The Detroit street peddlers - remember them ?

[Bigb23]

I spent part of my youth around the Keating, State Fair area, and I remember the fruit and vegetable carts, the rag man, the guy who bought scrap, the tri-cycle bike knife sharpener, and a guy with a pony and western costume for kids photos. This story I ran across reminded me of those days.

A Ghost Story

Attachment 507


From: KodiakKeith posted Saturday, March 14, 2009 7:34:40 PM


My grandparents lived in a house at 699 Fairview Street, Detroit. The house is no longer there, Google Earth shows a modern housing development covering what what was once a street of turn-of-the-century bungalows shaded by ancient horse chestnut trees. They bought the house back in the 1920's and lived there until the 1970's.
The small upstairs had been converted into a second flat with vaulted ceilings because I guess it was originally just attic space. This flat was occupied for a number of years by my parents and even myself, though I was too young to recall actually living there. We used to visit a lot, but we always slept downstairs because the upstairs was largely without furniture and used for storage by that time of my life.

My parents and grandparents used to talk about the singing man that could be heard upstairs on quiet nights when they lived there. I never heard it myself, but listened to their renditions often enough that the little melody sticks in my head to this day. What they'd hear late at night was a man with an Italian accent signing "Strawberries, cherairairies, blueberries, appupuples...." And it went on with other fruits - the sing-song chant of a fruitseller pushing his cart along the street. They'd hear him faintly in the distance and then clearer as if he was just outside and then fainter as he moved away. On some nights they'd hear him again and again, on other nights not at all. The grandparents had lived there since the 20's and could not connect him to anyone they had known during their time. Oddly, they could not hear him downstairs, but had heard him often enough when they slept upstairs while family was visiting or something like that. It didn't frighten anyone, they just sort of accepted him as an eccentric neighbor.

Another odd thing was that to get upstairs, you had to open a door on the rear porch and walk up a flight of steps and then knock or open the door into the upstairs kitchen. They would hear a knock upstairs, open the door and nobody would be there. This might happen night or day. If it had been a prankster, he would have had to run down the flight of stairs and exit and close the door at the bottom before anyone opened the upper door. Yet, that upper door was right next to the kitchen table and so frequently somebody would be sitting there and just reach over and open the door while the knocking was still in progress, and nobody would be there.
I remember my dad saying that everybody liked the Italian guy, but the knocker would make my mother absolutely furious because he often caught her in the middle of something, so she'd open the door and scream down the stairwell at him to knock it off.

Family stories...

http://www.cryptozoology.com/forum/t...=36&pid=651190

And another nostalgic link.

http://www.mybaycity.com/scripts/Art...ewspaperID=198