People have asked me, after finding out how old the house was, if I was ever worried about the place being haunted. The truth is, while living in El Reno, I was much more afraid of the living than the dead.
El Reno has some dirt poor people, and on first of each month (when welfare checks arrive) some of those people liked to buy beer from the convenient store near my house and then drink it on my property.
Out behind our house was a small shed, complete with tin walls and a dirt floor. As the nights got colder, we began seeing evidence that someone was sleeping in our shed. I made it a point to shut the door each night before bed, and each morning the door would be wide open. Inside the shed we would occasionally find empty beer cans, cans of paint, pillows, and other random things. I put a padlock on the door once and someone broke it off. We decided that if people were that desperate for a place to sleep, better in the shed than in our house.
And then, one time while mowing the lawn, Susan ran across a “sleeping pad” someone had set up between our evergreen bushes and our house. That was a little unnerving, especially since the space was right below our bedroom window. This happened during the colder months. In the spring and summer, drunks would simply pass out on our sidewalk. Eh, live and let live.
After about six months, the novelty of two people living in a big, old house wore off. Like I said yesterday, we pretty much stuck to small portion of the house as we found it was easier to stay warm/cool that way. With straw, newspaper and corn husks as insulation, the house was difficult to heat and cool. During the winter we ran electric heaters to stay warm; during the summer, we used box fans in front of a window air conditioner unit to keep cool. If you weren’t directly near one of those two things, you froze in the winter and burned up in the summer. And sometimes, you did anyway. There wasn’t a ceiling fan in the house, nor was there a ceiling strong enough to support one.
We didn’t venture into the rest of the house too often. I don’t remember going upstairs more than just a few times, and I don’t think I went in the studio apartment more than once. During the winter, we gave the entire back apartment (a living room, a kitchen, a dining room and a bedroom) to our stupid dog Leroy, who ungratefully filled it with poop and fleas. In retrospect, it wasn’t one of our better ideas. The carpet in that part of the house was a dark green color, which I think made Leroy feel more comfortable while pooping on it.
As might be expected for being 127 years old, the El Reno house had few amenities. As I mentioned yesterday, there were five bathtubs in the house, but not a single shower. The house pretty much always smelled like natural gas and I’m sure there were leaks all over the place. There was no dishwasher. We had no washer or dryer either. I’m not sure there was even a place to hook one up, and if there had been, we barely had any water pressure anyway. Susan did all our laundry at the 24 hour laundromat near our house, which was also frequented by all the beer drinkers and paint huffers who hung out in our shed. I seem to remember Susan getting into an argument at least once with other people at the laundromat, but she would have to give you the details about that. Without a working dryer in the house, we went to work wearing wrinkled clothes more than once. I actually got written up at work once for wearing wrinkled clothes.
Although we had no dishwasher, washer, or dryer, we did have an oven. One evening, while I was watching the Chicago Bulls play in the NBA finals, I heard what sounded like a shotgun going off in the next room. Susan had tried to light the gas oven with a match, and came pretty close to blowing her face off. When she got to the living room, her hair was smoking and she had burned her eyebrows off. She looked pretty much like Daffy Duck always did after being shot in the face by Elmer Fudd.
Susan and I lived in that house for almost a year. In the summer of 1996 I accepted a position and moved to Spokane, Washington. In August, I packed a computer, some clothes and a bunch of CDs into my Dodge Neon and drove 1,800 miles northwest to start a new job. Susan stayed behind and, with help from friends and families, packed up all our belongings and began the process of selling our house. I definitely got the better end of that deal.
Susan moved to Spokane about a month later, before the El Reno house had sold. Now the way I tell the story is, while the two of us were in Washington, the realtor let a potential buyer cut holes in the wall to check out the state of the plumbing pipes. While banging around on the pipes, the potential buyer ended up busting an upstairs pipe. That caused the upstairs to flood, and eventually the downstairs ceiling caved in. If you ask Susan, that never happened and I am batshit insane. She says she has no recollection of that ever happening, and I can’t believe she doesn’t remember it.
Either way, the house was eventually purchased by an architect, who dreamed of restoring it back to it’s original state. I guess you could call it the House of Dreams, because we sure dreamed about getting rid of it! When we originally bought the house we learned that one of the other bidders was the church across the street, who had hoped to buy the house, bulldoze it, and turn it into a parking lot. Things would have been a lot simpler if we had just done that in the first place.
According to the original blueprints, the house was originally two-stories and square. The side apartment (that Susan and I had lived in), the rear apartment (where the dog lived) and the upstairs studio apartment had all been added on over the years, and before you knew it, a construction crew was brought in and removed them all. What was left was a small, two-story house. The siding was removed, all the wood and windows were replaced, and then … nothing.
I took that picture back in 2003. Here is a picture of the side of the house when we lived there, back in 1995.
And here is a picture of the same side of the house in 2003, while construction was still on going.
Note that everything to the right of the big bay window is now gone.
As far as we can tell, all the external wooden walls were replaced with new wood and covered with new siding. That was done around the time these newer photos were taken (2003). We still drive by the house some time to time, but we’ve never seen anyone ever living in it. We’re still not sure why someone bought it, restored it, and has left it empty for fifteen years. Maybe they got afraid of the drunks hanging out in the shed.
So anyway, that’s the story of 202 S. Barker in El Reno, Oklahoma. And here is a picture of the house from Google Maps, still unfinished, in 2010.
Similar Posts:
Entries (RSS)
July 30th, 2010 at 7:50 am
I’ll bet that little cap on top is not in the original blueprint. And since I think you told me they’ve now declared that a historical district, the owner is probably fighting battles over what they’ll let him do to finish it. At least, thank goodness, it’s now somebody else’s nightmare!