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My roommates look around in disbelief. "Ghosts.....or fraternity boys," mutters one of them. 

I can't help but think that the so-called "charm" we saw in this dilapidated old apartment was something we had invented. What were we thinking? Sure this old house had once been a New Orleans mansion, but that was about 50 years ago. In the meantime it had fallen into disrepair, chopped up into 3 levels of apartments, and the top floor, our floor had been inhabited by various fraternity men for the past 8 years. From the looks of it, it had been handed down year after year, brother to brother, and when they finally let it go, the current occupants took their clothes and left everything else. 

Sure we had gorgeous crown molding and huge cedar closets to die for. We had two glassed in porches and an illegal washer & dryer. We were allowed animals, and our bedrooms were huge. However, we also had 8 years of fraternity-boy-funk to get out, golf clubs and hockey pads, broken furniture, one suspicious looking piece of PVC pipe, and a bathtub that we hadn't noticed was rotted out & didn't have running water. What were we thinking? 

5 girls, good friends from freshman year of college had finally been granted permission by their parents to move off-campus. We set off to find our own castle and after many duds (could they really have been that bad in comparison??), we settled on the Webster Street house. It seemed perfect and we imagined wicker furniture, breezy white curtains, and a little dog or two running around. In reality it took taking 5 truck-loads of junk to the dump to even make room to move our stuff inside. The paint had faded over the last 50 years and so we repainted over the dirty putty color.  The gorgeous pale pale peach we picked for our living room absorbed into the walls and morphed into Pepto Bismal pink. The cheery yellow I'd selected for my room looked like "Radioactive Macaroni & Cheese" according to my Mother. The celery green we painted the kitchen distracted us from the occasional mouse-family-visitors and the 1950's kitchen appliances that were never upgraded. We found evidence that our glorious hall closet (that was really the size of a bedroom) had been used to haze fraternity pledges. Our front door stuck, and the floors hadn't been cleaned in years. The air conditioner worked intermittently. The ceiling fans were growing dust-globs the size of small children.

Somehow though, we scared the ghosts away. Papa Duke changed all the locks for us, and fixed the sticking door frame, and we threatened to sue our landlord if he didn't replace the rotted bathtub, which he did. The paint was a little much, but it was bright and clean. Our Mother's scrubbed the kitchen (and then hired a cleaning service when it was apparent they were not getting anywhere) and we all bought cheerful bed linens. We put hand-knitted afghans on the crusty couch and scrubbed it within an inch of its torn upholstery. Somehow, the dingy apartment became ours, after 90 bottles of Lysol, some scented candles and one high-end air filter. 

For two years we lived there, through fights and pets (at one point total canine count was 4) and Mardi Gras and finals and hot sticky summers that our air conditioner couldn't keep up with. It didn't matter. That Webster Street house was ours. We cooked dinner for five in the kitchen, and had a system for paying our astronomical electric bills. We had parties and movie-thons and rubbed each others backs when we were sick. When we graduated we cleaned all of our belongings out, swept one last time, and left the keys in the mailbox. It was one of the hardest days of my life, saying goodbye to my best friends, and the creaky old building I had called home for two years. 

After Hurricane Katrina, we heard the roof leaked, further wrecking the floors, and another gaggle of fraternity boys moved in. We laugh at the thought of them in the Pepto Bismal pink living room. We hope they loved that house as much as we did.