Rememberment, Chapter XXVIII: Things in Abandoned Houses

There's just something magical about old, abandoned houses, especially when you're a kid. They are creepy and fascinating, and should you enter one, you will immediately start to wonder what kind of treasures have been left behind by the people who used to live there.

We used to have one such house right near our own. It stood between our home and the railroad track, surrounded by a sparse collection of birch trees; a small, wooden house with a roof covered in moss. I don't know if it was ever painted in the traditional Finnish way using red ochre, but if it was, that colour had long since been weathered away.

Matti and I often wandered around that house. Beneath the moss-covered yard were many empty bottles of booze, and one of the four walls was riddled with bullet holes, but those were the only interesting things we found. We were strictly prohibited from trying to go inside the house, and we also weren't stupid enough to defy that. Falling into an old potato cellar through some rotten floor planks wasn't on the agenda.

However, beyond the railway tracks there was another abandoned house, and that one we did enter a few times. It was located on the side of a dirt road that was running through the nearby fields of oats and barley, and had a lush back yard with big lilac bushes, making it an alluring spot for butterflies—and for us to catch some for our collections. Venturing inside, we were greeted by the smell of old dust, peeling paint and moist earth. Although we found some interesting items such as old magazines, letters and small toys, I don't recall that we ever took anything back home. They still weren't ours to take and we knew it.

The house that was near ours was eventually torn down. I recall there was a crew of men at work, including at least two of my brothers, Esa and Tapio. They brought home a bunch of old newspapers and magazines they had found inside the house, which I spent quite a bit of time reading. I was particularly fascinated by the old comics such as classic Finnish strips "Kieku ja Kaiku" and "Pekka Puupää".

One evening I was alone with Esa, who had his own story to tell about an abandoned house.

He told me that when he and our other two brothers were still little, living in the small home my family had back then, there was an older woman who lived alone in a nearby old house. For whatever reason, all the kids in the neighbourhood were terrified of her.

One day the lady passed away and her house was left empty. My brothers and their friends would sometimes go inside in the evening to goof around, play cards, and tell each other ghost stories. The noises in the house gave birth to one of those stories; the theory went that the sounds of rats and other critters in the walls were, in fact, caused by a ghostly severed hand that was looking for the rest of its body.

Eventually, that house was to be torn down too. The attic was filled with old items. One of the men noticed some loose boards on the floor, and underneath them a case, which he pulled out and opened.

The case contained a collection of war memorabilia. And something wrapped in cloth; the remains of a severed human hand.