Welcome to This Open House. Please, Do Not Ask Me About Its Vast Network of Tunnels

Come on in, and please take your shoes off. Here’s my card, and oh, just one minor thing, it’s so funny, but I have to tell you this again: I can’t say another word about the vast system of tunnels underneath this home.

How about a quick overview? It has three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, and a four-foot-wide ventilation air shaft, which is completely up to code for below-ground air circulation. It’s for the religious sect living in the network of tunnels. Ugh, sorry. Am I being too technical? I promise not to bore you with any more details about how they obtain fresh air.

What else? The home was built in 1954 and is anywhere from 2,000 to 70,000 square feet, depending on how many of the underground prayer labyrinths you include. Which I can’t and won’t say more about on this tour.

Those are genuine hardwood floors you’re looking at. The seller had them refinished a few years ago, so they’re practically ready for a game of hoops with everyone below—ha ha, just kidding, they can’t join. I am not going to get into why their religion expressly forbids games involving hollow orbs, obviously. But it’s not like they view them as sacrilegious representations of our own hollow Earth, okay?

Let’s check out this totally not-hollow built-in desk in the den. Touch it. That’s cherry. Wouldn’t ever want to pry up that original woodwork. It’d be like digging up this place’s foundation and ruining the sacred candlelit mud-statue of Edmond Halley. Oh, not familiar with the sixteenth-century astronomer who first proposed the idea of a hollow Earth? Whatever. It’s not as if I have feelings about that or the idea of you destroying his holy shrine.

Listen to me—I keep going on and on. What’s next? I neglect to show you the farmhouse-inspired breakfast nook and instead yak about the inner chambers where the Mudkin continually dig, hopefully one day to locate the subterranean garden deep inside the Earth, where there’s eternal life? Nope. No way. I can read this above-ground room.

Come with me. There’s so much more to explore. Above. Them.

No kids, huh? Well, this neighborhood has a great surface walkability score, so if you do decide to spawn, your future kids will have plenty of room to scoot around on their bikes. That said, these imaginary future offspring might not want to go near the sewer grate on Elm Street. They could hear chanting in the evening during our holy dredging hour.

Did I say “our” holy dredging hour? I meant that more in a collective sense. To refer to all of “our” fellow under-countrymen out there, perhaps tunneling deep underground these gorgeous postwar ranch houses.

Hey, what are your thoughts on the kitchen’s counter space? It’s got an island and a peninsula. No weird underground correlation there. Just a nice, wholesome home fact for you to consider.

Wow, look at the time. I am late for my next showing.

How about you let yourself out through the French doors to the backyard? Just don’t stand over the old well to speak to the robed man who’s sitting at the bottom. He may or may not find a path of enlightenment for you, with us.

I mean, it’s not like he gazed up at you from the kitchen air vent and whispered to me that you possess a “burrowing” aura or anything.

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