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| Hermit Neighbor's house for sale |
Alright, Dateline fans, this is the much-anticipated conclusion of the Hermit Neighbor Trilogy. To fully understand this, you must first read Part 1 and Part 2 .
When we left off a little over a year ago, there was an active missing person investigations for Hermit Neighbor. I checked county court records on a very regular basis (I’m a former reporter - stalking public records is my jam) until one day I saw something pop up in his name. His elderly mother from Louisiana had gotten “conservatorship over a disappeared person.” Sort of like the “Free Brittney” case only with no back-up dancer ex-husbands, and Hermit Neighbor was missing, not doing a residency in Vegas.
I knew people who knew the detectives in the case and got the deets. The supposition was that Hermit Neighbor, while dying of colon cancer, checked into the hospital with a fake name. The detectives were waiting on dental records to confirm. Meanwhile, the unclaimed body of a man with a fake name lay on a chilled slab in the hospital morgue for nearly a year. His house across the street from me remained empty for a while, and then cars started showing up.
They belonged to Hermit Neighbor’s mom and her sisters from Louisiana. And the guy who reported him missing in the first place - his online gamer friend from Nebraska - along with some of his friends. They had set to work on his house. I don’t even know how they got inside. One morning when I was loading the kids in the car for school, the Nebraska guy and his lady friend approached me and asked where the DMV was so they could get Hermit Neighbor’s car - which had sat untouched in the driveway for a year - properly licensed again. It was the most conversation I’ve ever had with anyone from that house. Ever.
They rented dumpsters and filled them with boxes of papers, an old recliner and untold junk. I have never in my life wanted to dumpster dive so badly. Would the keys to Hermit Neighbor’s secret world be in there? Would there be an obvious explanation to why he was so averse to human contact? A diary detailing being scorned by an ex-lover? Documents linking him to a murderous drug cartel? Or just lots of Twizzler wrappers from his tri-monthly five-pound shipment from Amazon?
Alas, there was never really a good time to dive into the dumpster without drawing suspicions from neighbors. Maybe nighttime, but what if I encountered a raccoon in there? I have no doubt they would fight me to the death for some juicy missing neighbor gossip. Have you seen their claws?
Then a roofing company came and replaced the house’s roof. A man came and bought the Porsche that sat in Hermit Neighbor’s garage that I never once saw him drive in the decade we lived across from him. Things seemed to be moving forward, so I checked back in with the detectives.
They had confirmed that Hermit Neighbor did in fact check into the hospital with a fake name in July 2021. He died a few weeks later at the age of 51 years old. This left me with two very big questions:
1. How do you check into a hospital with a fake name?
Don’t you have to show ID? And your insurance?
Who paid for Hermit Neighbor’s end-of-life care if they didn’t have his insurance with his name on it?
When I was hospitalized at the end of my second pregnancy, I had to recite my name and date of birth pretty much any time a new nurse came into the room. How can you keep up the facade if you’re barely conscious?
2. Why would you want to check into a hospital with a fake name when you’re dying?
You hate your family so much you don’t want them to know whether you’re dead or alive?
You’re being hunted by an assassin? (But you’re dying anyway, so does it even matter?)
You want to stay on the hermit brand until the bitter end?
Whatever his reasons, Hermit Neighbor’s family finally found him, even if it was months after his death. His mother paid for many repairs to the house and put it on the market. She also got his 401K. For a guy who was so private, I could tell you exactly how much was in it because it’s all now in the public record of the probate case. Anyone could look it up (but probably only public record stalkers like me actually would).
When the house was listed for sale, the realtor said it was a “well-maintained home.” I laughed out loud when I read the listing. Maybe she meant well-maintained in that the top two floors hadn’t been lived in for the last decade. Hermit Neighbor resided only in the basement (see the previous installments of this trilogy) like a good hermit would. And in the 10 years we lived across from him, I never once saw any kind of home maintenance van - no HVAC, no electrician or plumber, no repair person of any kind. The two-story deck in the back was rotten. And still the house sold for about the same price as what ours is currently valued at. The housing market today, man. “Come buy a dead basement-dweller’s house that until recently had a hole in the roof for way over market value!”
This weekend, I was working out in my yard when the new owners of the house came by. They are a couple who hasn’t fully moved in yet, but the man was mowing his new yard. He waved at me. It’s the dawn of a new era.
