Yes the house had some dark secrets alright!
1. First day there I removed the carpet in the master bedroom which extended into the closet. There was a file cabinet bolted into the floor. It was a heavy file cabinet and the estate had left keys for me. But to get to the bolts I had to remove the lower drawer but decided I would first look for potential ‘treasure’ underneath the drawer. I reached in and felt a cloth sack. It was heavy...like a gun.
I opened the sack and found a perfect...I mean exquisite German Luger. It looked like it had never been used. I don’t like or own guns...but damn this thing was special and impressive. There were ammo cartridges and a large container of loose change. I called my real estate agent and returned the gun to the estate. A year later when I told the story to my girlfriend, she immediate accused them of being Nazis.
2. The next week after finding the gun, I set up the stereo. I sat in the living room listening on a low lounge chair and looked at the kitchen to see that there was a 1/4” x 3” slot in the base moulding of a cabinet. I went to the kitchen and saw that the slotted moulding extended to the corner of the cabinet. At the corner of the moulding was a ring pull. I pulled the ring and the entire corner with slot neatly slid off...allowing a tiny spring-hinged door to immediately flip down. This door had a small mirror glued to its back that now reflected two LED lights pulsing from inside the kitchen cabinet. I opened the cabinet doors and removed the shelf paper to find another compartment. Inside was a motion detector. The kitchen cabinet lined up with the doorway to the hall which led to all the bedrooms. If an intruder broke the beam...an alarm would activate.
3.My girlfriend did not like the wallpaper in the bedroom. So we hired a company to remove all the wallpaper in the house. After an hour or two, I decided check in on the progress. The guy taking the wallpaper down looked at me a little sheepishly. Behind him and across 4 of the walls were Nazi swastikas and strange runes or symbols. They were written in white primer. They had used primer to treat the walls surfaces where the wallpaper seams met and used the excess to paint runes and swastikas.
Years later I learned from my next door neighbor that my house was the middle of the 3 homes occupied by German families. He had stumbled onto bomb shelter while gardening in his back yard. The concrete ceiling was 4’ thick. It had a fold down mattress and an air pump for oxygen.
The husband was actually a rocket scientist who worked for Rocketdyne. He probably left Germany after the war. He had done some other interesting things to the house. But It was a fortress. I got locked out once. It took a once cocky locksmith almost 2 hours to get me back in.
1. First day there I removed the carpet in the master bedroom which extended into the closet. There was a file cabinet bolted into the floor. It was a heavy file cabinet and the estate had left keys for me. But to get to the bolts I had to remove the lower drawer but decided I would first look for potential ‘treasure’ underneath the drawer. I reached in and felt a cloth sack. It was heavy...like a gun.
I opened the sack and found a perfect...I mean exquisite German Luger. It looked like it had never been used. I don’t like or own guns...but damn this thing was special and impressive. There were ammo cartridges and a large container of loose change. I called my real estate agent and returned the gun to the estate. A year later when I told the story to my girlfriend, she immediate accused them of being Nazis.
2. The next week after finding the gun, I set up the stereo. I sat in the living room listening on a low lounge chair and looked at the kitchen to see that there was a 1/4” x 3” slot in the base moulding of a cabinet. I went to the kitchen and saw that the slotted moulding extended to the corner of the cabinet. At the corner of the moulding was a ring pull. I pulled the ring and the entire corner with slot neatly slid off...allowing a tiny spring-hinged door to immediately flip down. This door had a small mirror glued to its back that now reflected two LED lights pulsing from inside the kitchen cabinet. I opened the cabinet doors and removed the shelf paper to find another compartment. Inside was a motion detector. The kitchen cabinet lined up with the doorway to the hall which led to all the bedrooms. If an intruder broke the beam...an alarm would activate.
3.My girlfriend did not like the wallpaper in the bedroom. So we hired a company to remove all the wallpaper in the house. After an hour or two, I decided check in on the progress. The guy taking the wallpaper down looked at me a little sheepishly. Behind him and across 4 of the walls were Nazi swastikas and strange runes or symbols. They were written in white primer. They had used primer to treat the walls surfaces where the wallpaper seams met and used the excess to paint runes and swastikas.
Years later I learned from my next door neighbor that my house was the middle of the 3 homes occupied by German families. He had stumbled onto bomb shelter while gardening in his back yard. The concrete ceiling was 4’ thick. It had a fold down mattress and an air pump for oxygen.
The husband was actually a rocket scientist who worked for Rocketdyne. He probably left Germany after the war. He had done some other interesting things to the house. But It was a fortress. I got locked out once. It took a once cocky locksmith almost 2 hours to get me back in.