Resonant Site: 1408 Dearborn Place
History
At the far end of a quiet residential neighborhood, nestled between a canopy of overhanging greens, sits a quiet residential road called Dearborn Place. At the end of this road, just where the pavement breaks into a rough gravel, sits an unassuming one-story rambler, its face all but obscured by an overgrown yard. If it was ever the home of a truly happy family, those days are clearly long gone.
A family did live there, once — a widow and her three daughters. According to the mother, the father of her children had died mere months after the birth of the youngest, leaving her to raise the three girls all on her own. Various relatives on the mother’s side came to visit from time to time during the aftermath, but such activity dried up quickly, according to the neighbors, and soon enough it was just the four of them, alone in the quiet residential house.
In the year to follow, the neighbors began to notice a change in the widow and her children. While they had never been what one would call the social type, they grew even more taciturn and withdrawn. Eventually, the mother stopped leaving the house altogether — “living off the insurance money,” neighbors assumed. Then she pulled her daughters out of school — “she wants to try home schooling.” Even when the newspaper boy stopped delivering to the house, nobody interfered. But after the windows facing the street were boarded up, and the once picturesque lawn became a tangle of crabgrass, the rumors started to fly. “She’s truly lost her mind,” some said. “Her daughters killed her!” said others.
Soon after, on the night of a massive thunderstorm, one of the neighbors thought she heard a sound from the widow’s house, and she crept to her window for a look. There, amid the intermittent flashes of white lightning, she thought she could just make out four figures piling hurriedly into the widow’s station wagon. The next morning, she gathered the courage to go knock on the widow’s door, but there was no response. The family was gone. No “For Sale” sign ever appeared out front, and no new family has moved into the house in the years since. The house just sits — waits, some say — falling into ever deeper disrepair, slowly merging into the forested backdrop of quiet residential Dearborn Place.
A family did live there, once — a widow and her three daughters. According to the mother, the father of her children had died mere months after the birth of the youngest, leaving her to raise the three girls all on her own. Various relatives on the mother’s side came to visit from time to time during the aftermath, but such activity dried up quickly, according to the neighbors, and soon enough it was just the four of them, alone in the quiet residential house.
In the year to follow, the neighbors began to notice a change in the widow and her children. While they had never been what one would call the social type, they grew even more taciturn and withdrawn. Eventually, the mother stopped leaving the house altogether — “living off the insurance money,” neighbors assumed. Then she pulled her daughters out of school — “she wants to try home schooling.” Even when the newspaper boy stopped delivering to the house, nobody interfered. But after the windows facing the street were boarded up, and the once picturesque lawn became a tangle of crabgrass, the rumors started to fly. “She’s truly lost her mind,” some said. “Her daughters killed her!” said others.
Soon after, on the night of a massive thunderstorm, one of the neighbors thought she heard a sound from the widow’s house, and she crept to her window for a look. There, amid the intermittent flashes of white lightning, she thought she could just make out four figures piling hurriedly into the widow’s station wagon. The next morning, she gathered the courage to go knock on the widow’s door, but there was no response. The family was gone. No “For Sale” sign ever appeared out front, and no new family has moved into the house in the years since. The house just sits — waits, some say — falling into ever deeper disrepair, slowly merging into the forested backdrop of quiet residential Dearborn Place.
Type
House
Owning Organization
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