Tax Sale

Personally I love going to sales…any kind of sales. My favorite though are garage sales, storage shed auctions and the best of all – tax sales of local properties. I have bought a few properties that range in price from $200.00 for a small one bedroom house to $8,790 for a three bedroom house in one of the best parts of town.

In addition to getting properties at extremely low prices, when the previous owners leave they pretty much always leave stuff behind. I have found hundreds of books, furniture and tons of money. My best find was over $30,000 in the attic of a house I paid $1,000 for. Pretty good day’s earnings for just paying off taxes that somebody else couldn’t afford. But, when I bought the house at 678 Spicer Street I got more than anyone could ever imagine.

I searched the house right after I bought it. From the looks of the inside it had been empty for quite a few years. Everything was covered in a thick layer of gray dust. I mean that it was so thick that there was a mahogany dresser the previous owners. It had beautiful a beautiful dark brown and gold finish to it but there was no way to see until I took a heavy sponge and washed it clean. When I first saw it I swear to God that it was dull and worn but that was an illusion created by the dust. Once I cleaned it and everything it was beautiful. I knew at that moment that I was looking at a sale price of almost $2,500 dollars.

The bedrooms were full of what they call “vintage” clothes. Every outfit in the closet came from the late 1970’s. I could not believe all of the polyester suits, bell bottoms and a few gunny sax dresses. It was like taking a trip in a time machine back to a time when good fashion didn’t matter.

Then I walked back down to the first floor and then down the thirteen stairs to the basement. There was so much there it was mind boggling. The strange thing was everything in the basement was antique and was used in medical treatments as well as medical experimentation. Oh my God, I thought. This place looks like the shop Dr. Frankenstein had in that old horror film I saw when I was a kid. The walls were lined with old lead covered bottle. It was hard to see but I saw that each bottle had a different body part inside.  There were brains, lungs, hearts and everything else. Each bottle was marked M or F and then a date. Each one also designated what blood type the organ was. “What in the hell is this,” I asked out loud.

Places like this were common back in the 18^th and 19^th centuries but not in the last hundred and fifty years or so. I knew that because of some documentaries on the Discovery Channel. Doctors and not quite doctors set up operating rooms in their basements for people who didn’t want to be seen in a hospital. God knows how many people were treated here and better yet…how many people died here.

I looked around a little bit more, especially at the jars that held the organs. There was a code of some kind written. The one with the brain has this written on a white, well yellowed, paper…the code read “Fe-MT3-22-46A.” Okay, I figured the “Fe” meant female. The MT3 could mean the third Tuesday of March and lastly that last piece of the 46. I could only guess but I thought it meant 1946. That had to be it. Every jar had a different code but they were all the same format.

On a desk in the corner of the room were a desk and a lamp. I reached over and turned the light on. It cast a strange light…seriously strange. It was like the light you see in an old color photograph in your mom’s photo album. It was a white light but not quite white. It was more of ivory. Yeah, it gave the area a really cool look but I would not want to have to live with it.

The drawers were unlocked. I opened the bottom one on the left side. It was full of small jars and vials. I looked in them and found that each one was a vial of blood and each had the same codes as the jars with the organs. I quickly closed that drawer and open another. Inside was a book. It was the “doctor’s” notepad. Inside was page after page of the codes that I had been finding. I leafed through the pages until I found “Fe-MT3-22-46A.” It was a woman named Anna Louise Bailey. She was 22 years old and she came in on March 19^th 1946 for an abortion of twin girls. That was all the information that was in the book but there was one thing, from looking at the book that “doctor” had a massive business in abortions

Taking the book with me I went back up to the living room, opened my laptop and ran a Google search for Anna Louise Bailey. I really wasn’t expecting anything but there were more than a thousand site dedicated to that woman and what happened to her. I looked over a few of them and they all told the same story. Miss Bailey disappeared on March 19^th. There was an investigation but the cased was closed after no trace of her could be found.

“Oh shit,” I yelled. It echoed through the room as clear as if I was standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. “What in the hell did I stumble into?”

I sat there for a good forty five minutes or so taking in everything I had seen and read. What went on down in that basement. I had to look around some more so I went back down stairs. I ignored the jars and the desk. I was interested in what was behind door number one. I walked slowly toward the door.

Did you ever get a feeling of total horror…the one you get when you are watching a really good horror film? Well, that was the way I was feeling and it got stronger as I approached the door. By the time I reached for the doorknob my body was shaking so bad that I could barely stand up.

The door opened slowly, held back by decades of rust and dirt. There were no windows in the room and no ventilation so the air was thick, heavy and smelled of mold and fungus. There was also no light so I felt my way along the wall until I found a light switch. As soon as I turned it on I saw what I kind of expected but I didn’t want to see. There were bodies, a hundred bodies at least. They were set into different positions. The one closet to me was holding a rugby ball and was placed in a running pose. Others were posed as ballet dancers, trapeze artists, soldiers and pin-up models. The one thing I noticed that on every body the skin was completely removed. All I could see were their muscles, tendons and some of their bones.

Honestly, I had no idea that such a thing ever happened but the thing was I was not shocked to see them. They were strangely beautiful and very, very artistic but I knew what I had to do. I took my cell phone and called 911. I wasn’t quite sure how to report it or what to say. I just explained it the best way I could and within minutes police, EMT’s and the media showed up and the tedious job of matching DNA and other ways to match the bodies to their internal organs and skin, which I found behind door number two. There was a third door but I didn’t open it and I didn’t want to be there when anyone else opened. I may have been a coward but after all that I had seen I didn’t want to see any more.

I walked up the stairs half sick half frightened. I laid down on the floor. My mind was swirling as they carried up one body after another. All of the, once they were in the light, seemed almost natural…almost alive. The jars were next and then the vials of blood. Honestly I couldn’t watch. It was just way too disturbing for me so I closed my eyes until they were gone.

A little more than seven months went by before I heard from the authorities. They had found 135 bodies in the basement. Every one of them died back in the early to mid 1940’s and every one had some kind of surgery done when they died on the table. Yet, not one of the families notified the police of a missing family member and there were no records of their deaths. Then they said something that shocked the hell out of me…of the bodies they identified all of them had gravesites at one of the local cemeteries. Right after that they added something to the story…all of the graves had coffins buried in them and every one of them had a department store mannequin inside.

“How many did you identify,” I asked.

“Out of the 135 we found we could only identify 131,” one of the officers said. “The rest are at the morgue. We have no idea what to do with them.”

I thought a minute. There was an idea I had and I wasn’t sure it was going to work. I excused myself and went out and made a call on my cell. A few minutes later I had my answer and it really felt like it would work.

“Well,” the officer asked as soon as I walked in the door.

I explained my idea and asked permission to claim the final four bodies. He called someone…God knows who and a few minutes later he came back and he told me that they were willing to do anything to get those bodies out of the morgue. Then he added that the lab techs down there were getting freaked out just knowing that they were there.

The next morning I arrived at the morgue. The bodies were waiting for me. I loaded them into a truck and drove over to the local art museum. They unloaded them and then placed them in a sealed glass display area. It was the first time ever that deceased human bodies were used as sculptures. The exhibit is still on display for the public to admire so, never ever again, will these people be forgotten.