It’s haunted house season, and I have never gone to one. In high school, my class put together a haunted barn. And I wasn’t old enough to tour the neighborhood haunted house, which stopped running once I was old enough to attend. Still, the idea of a house holding more than it seems, connecting to another realm, or linking between past and present fascinates me.
Throughout my child and young adulthood, I knew ghosts lived in my paternal grandmother’s house. When I spent afternoons, nights, and weekends in her house and the sun would set, a weight would settle over the house.
The dark already spooked me. I slept with a nightlight or the door cracked until needing privacy outweighed my need to chase off ghosts. Even now, nighttime quiet feels too silent when I’m home alone.
But my grandma’s large multi-family home spooked me more than my bedroom after sunset. The basement was dark and unfinished, with little windows only allowing minimal natural light to enter. I refused as a teenager to do anything down their after sun set. Wood floors groaned as I walked down the hallway, transporting me of the point in movies right before the ghoul or demon pops out.
Despite 20 homes and an apartment complex on her block, I rarely heard noise from traffic, neighbors, or kids through her windows. This silence lasted from age four through 18 as the original families in the neighborhood had moved away and new families hadn’t moved in yet.
I grew out of many of these fears. Although I still don’t like basements. However, the disturbances weren’t Casper or Beetlejuice, there were memories and unresolved issues.
My dad’s cat died, assumedly around 1998, on my dad’s floor but wasn’t found until 2007 when dad renovated. My grandmother’s hoard had grown so high the cat couldn’t escape and possibly died under a collapsed tower of magazines. In 2016, my dad died in my bedroom, two days after I saw him, of cirrhosis. My first bouts with depression happened in the house as a teenager dealing with social media bullying and growing up with a father who had high functioning depression and anxiety.
Dealing with these intense sometimes absurd stories and memories without the distractions of daylight kept me from quickly settling my grandmother’s affairs once she also died in the same home as her son and her son’s cat. I couldn’t focus on boxing up china or sorting papers when I constantly looked over my shoulder.
Now that those affairs are in order. I have the distance needed to face the ghosts in that house and maybe some day go back and confront them.
I have been working on essays about my time in this house and drawing on tropes in a memoir like In the Dream House or a novel like Haunting of Hill House, which deals with the house as a character like any other. I want to consider the weight of these homes and the expectations of those in them.
Fast haunted thoughts
Disney needs to stop making haunted mansion remakes.
Nightmare before Christmas is a Christmas movie masquerading as a Halloween movie.
Corn mazes are far scarier than haunted houses.
Ghosts won’t disappear if you refinish a basement but they are temporarily blocked.