ve only ever heard her make when watching horror films on TV late at night.

She was standing over by the kitchen nook table, hovering over that Scrabble board.

There was a new word on the face of it, built off the O in YOU.  The new word was OUT.  Like so:

 YOU   

   U

    T

Now fearing for our lives, it didn’t take us long to evacuate.

Standing in front of our house, Alice said she would do some research and call us in the morning. Then she bid us farewell, suggesting that perhaps tonight we stay at a hotel.

June, Juliet and I spent a few more minutes in our kitchen talking it over, and unanimously decided to do just as Alice suggested but when I called around it turned out that literally every room in town was occupied by a group of motorcycle tourists on their way to Garberville.  

As an aside, this has happened to me three times in my life since I first moved to California—I need a hotel and there are none available because of motorcycle tourists!!

Juliet is a little relieved that we’re not going to a hotel because Bono has still not reappeared and she is really afraid that the dog will freak out if she comes home and we’re not here.

Anyway, the bottom line is we’re spending the night in our new summer-house and I can not sleep and am writing this blog, half believing some psychotic in old cowboy boots is about to rush up to the picture window and slap his bloody palms on the glass.

I think I’m going to go open a bottle of wine and try to relax.  Maybe I’ll download a book on my Kindle and sit by the gas fed fire and read. 

Assuming we’re all alive and well tomorrow,  I’ll let you know what,  if anything,  our realtor Alice discovers. 

Jan. 20, 2010 - We meet the man who lives in the house.

I fell asleep on the couch last night and was awoken at about ten by my wife and daughter who made me pancakes and bacon.

The fog and rain had momentarily cleared and the ocean was a startling sea-green. 

Down below, too far for us to see from our hillside retreat, the most psychedelic tide pools swirl in the rocks and kelp rises up like underwater streamers.

I’ve SCUBA’d here in Mendocino and it’s really remarkable.  The kelp’s like a thick forest.  It’s eerie and gray and cold, and occasionally you can spot a seal swimming around or a gray fish.  It’s not a tropical sea-life paradise like other places more popular for diving, but the cold Northern Pacific has a calming Zen-like quality to it—less overwhelming than other seascapes.

I’m not sure why I’m suddenly blogging about being under water except for the fact that it’s just so beautiful here in the mornings and I’ve always believed good writing (though perhaps not good blogging?) is stream of consciousness, so why not let it flow?  I suppose the point is, the nature here is so vibrant and overwhelming as to have nearly eclipsed the fact that there’s an ominous house behind our house.

While we ate breakfast, a call came in from Alice who asked us to meet her at the local public library to go over the records of the property.

At the library she shows us that our house was been owned by one woman,  from 1964 till 1997, until she died.  This woman, Peggy Buckingham, had a son, Lester, but according to the public record Lester died in combat during the Viet Nam War in 1972. More records showed that Peggy’s husband Bill had disappeared and Peggy had retired from teaching school, middle school English, in 1984.   I wonder what grade Mrs. Peggy Buckingham, were she alive to read this blog, would give me for my bad grammar!

Other than deaths and a mysterious missing husband/father, there was nothing else on the public record, but clearly the dead people etc associated with our house gave us no comfort. 

Alice, who I would describe as part old hippie, part Stepford wife, closes up the last file she has out and says she’s sure there’s nothing to worry about.  That’s when I remind her that the Scrabble board in the mysterious kitchen went from YOU to YOU OUT and so obviously there IS something to worry about.

I thought to ask her who had received the monies from the sale of our property (thinking this might be a clue to who built the house behind our house), since the previous owner had no living relatives, and she tells me that in such cases the profit goes into a public trust—basically it goes into a fund with any other monies collected by the local government, such as taxes and parking tickets…

A few minutes later we’re entering the local Sheriff’s office (a man named Sheriff Mel Willits) and he is surprisingly helpful—also, weirdly soft and handsome for a Sheriff. He looks more like a prototypical stoner forest ranger than the photo-ideal of small town law enforcement, with curly brown shoulder length hair and warm brown eyes, mid thirties, tops. 

