I'm 99 percent sure our house isn't haunted

Nothing says "welcome to the neighborhood" like "your house was the scene of a brutal crime," which may explain why it took nearly 6 years for someone to tell me that a mentally unstable man killed his 70 year old mother, hacked her to pieces and lived with her decomposing body parts back in 1976. Apparently it took 4 days before a next door neighbor got suspicious and called the police.

I finally got the story from the youngest daughter of my recently deceased elderly neighbor. She and her husband have been cleaning out the house, which has been in their family since it was built in 1910 (the same year our house was built).

Now that my curiosity has been piqued, I'm going to try to find out more about the crime. One of my neighbors moved across the street just 4 months before the murder and she's promised to sit down and tell me what she knows. I'll post any updates here. And, in case you're wondering, I've never gotten any bad vibes from the house. I've always felt very safe here.

Kidnapped kid hits close to home

Our tightly-knit community was abuzz yesterday afternoon as word quickly spread that a 6-year-old blond girl had gone missing from her backyard about three blocks from our house. By this morning we'd heard through the neighbor grapevine which girl it was and that she'd been found about 7 miles away, in Northwest Chicago.

She had indeed been taken by a stranger, but she appears to have been unharmed. The news I'd heard this morning was that she escaped from his car when he pulled into a gas station and found a mailman, asking him for help. But this report in the Wednesday Journal tells a slightly different story.

A truly frightening story, particularly in a village where parents feel comfortable letting their children run up and down the street with minimal supervision. I'm so thankful our backyard doesn't face an alley.