How Old-Timey Basements Evolved from Practical to Creepy
Stephanie Lucas
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho (KIFI)—It was always a mystery to me how my World War II–era grandparents could walk into a dark basement and not bat an eye, whether it was the West Virginia farmhouse with a coal stove or a dirt-floor cellar somewhere in the South.
After a couple of history degrees, I realized that until recently, it was function over form for the majority of American homes. So I started to wonder—did earlier generations even think basements were creepy?
“I don’t think basements were ever designed to be creepy,” says Kristina Frandson, Curator at the Museum of Idaho.
She and her fellow Museum of Idaho anthropologist Camille Thomas met me at ‘Spook Central’, the 1915 home of historian Melissa Danielson-Zaladonis in the Idaho Falls Historic District, to figure out what makes a basement weird.
“It is, like a cool and dark space that could have been used, depending on what era we’re talking about, for storing food because it’s cool and dry,” said Frandson. “Eventually, people put boilers down there—all sorts of different things.”
As those modern conveniences came along, so did the postwar onslaught of factory line, mass-produced “stuff.”
“Basements often, you know, people and our country especially—we collect things,” says Camille Thompson. “We store things in the basement, and so there’s also this element of—there’s old things.”
And in the case of Melissa’s 110 year old home, shoes.
“We found these in the dirt crawl space,” says Melissa. “We learned that it’s something of folklore or legend to bury shoes in your foundation of the house for good luck, so something is not always that scary, just folklore, how it evolves.”
Armed with that logic, our crew descended on the creepiest basement in town, being careful of steep stairs, wires, and an old iron boiler that greeted us almost head-on.
Kristina noted there are quite a few original boilers in downtown Idaho Falls buildings.
“Whatever heating unit they had is just left in the basement because it’s too hard to pull apart and take up,” she says.
If this heavy, rusted boiler were shiny, polished, and brand new, however, would it still be considered creepy?
If this were shiny and new—stainless steel, polished metal—would it be creepy?
A resounding “no!” is the general consensus – “I think honestly, it would have been a flex,” said one member of our group.
Just a few feet to the left is the coal chute, made of a material that no creepy East Idaho basement could be without—lava rock.
“The lava rock is a good foundation, first of all, because it’s like it’s everywhere out here, obviously,” Kristina says. “And if you’re making a way for a house, you’re going to be moving that lava rock. And so it makes sense to use it in whatever capacity you can. Otherwise you have to cart it off somewhere. “
It’s about this point the outdated technology factor begins to track for this creepy basement.
For example, if you’ve never seen sheet rock, which wasn’t common until the 1950s, lava rock walls wouldn’t look creepy. However, to post-war eyes used to smooth drywall, that stone could feel almost otherworldly—like the knob-and-tube wiring we came across.
“When you go into an old basement,” says Camille. “Maybe you’ll find black mold or shoddy wiring, old wiring that also adds to the scariness. Even though it’s a real-world problem, something is also scary. Yeah. Again, it’s just like all that unknown, you know?”
Delving even further into the unknown, we finally got a look at the crawlspace where Melissa’s husband found the shoes.
“I posted the shoes online,” Melissa says, “And everyone said, ‘You need to move… or put them back!’ ”
Melissa isn’t putting them back—because she’s a historian, and historians know: when you misunderstand the past—whether it’s old shoes, lava rock, or a rusty boiler—it’s easy to think of them as creepy.
