Spider furnace

By

Jason Gabriel Kondrath

Spider furnace Copyright © 2017 by Jason Kondrath All Rights Reserved.

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Cover designed by Jason Gabriel Kondrath

ISBN: 9781370205875
 Spider Furnace

My grandparents lived in a house that they raised six children in, which was amazing
considering that it only had three bedrooms. After my grandfather retired, he and my
grandmother moved to another state, Texas. My parents decided to buy the house from
them because it had a lot of memories, and they wanted to keep it in the family.
Now the house is in Detroit, (and if you want, you can still look up the address) on Perkins
St. which was still a decent neighborhood when my mom was a kid, but you would never
know it today.
So, after my parents moved out of the city, they decided to keep the house and rent it out
instead of selling it. The people who rented it was a Polish couple straight from Warsaw,
and they both worked downtown for one of the auto companies, but I don’t think either of
them worked on the assembly line itself.
Guessing by their looks, the Podolski’s, at that time, must have been in their late sixties,
and I’m being generous. They were two poorly educated but hard-working, old-school,
first-generation immigrants.
Humorless, childless, with no tolerance for non-sense. And they still preferred to speak to
each other in Polish, and not English.
I want to mention that even though the house was very old, and that my parents had never
done any major updating or modernizing everything was still in pretty good condition.
In the old day’s houses like this one had a chute built-in the basement for receiving coal.
That’s how people used to heat their homes before gas or electric heating.
The chute door was made of iron and it had a metal bar that locked from the inside so that
nobody could sneak thru it and rob the house from the inside out. In the middle of the
basement was a giant “spider furnace” that got its name from the large heating ducts that
looked like legs and ran upward to the registers on the first floor.
It had a coal chute in the basement, and one thing that always struck me as peculiar was
that during the daytime the sunlight always seemed to bleed thru, and outline the edges of
the chute, making it look like it was glowing.
We could never filter out the light, completely, no matter how many times we covered the
chute with insulation during the winter. And we tried because light was an indication that
heat may be escaping through it.
The furnace was so big that it covered most of the basement, and you could even walk
around it in a circle. The floor was concrete.
During the time the house was built there were only three or four colors to “stain” a
concrete floor with. I don’t know why but one of those colors was a rustic red, that looked
like dried blood as it aged.
Red is a bad color for the interior of any building, residential or commercial, because Red
is an angry color. You will never see Red, in a hospital, school, prison, or mental
institution. It’s also shocking, it commands your attention, that why stop signs and traffic
lights use the color red.
Colors and sounds affect us subconsciously, especially our moods much more than we are
aware of. When my parents owned it, the color had faded immensely, it looked more like
a red-brown, with age, but the red was still visible enough to be distinct.
After about a year the Podolsk’s said that they liked the house so much that they wanted to
buy it, but the bank would not give them a loan because they hadn’t established any credit.
They Podolsk’s paid all their bills in cash; they didn’t believe in credit cards, that’s why
they didn’t have any credit established, so they asked my parents if they would consider
selling them the house on a land contract?
You must understand it was a win/win situation because tenants are much more likely to
stay long term, continue to make their payments on time and take care of the house, if the
payments are going towards ownership of the house, instead of just rent to a landlord.
They were building equity in something they actually owned. Can you imagine the joy of
owning your first house after sixty-years???
Living so far away my parents agreed; and a couple months later the Podolsk’s asked if
they could start fixing up the house at their own expense.
My parents said if they were willing to spend their own money and it didn’t interfere with
the rent payments, they had their blessings. The Podolski’s wanted to start from the
ground up, Mrs. Podolski’s, whose first name was Eva, did a lot of laundry, and the
washer and dryer were both downstairs.
She hated the basements mud brown and blood color so that was the first thing she wanted
to change. Besides paint was cheap, a relatively quick fix, but the improvement would be
dramatic.
The Podolski’s painted over the rustic red with a dark charcoal gray, which seemed a
much more appropriate color. And being darker, the clerk at the hardware store assured
them that the previous color would not “bleed” thru.
The following week my parents got a call from the Podolski’s who said that they were
