Finding out

We had an older couple that lived next door when I was growing up. They didn't have any kids and never had any family over to visit or anything. Just the two of them. The guy was a little quirky but he was retired and just liked to stay busy, so he would do things like go out and find a broken bike someone had put by the curb or something electronic, then take the junk back to his place and try to fix it in his shed in the back yard. He truly was one of those "one mans trash" type guys and just liked fixing things. He would do all this in his little red shed in the middle of his back yard that had a full workshop in it. Once a year our block would get together and do a whole weekend where we did a big yard sale and people could come walk house to house looking over stuff and it actually got a good amount of people since it was in the early 90's then and you couldn't just pop on Craigslist or marketplace for some used stuff. And I ran a little lemonade stand myself to get in on it as well.

So this guy was in his back yard ALOT, hiding out in the shed fixing whatever prize he had brought home that day. The only window on the shed faced our back yard. Whenever I would go out to play in the back yard (fully chain link fenced in yard so my mom would just let me go alone and watch me from the window of the kitchen), I would hear growling and roaring coming from the shed. I was very young, probably like 5 or 6. So I would get curious about the noise and go up to the fence and just push my face up against it staring at the shed while it was making all these crazy noises. At some point he had come out and told me he had a tiger in his shed and that was where it lived and why I kept hearing it. I'm like 5 so of course I think it's the coolest thing ever that my neighbor has a tiger so every time I hear it then I would run over to the fence and try to watch even though the small window had blinds and you couldn't see in.

Obviously I eventually grew up enough to start questioning this, plus me and my mom had walked over there one day and the guys wife sent us out back to the shed to ask if he could fix something for us. I got to see inside then, and realized there was no tiger and he was just messing with me. But I did see that his work desk was directly under the window. I never thought anything of it. Just some nice old guy.

My mom also used to send me over next door sometimes saying that they had something for me and I'd go over and him and his wife would be in the living room just watching TV and they would give be a bag with like 2 handfuls of candy in it, sometimes they would give me a bag of tacos for my dad (his wife was Hispanic and made some amazing authentic tacos), and I'd sit down for a few minutes and they would ask me how I liked school or if I was doing good, stuff you would talk to a kid about. Then after a couple minutes they would send me home. It seemed normal to me as a kid because it happened weekly. Sometimes he would give me a toy he had fixed or something instead.

Sounds like this completely normal old couple that was just super nice.

But another family moved in down the street. That guy and his wife had a 3yr old girl, and his wife was paranoid. She went and met everyone on the block when she moved in, then checked to see if anyone was a registered sex offender, because that's completely normal and not weird right? Come to find out... she wasn't wrong. The guy neighbor that had been watching me grow up all these years turned out to have child molestation charges against him. No one knew. And back then the internet wasn't exactly in every house, so getting information like that would have been on the person trying to find it. So this woman did and showed my parents the info she got. I was no longer allowed anywhere near them even though I was too old now for it to matter, being basically a teen now.

I think back on all the weird crap that we accepted as normal and how much time I spent watching for the "tiger" and my skin crawls wondering what was going on. It also makes sense why they never had visitors or children around. No family coming by even on holidays. The wife had grown up children but they never came by. If they had children of their own, they may not have been allowed. Creepy.