I’m certain my wife is attracted to him, the way she keeps laughing at his simple sense of humor which right now is being employed to josh us about ghosts and goblins in the magical forest behind our haunted house. 

In any case, he says, getting serious, “if there is someone living out there in that house, they are doing it illegally and without a permit." He tells us we should sit tight while he and his deputy go stake out the situation.

Relieved that the authorities are taking us seriously, we stay in town all day shopping and enjoying ourselves.  We see a 2D version of Avatar at a local cinema (Juliet has been dying to see it) and then we had dinner at a fish joint. 

I’m in the middle of updating this blog from a cafe with an internet connection when we get a phone call from the Sheriff’s office asking us to come over.  And so we did…

When we arrive to the station, Willits sits us down and explains to us the following:

After staking out the house behind our house for hours, they apprehended a middle-aged man (late 50s) as he approached the house with a deer he’d shot in the woods. When they came up to the man, apparently he had not behaved weirdly or violently but seemed to know exactly why the officers had come for him.  He identified himself as Lester Buckingham, son of the previous owner of our house, Peggy—same name as the man our realtor Alice said was killed in action in Viet Nam, 1972. Photographs of the young man who died in Viet Nam and this old man’s face confirm he is who he says he is.

Naturally, my first line of questioning is such as: “How is it that no one knew he was alive for the last thirty years? Does he seem disturbed?” And so on and so on and so on…

The Sheriff says he seems like a “gentle, harmless odd-ball” whose been living like a ghost, self-sufficient, for the past thirty years, in contact with no one other than his now deceased mother, who by all accounts was a hermit in her own right.

“So are you going to arrest him and tear his house down or what? It’s illegal, he’s a squatter, isn’t he?” My wife quite rightly asked.

Willits said yes, Lester is a squatter but in fact, he went on to inform us, squatters who have resided on a property for as long as he has, do in fact have certain common law rights—squatter’s rights, he told us, believe it or not! 

I’d thought “squatter’s rights” was just some lingo used in the school-yard to stake the claim of a certain jungle-gym or something like that, but it turns out there are real laws providing real legal protections to people who have occupied land for enough time, even if they never purchased the land, paid property taxes, or filed for legal ownership.

He told us that, in his opinion, we ought to speak with Lester and decide for ourselves what we wanted to do.

“What we want to do about what?”  I asked.

“If you want to pursue a legal action to get him to clear out,” Willits replied.

Unreal!!: the burden of ridding ourselves of our surprise, creepy neighbor is on us!  Typical.

The next thing you know, my wife and I are having a face to face with Lester Buckingham…

My first impression of him is that he is gay, or sexually ambivalent.  Certainly he has very fair skin and he’s cleanly shaven and pale, as if he has used sunscreen his whole life. He’s not the stereotype at all of a man who hunts deer in the woods, not at all the jittery Viet Nam Vet Survivalist or bearded Unabomber Grisly Adams I’d expected.  

The only thing stereotypical about this man is he talks with a slow and simple drawl, like a man from Appalachia, where, it turns out, his mother and father migrated from in 1964, when Lester was a teenager. 

In general he has a soft disposition and avoids looking you in the eye when he speaks, as if he doesn’t want to offend you, but also he seems honest enough to make eye contact when it counts. 

He tells us that the Army had mistakenly told his parents he’d died in action, but in fact he’d been a POW from 1969 till 1973—that he’d lived in an underground cage by himself and everyday a “sweet looking yella boy” would feed him and he’d beg the boy in a strange game of charades (since they did not speak the same language) to unlock the cage and set him free.  For three years, according to Lester, the boy refused to help him, but then “one day he just unlocked the cage and I climbed out and found myself in the middle of the jungle on the outskirts of a village.”

