The sad demise of Hermit Neighbor ... maybe, possibly

This is a story about hermits, HIPPA, nosy neighbors, police, basements, public records searches and Twizzlers. 

But before you read this, first you need to read this.

You get all that? OK, so I wrote that six years ago. Hermit neighbor has continued hermiting since then. No further real-life lady friends have shown up to bring him out of his shell. (I can only speculate about his online relationships.) 

I noticed early this past summer he appeared to have lost some weight. This was observed in one of his rare outside appearances that only occurred when he mowed his grass down to the dirt every three weeks or so. 

Then on July 22 in the year of our Lord 2021, Nosy Neighbor approached me while I was out getting mail. Nosy Neighbor moved in five or six years ago and is catty-corner* to my house, and next-door to Hermit Neighbor. (Hermit Neighbor is directly across the street from us.) Nosy Neighbor is the gossip of our subdivision. He was on the executive board of the homeowners association for a while, but he claims he was ousted after being a whistleblower about how the HOA was paying another guy on the executive board to do landscaping at the neighborhood entrance and what a conflict of interest that was. He often summons me to gossip about our neighbors when I get mail, as our mailbox is almost directly across the street from his. He is our very own Gladys Kravitz. (“Bewitched” TV show reference, for you young’ens.)

So on this summer day, Nosy Neighbor informed me that he took Hermit Neighbor to the hospital earlier in the afternoon. I gasped, mainly because I couldn’t imagine Hermit Neighbor asking anyone for help or riding in their car with them. He seemed the type to prefer an anonymous ambulance. I asked what was wrong, and Nosy Neighbor advised me that Hermit Neighbor told him that he had stage 4 colon cancer. I felt bad for thinking he’d just done keto or something to lose all that weight. Nosy Neighbor also had a detail I’d never known before: Hermit Neighbor’s name and approximate age (50)! I filed both in my memory bank for later potential cyber stalking. 

Then the next night, I got a knock on my door. It was two police officers. They asked if I knew the whereabouts of Hermit Neighbor. They’d been called to check on his welfare. I told them about Nosy Neighbor taking Hermit Neighbor to the hospital and pointed them to Nosy Neighbor’s house. One of the officers was notably relieved. 

“Oh good!” he said. “Because we thought we were going to find a body in there.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because the house is weird. Looking in the windows, the upstairs is all dusty and doesn’t look like anyone lives there, and the basement is just packed full of stuff.” 

Confirmation of my long-held theory that Hermit Neighbor lived in the basement! But more perplexing than all of this was who would call for a welfare check on a man who seemed to have no relationship with anyone? 

Of course Nosy Neighbor briefed me on his police contact the following day. When I asked him if he knew who called the police, he told me the cops informed him that it was some guy from Nebraska that Hermit Neighbor regularly played online games with. When he didn’t show up for some game, Nebraska gamer got worried. And yes, more of my theories of how Hermit Neighbor lived were getting confirmed by the second. 

Nosy Neighbor also informed me that Hermit Neighbor had put in some kind of no-contact order at the hospital. He set it up so they couldn’t tell anyone he was there. How on brand of you, Hermit Neighbor. Hermit Neighbor had agreed, however, for Nosy Neighbor to get his mail while he was away. 

But then Hermit Neighbor never came home. Nosy Neighbor dutifully mowed Hermit Neighbor’s lawn and collected his mail and packages. I helped weed sometimes. (Read: I let my kids pull dandelions out of his yard and blow the seeds everywhere because he wasn’t around to be pissed about weeds, and even when he was, his lawn maintenance was limited only to that required by city code.) 

I knew people who worked at the hospital, and even they couldn’t tell me whether Hermit Neighbor was dead or alive. Nosy Neighbor didn’t know either and had stacks of Hermit Neighbor’s mail. So being the former reporter I am, I set out to put my cyber-stalking skills to good use. 

I couldn’t request a death certificate because I’m not next of kin, but I could search obituaries. I didn’t find any for Hermit Neighbor, but the obits - along with some other public records - led me to what appeared to be his family in Louisiana. Yes, Hermit Neighbor had a mom, a deceased dad and a sibling or two!

A few months later, with still no word, I dug into County property records and saw Hermit Neighbor’s house had been sold in a tax sale (i.e. he didn’t pay his property taxes for a few years) and purchased by some property flipping company in September. I informed Nosy Neighbor of this news the next time I saw him. 

Whereas I was just happy to know this information, Nosy Neighbor took it one  nutha’ futha’. In fact, he took it about six ‘nutha futhas’. He called the woman I’d found whom I suspected to be Hermit Neighbor’s mom. I don’t want to know how he got her phone number. She was apparently estranged from her weird son (shocker), and when Nosy Neighbor told her that he had all her son’s mail and didn’t know whether he was dead or alive, she freaked. She seems to still care about him a great deal. I told Nosy Neighbor to advise her to request a death certificate, since she was next of kin. He did so.

Nosy Neighbor even called the property development company that bought Hermit Neighbor’s house. They told him that due to some law, they couldn’t take possession of it for 12 months. It has sat vacant since he left that day in July. In that time, we’ve had horrible heat, a storm that ripped off several of the house’s shingles and now sub-zero temperatures. I never once saw any kind of maintenance van at his house, so I can’t imagine it’s in good shape. 

Nosy Neighbor also found the Nebraska gamer who was apparently Hermit Neighbor’s BFF, and learned that guy hired a private investigator to determine what happened to him. 

All of Nosy Neighbor’s frantic contact with Hermit Neighbor’s mom, online BFF and the property company happened in early December. Then when I came home from work last night, there was a firetruck and three police cars in front of my house. And who was standing in Hermit Neighbor’s driveway talking to the cops and firefighters but Nosy Neighbor? 

I asked him what was going down. Here’s where the plot thickens: Hermit Neighbor’s mom did request her son’s death certificate, and THERE WASN’T ANY. So she called the cops this time, and now there’s a missing persons investigation. They were going through the house, and there were more lights on in the upstairs rooms than I’ve ever seen in our decade of living across the street from him. The nosy neighbor deep down inside of me would give anything to see the way that guy was living in his basement. There also was a detective’s business card in my front door with a request that I call him. 

An Amazon package also had mysteriously appeared on Hermit Neighbor’s porch. Was he still ordering stuff to be sent to the house from a bunker somewhere? Or from beyond the grave? But Nosy Neighbor informed me it’s a 5-pound box of Twizzlers that arrive on auto-ship every three months. Given that he’s been collecting his packages, Nosy Neighbor has accumulated enough of Hermit Neighbor’s Twizzlers to send a couple Little League teams into diabetic shock. 

For the last several months, I’d been using Hermit Neighbor as an object lesson for when my 8-year-old gets mean. 

“If you’re mean to people, no one will want to be around you and you’re going to live and die alone like Hermit Neighbor across the street!”  

But now I’m not so sure that Hermit Neighbor is dead after all. Maybe he lied about the cancer and just decided to leave his demanding life of no human contact behind for something and somewhere new with none of his possessions. I hope this is the case. But maybe he was catlike and curled up under someone's porch to pass away quietly. Maybe he was involved in some Bitcoin shadiness that got him assassinated. Regardless, I have to come up with a new empty threat for my kid until this mystery is solved. 

*Catty-corner: Midwestern for diagonal from your position; across and over one