leaving by the end of the month. My parents were shocked, and my father was stunned.
Why???
Stan Podolski’s said they had painted the basement floor over the weekend just like they
planned, but Monday when they came home from work, they went downstairs and
discovered that someone had walked all over their fresh paint, while it was still drying.
My father assumed that someone had broken into the house, and Stan just got spooked.
The prints were still there if he wanted to see them for himself.
So, my father decided to meet with Stan that weekend to see for himself. Now here’s
where things start to get weird. It did not actually look like anyone had broken into the
house because there was no “forced entry,” and nothing was broken, stolen or misplaced.
Like the doors, all the windows had been locked shut, and none of them had been broken
or jimmied. Stan and Eva, not the two most sociable people in the world, even asked the
neighbor’s if they had seen anybody suspicious in the neighborhood, or lurking nearby,
while they were at work.
Most of the other neighbors were their age or older, and being retired, they were home all
day, and at least three neighbors had confirmed that they had seen no one that day.
Nothing in the house had looked disturbed, except for the basement itself.
Then the Podolski’s called the police to make a report, and when the police came the
Podolsk’s led them downstairs. The first thing the detectives wanted to do was to check
the coal chute. If you looked at the chute from the outside, it just looked like a flat piece of
metal, and not an opening, it didn’t even have a handle on either side. There was a thick
steel bar that kept the chute locked on the inside and it was still in place.
In fact, to make the chute even more secure, my father bent the bar over in the shape of a
“U,” with a hammer, so that it could not be “jimmied” from the outside.
You couldn’t open the chute from either side. And the steel bar did not look tampered
with in any way. One of the detectives even hit his fist against the steel plate a few times
just to check and make sure it was still secure, the steel door never budged.
The lighting was poor in the basement, so both detectives pulled out their flashlights, and
they followed the trail of footprints that went around the spider furnace and then
disappeared.
None of the footprints led from the coal chute. In fact, it looked like the footprints had just
begun and then disappeared. They didn’t lead anywhere. No two footprints looked the
same, and some of the footprints did not even look human as if they were claws made by
an animal with hoofs.
But they were “footprints,” and not shoe-prints because the impressions were distinct
enough to show “toes,” yet the police remarked that they had yet to catch a thief who
robbed a house barefoot.
Finally, the trail of footprints stopped next to the wall, but one print was only half visible,
as if the intruder had somehow continued walking behind the wall.
The detectives took pictures, and even had Mr. and Mrs. Podolski’s put their feet next to
one of the prints for comparison. The detectives finished taking their statements and gave
the couple their cards.
They told them to call their if they remembered anything else or discovered anything else
missing. Also, if they decided to repaint again to contact them if any more tracks
appeared. But in their reports, they noted that there was no specific entry, or exit point,
that could be determined, at the time.
This was no prank, and Stan did not consider it to be a joke. He was a no-nonsense guy,
who didn’t believe in Ghosts, Demons, UFO’s, Bigfoot, Santa Clause, or anything else
that he couldn’t see with his own two eyes.
He had even been a soldier at eighteen and on the front line fighting the Nazi’s when they
invaded Poland during World War 2, he knew fear. Stan had never seen two armed men
trying to leave a house any faster.
I don’t know what happened to the Podolski’s after they left, because we never heard from
them again, they gave no forwarding address. But we found out from the neighbors that
they moved out within a week from the time of their call, they didn’t even bother waiting
until the end of the month even thou they were paid up in full.
The Podolsk’s even forfeited their percentage of ownership they had invested into the
house thru the land contract. For a Polish couple who lived on rations thru war and that
was like throwing money away.
Being from an older generation who understood pain, hunger suffering and death, where
every day was just a struggle to survive; this was unheard of.
After my parents saw the prints for themselves, they decided that they didn’t want to rent
the house out anymore, so they listed it with a Real-Estate company in Detroit and
lowered the price twice until the house sold within about a year.
A vacant house is an easy target for vandalism, and my parents did not relish paying a
double mortgage, taxes and insurance. I don’t know if the new owners had the same
problems with the house as the Podolski’s, but after a very short period of time, it was
back on the market again and currently for sale.
Would you like the address???