Our only venture into home ownership ended in disaster and I went back to being a council tenant. We bought this small terrace in the mid 1990s, when the prices had fallen and we bought from someone desperate to sell (should have realised) who had negative equity - not so unusual, then. And that was probably the reason we thought she was desperate to sell.
I'd loved the council house we had just before that - husband didn't. We looked out over allotments at the back, and the street was very nice - big, wide 1930s' boulevard type road, lots of trees, greenery and the council house was huge. But husband never loved it there and so when we got a chance to buy something else - we took it.
Two doors down to our 'own' home, was a Very Old Lady. She had been born in her house - her father died not long after she was born, in WW1. She knew everything about the street and who'd lived there. I loved the house at first - well, for maybe a day - because it was my first house of my own. As it turned out, my last.
Old lady told me that no-one had ever stayed in that house for long (you know where this is going). Divorces, people suddenly moving abroad, general misery... And we'd moved in with 3 kids, oldest about 8. Most of the more recent ones before us had been childless. The last one - she sold it vacant possession having already moved out, so we never met her, but were told she was a nurse, and "a bit strange". She'd moved to Yorkshire, apparently, and needed a quick sale. Within hours we knew why - turned out it was next door to a registered alcoholic who sang in a booming voice, day and night, and had his dodgy mates round - he was in his 60s, maybe, and him and his mates looked like tramps. The singing or shouting and swearing (and I had young kids, remember) went on all day and all night. I still want to cry if I hear 'Danny Boy' - he sang that throughout the night. Nothing blocked the sound. He wasn't a bad hearted man. Just a very damaged one. Rehab etc never worked. Sometimes his mates would come round and smash in the door - once they smashed in another neighbour's, thinking it was him. The couple of years we lived there we didn;t once have more than a couple of hours at a time of quiet. To the point I still have no idea how that woman persuadedhim to be out when we viewed the house because the viewing we did was the only time it was ever to be quiet. She taped a handwritten sign to a door when we viewed, saying about the lovely neighbours. (This was gone the day we moved in).
I think it was just before the laws that meant we could've sued her or the estate agent.
So anyway - not a ghost as such but sheer misery. I hated being home.
Thing was, the old lady was right. Nothing went well for us. We started arguing (maybe, stress). Then there were the constant, low level illnesses - one after another. Constantly being sick for no apparent reason (not the kids so much - just us adults). I had hoped for a house with a cellar but was told there wasn't one. One day in the cupboard under the stairs, I realised there were floorboards not a solid floor, and big gaps so we shone a torch down and saw we did, indeed have a cellar. But no stairs down to it, no apparent way to access it. The downstairs floorboards I stripped every inch of them and was sure they were 1970s or summat - not original (house was maybe 1890s).
Pet bunny vanished from our closed in garden. Week we moved in, a teenage girl was abducted from the top of the street, driven somewhere and raped and our street was on the news. What are the odds of that? Once, driving out of the street, a drunk/druggie opened the car door and tried to climb in with us... I kept thinking of what the old lady had said that no-one ever settled there. She'd lived there maybe 80 years and known every family there, that whole time. When pregnant there with son 4, I fell down the stairs (no harm done). That house never felt right - not just because someone told me it wasn't right. It wasn't right. Whilst there, we split up and I moved away. We sold the house to a buy to let landlord who didn't give a toss about the drunk next door or anything else - he had no intention of living in it. It wasn't a 'rough' area, as such, either - quite nice in fact.
I always thought if we'd stayed put in our nice council house I loved, that had great neighbours, I'd never have gone through that dark time and of course if I'd just bought that council house we'd be quids in, now. Because my life went to crap for a long time, I was never in the position again to buy my own home and I wish I had now as I'd be getting to the point of no mortgage whereas now I'll pay rent forever which seems insurmountable. Have been dogged with 20 years' really awful luck, all because we bought that particular house.
I often wonder who moved into it subsequently and whether they stayed. The old lady probably died not long after we left.
