Doom House (...and doom house dog)

Morning! Happy Saturday! Next door to us is a busted up, dilapidated house. When we moved in last February we noticed it and immediately started calling it "The Doom House". We live in down town Salt Lake, so there isn't a ton of room between properties. Our back yard area has a fence, and then about 4 feet away from that is the doom house window. The window has tons of cob webs in it and the blinds have always been pulled shut. The first few weeks of living here, there was never any activity at the doom house. Never saw anyone, never heard a peep from it. One night, I'm out back with BoDee and the doom house window lights up. I'm a little surprised because this house is seriously in bad shape, in the front section that faces the street there are similar windows to the window we always see from the back yard. Except the windows out front have three feet of VERY bushy ivy growing into them. So there's no WAY someone could be living there right? Three feet of ivy growing in the windows! Worse yet, at one point, we went to the front door to actually confirm no one lived there and there was a 55 gallon steel drum full off...goo. Seriously... goo. Black shiny greenish goo. I thought it might have been oil from the engine of a car, but it must have been sitting there for years and there was probably 40 gallons of it. Needless to say I didn't knock on the door and took the goo as a sign that nobody could live there and allow such a foul waste product to take residency on their main porch.

So the doom house window lights up, I'm totally speechless when this happens because it's about 1 in the morning and I'm sleepy and a little out of it. After 2 minutes of silence just staring at the window, the light flips off. That's enough to send me hurrying inside locking the door behind me. This same thing happens on and off for the next few months, the light turns on sometimes late at night, stays on for a short period of time and turns off. We begin to speculate as to how this could be happening. We've still never seen anyone in or around the house, never heard a sound from it. no one has ever maintained the yard or trimmed a tree even. Jonda thinks it's haunted at this point, I'm leaning more toward drug users breaking in to get lit up or some kind of timed light system that was never turned off by the previous tenant.

One day I'm out in the back with BoDee and a dog crashes into the fence we share with the doom house! BoDee goes charging over and is jumping and scratching at the weakened fence as the bigger dog next door is crashing into it and working his way through. I scoop BoDee up (he's still trying to get at the dog as I'm taking him inside, he ain't scared a nothin!) and run him inside as the dog finishes knocking the boards out of the fence. I come back out and the dog is gone, I set the fence back up (poorly, it's just my way, gimme a break.) and go back inside. Later that week the same dog comes over and knocks the fence down again, worse than before, but this time I see someone back there, I'm like "woah! The doom house...man!" Not a clever name, but this is the house that I'm assuming no one has lived in for the last 6 months, so I'm expecting this guy to be Gollum's brother or a leprechaun or something. Jonda is out there as well and I she wants to go next door and tell DHM that he needs to fix our fence. I'm still in shock about even seeing the dude. It's like I've seen a troll of some kind just now, and Jonda thinks we should ask the troll to fix the fence his dog just broke. We end up going over there and the dude answers the door (after about 5 minutes of silence) with no shirt, not a good sign. He says sorry about the fence (in no way sincere) and he'll TRY and make his dog stay away. He doesn't fix the fence...doesn't even elude to offering. I fix the fence again (poorly...) and his dog knocks it down pretty much every week now. Needless to say, BoDee HATES this dog. I kinda hate him myself since now every time I go out back I have to worry about dog busting through the fence!
Ivy Curtains