The house to the south of my apartment building was demolished this week. It's sad to see the gape now making our backyard where once there were neighbors and a well-tended garden. Next is the inevitable construction of cheaply built replacements: multiple multistory townhouses crammed onto a tiny lot. There'll be that many more neighbors competing for street parking and peering over the fence.

A couple lived in the house behind the building the entire time I've lived here. I never saw them but I heard about them. Downstairs neighbors told me about echoing domestic rages that woke neighbors and summoned police. One morning, a can of paint had been dropped over the fence between our properties. The explosion left a tear of white latex across the walkway to the backdoor and up the walls and windows of the first floor. Amateur forensics led to the hypothesis that the neighbors were pissed off at the construction of our new walkway.

Then one day the Public Land Use Notice sign went up. The house was vacant. I found some of the beautiful trees replanted in our yard. I contacted my downstairs neighbor to find out what happened.

He said one of the men had invited him to take whatever trees or shrubs he wanted. The man said they'd just learned of the house's fate and thus had learned they'd been deceived. They needed to move to a smaller location and the buyer claimed to want the house to live in. After the sale, they learned the buyer was a developer. The man said they never would have sold if they had known the truth.

But you never know—we who stay here only know the noise.

After that, the man invited my downstairs neighbor to tour the house. A lovely old thing that had lost its second floor and endured a patchwork remodel, the inside was larger than it looked. And in the basement, a vast secret place, a dungeon. All of the accoutrements furnished the beams and walls. The man said they bought the house, dungeon and all, and that in the 80s this house was the dungeon in the city. My downstairs neighbor's eyes widened. He added, "I was kind of scared to be down there with all that shit."

A couple of weeks ago I ran into Tim, our former building manager. He's the kind of guy that knows what's going on with everyone in the neighborhood. When I told him about the imminent demolition, he reported already knowing about it. What's more, he confirmed knowledge and legend of the dungeon and told me that the house used to belong to Animal, of Animal's Coffee.