The plow driver told me he’d been turning around in my driveway for twenty years, and there used to be a gate. I’ve owned this place since 2002, and there’s never been a gate. He described it clearly—pipe frame, chain, and a reflector on the left post. There were two holes in the ground exactly where he said, filled with gravel and grassed over. I dug one out with a spade that afternoon and found concrete footing cut off clean below grade.
Someone had taken a gate off my property and hidden the evidence. I asked the man who sold me the house, and he said he’d never seen one either. Then he asked me who I bought it from. I told him the seller’s name, and he went quiet. He said that wasn’t the person who had owned the house before him. I showed him the property records, but he shook his head and said there had been another owner whose name wasn’t on the documents he remembered.
I went to the county office the next morning and asked for the oldest property records they had. The clerk brought out a file containing several surveys and tax maps. One of the maps showed a narrow access road running through the back of my property, ending at a small structure that wasn’t on any current map. The road had disappeared from the records sometime in 2001. I asked why, and the clerk said the change had been made after a boundary dispute. Then she pointed to the signature approving the change.
It belonged to the same man who had sold me the house. I called him again and asked what he knew about the gate. He finally admitted there had been one, but said it had been removed because someone kept using the driveway at night. I asked who, and he refused to say. Before hanging up, he told me to check the old shed behind the property line because there was something there that had been “waiting for the right owner.” I walked out there that evening and found the remains of a second gate buried under leaves. Hanging from it was a rusted metal sign with my name on it.:::
