By CURTIS SMALE
When I was a kid, eleven years old, I lived in a house on a street called Oakwood Street.
We lived in Greendale, Wisconsin.
I will change a few names here, the Internet being what it is, and I will go back and forth from memories as a ten year old to comments from my current 51 year old self.
What I’m about to tell you happened during the hot summer days of 1975, which were filled with wonder and excitement for me.
Not that this experience needed anything to make it more intense.
I had three other friends in the neighborhood: Steve, Keith, and John. Keith lived next door. His mother was a nurse and her husband worked for the FBI, which surprisingly, wasn’t very fascinating to me as an ten year old, although it might have had something to with what I’m about to tell you.
Steve lived two doors away, and he had a sister, Shelly, and a single mother, which was rare in those days, forty years ago.
John lived down the street.
Two other kids, Craig and Todd, lived in the two houses directly across the street, but they weren’t part of this.
Todd’s mother always used to call out his name, Taaa-aaahd!!! so loudly every kid down the entire block could hear it. Man, that woman had a loud voice.
Actually, the lady up the block, Jan, Steve’s mother, had a dang loud voice also.
Craig had a big above-ground swimming pool in his back yard.
The weird thing about what happened that summer day, the thing that made it so unusual, is that these three boys never were in my house at the same time before that, and, as far as anyone knew, they never were in it after, either.
But they were all in the house that day, and many times after, and my Mom never knew.
This is the same Keith who panicked when he stuffed raisins up his nose. No wait, maybe that was Keith’s brother.
The same Steve who got his foot stuck in the sewer grate in his own back yard.
The same John who had an identical twin, Jeff.
Before I made my accidental discovery in the basement, I thought it was scary fun when my Uncle used to lift us up and hang my brother Bryan and I with our grabbing hands on the gritty tiled edge of the garage roof.
After this experience, that seemed tame.
So, I led my three buddies downstairs to show them what I had found.
Never for a moment did I think my Mom and Dad knew about this, and I still don’t think they or the people who moved into the house after us knew about it. Duh. You would have read about it in the newspapers if they had known about it.
I opened the clanging aluminum screen door for the three boys (my Dad was working at the airport and my Mom was at Pick ‘N Save getting groceries).
Normally, other kids weren’t allowed to just roam through our house, but I knew all I had to do was let them in and we’d be fine.
At least we would be fine from getting in trouble with my parents.
Whether we would be fine from what was in the basement, I wasn’t sure of that.
After we got into the house, immediately to the left was the door leading downstairs. It had a sliding door to close it off, but we left it open.
Light as we were, the stairs still creaked under our weight as we went downstairs. This is Wisconsin, and they have basements there. Turns out, they had more than basements there, as you’ll see.
At the bottom of the stairs we turned right and I led my three friends across the dank basement to the corner.
There was a ground level window there.
There was something else down there, too…
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