On October 29 we went to this kind of spooky house at 60 Salome Drive, near Sheppard and Midland. It’s boarded up and the yard – backing onto the train tracks – is heavily overgrown. It may be the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a haunted house.

There’s a barn out back. It’s in far worse shape than the house. It has a lot of weird doors. Almost everything is very tightly screwed shut.

We walked around the mess of a yard, making our way through some tall weeds and prickly plants. Maybe someone was living ‘rough’ there?

Coming back to the barn, we peaked inside the tiny little window.

Val blurted out, “holy shit, that’s my bike!”

I’ll let you in on a little secret. This isn’t just some random house we visited on a lark. When Val was small he used to go to this house to visit his step-father’s parents. The last time he ever saw this bike was there in that barn, which, by the way, also housed a pigeon coop and a whole lot of other “stuff.” He thinks he last visited there somewhere around 1980.

It felt like archaeology crossed with Halloween. And just a side note particular to us, the bricks on the house are in great shape compared to our house built in the late 1980s. Val says the house probably dates back to at least the 1920s because the stove was hand-cranked.

We plan to research the house more. The lot has most likely been purchased by the neighbouring wax factory owned by The International Group. The factory dates to 1945, so the house is probably much older. Val thinks it was the area’s original farmhouse. We’ll see.