He told us he’d been so disoriented by the experience of having lived in solitude and darkness for all those years, he felt like an alien to the human race and was terrified, in particular, to return to the States for reasons that not even he could fully grasp. After spending the next five years living in Saigon, working odd jobs, never letting anyone from his past know he was actually alive, in 1982 he returned to America (off the record) to find that his father had gone missing "a complete mystery," he says, and that his mother, although physically functional, had become demented and didn’t remember him.

He’d wanted to live with his mother and take care of her, but because she couldn’t recall him, she was afraid of him, so the best he could think to do was build a house just out of sight of her house to keep track of her health but also to stay hidden himself, because the last thing in the world Lester desired was to return to the hell of the normal world—to work a dead end job, to pay money to the IRS, to be a member of “polite society”, as he called it, an obvious slug of distaste rolling his mouth. 

He said he’d always planned to hook up the plumbing of his house to his mother’s house, and the same with the electricity, but fear of becoming known to the outside world had kept him from it—should some nosey electric meter reader have noticed his usage, his anonymity would’ve been foiled.

Bottom line, he’d been living off the grid and off the land and caring for his mother and keeping to himself for decades… at least until we bought the property.

My wife asked him about the gag with the Scrabble board (YOU OUT) and then he mumbled something about being real sorry, he was just trying to scare us away.

All in all, after sitting with him for a half hour or so, I must say my general first impression of him is that he’s a sincere person, and despite his traumatic background, relatively well-adjusted /sane—only living a life most of us would not be able to comprehend!

If these positive first impressions of mine sound bizarrely generous/optimistic/unfounded given all, I don’t blame you, but I do have some expertise in evaluating human beings.  In fact, my lifelong profession is that of psychiatrist (which you already know if you read the bio of the writer of this blog, of course!).

Bottom line is, I’ve toiled most of my career in public health and for a decade have been a staff psychiatrist in the San Francisco jail system and I’ve evaluated some serious “nut jobs” and so I know how to read signs of mania and psychosis from the outset, and frankly my first impressions of people usually turn out to be fairly accurate portraits of them when I later compare those impressions (which I always notate in my patient’s files) to my long term experience of people I end up seeing on an ongoing basis.

Of course, my wife does not trust my instincts on Lester one bit.  She believes that if Lester is allowed to continue to live in the house behind our house, he will surely come murder us with an axe in our sleep.  She tells Sheriff Willits that she wants his house demolished and she wants him relocated immediately.

He tells us if that’s so, we better get a lawyer to expedite the process because there’s nothing he can accomplish in the short term except to charge him with the misdemeanors of hunting without a permit and illegal possession of a firearm and to recommend to the powers that be that they investigate Lester’s property rights, but, the Sheriff says, “You know how those bureaucratic things go—it could be months or years before anything gets done.” Willits went on to tell us he could probably not hold Lester in custody for more than a couple more hours—that he would be sleeping in his own waterbed tonight!

As we left the Sheriff’s office, my wife was pretty rattled.    It started raining again and we dashed to our car.

Inside the car, June insisted on finding a hotel with a free room.  She said we shouldn’t be like those idiotic people in horror movies who stay in a house despite the fact that they keep hearing thumps in the night.  She said she refused to put Juliet in harm’s way and that was the end of the story.

After calling every hotel and motel in town again, while it poured like cats and dogs on our windshield, we finally found a free room (at a resort so expensive not even Bill Gates would stay there) and we spent the rest of the day luxuriating at the resort spa while discussing our options and we agreed to get the best lawyer money could buy.

At around 3pm we called a friend of ours in San Francisco who practices criminal defense, and he gave us the name of a supposedly great lawyer living in Mendocino who specializes in property issues and land disputes, a Jewish attorney named Alan Weissman.  I only mention that he’s a Jewish attorney because I’m racist in one single regard: Jewish men are not always good lawyers, but the best lawyers are ALWAYS Jewish men (:

Weissman will see us in the late afternoon tomorrow, and tonight we will eat room service and watch pay per view movies until we fall asleep.