Discoveries

My neighbor sparked my interest in learning more about my house's past when she shared a picture with me of her house, circa 1900 I would guess, and just a sliver of our house could be seen on the right side, enough to know that there was once a decorative widow walk
on the roof of our house and that the front of our house, which I had always assumed was an addition because of its awkwardness, was actually original to the house, but as an open porch - actually a beautiful open porch that Eric and I are very sad was changed. We hope one day that we can make the now mud room something that enhances our houses appearance and doesn't detract from it, but we have a long way to go before that happens!

This discovery made me want to know more; like who originally owned/built the house, could we see complete pictures of what our house once looked like, did our house have any interesting history. I knew we would have to go to the town library and the county's registry of deeds to learn most of that stuff, but I decided a google news search of our address might turn up something of interest...and it did, but not exactly what I was looking for.

Sadly, on February 27, 2000 a woman, one of the previous owners of the house, was strangled by her boyfriend who lived with her. She was killed in her/our home. Now the saddest part: she had 4 children ages 11, 10, 4 and 2. After making this discovery I looked for a few more articles about the incident and found that her boyfriend had killed her because he caught her with another man. Of all the things I had hoped to learn about my house this was not one of them.

Now this bit of information is something that we already half knew/suspected. We had two different people make reference to this, but until now had not been able to find any more information about it. When we were looking at our house our Realtor told us that he thought a murder had been committed here, but we couldn't be sure about it and it didn't really change our feelings about the house. Then shortly after Dalila was born a man stopped by our house who claimed to be the victim's brother. Because he wanted to come in and see the house, we had to turn him away( I wasn't comfortable with having a stranger in the house, especially with a newborn), so we weren't able to get any more details than what he provided with his introduction.

I know some people might think that our house is cursed or haunted, but I don't feel this way. It was a horrible thing that happened, but our bringing new positive energy into the house I think helps reverse any negativity from that event that could still be lingering. I also don't think her ghost is haunting our house, or if her spirit is here, I think she protects the house more than she haunts it.