Ghost Houses

Crow; Clare McCarthy photo

Back in the dark ages, when I was newly hatched from college, I – and several hundred other under-30’s working in the publishing industry – lived in the Peterborough area. Most of us were poorly paid, so we lived in all sorts of interesting places: converted horse stalls, old-fashioned boarding houses, sublets of old houses, apartments entered by climbing several sets of stairs in a barn, apartments with bathrooms large enough to hold a party in and apartments with bathrooms that closely resembled an outhouse –all sorts of places.

Most of the seriously adult people who lived in Peterborough didn’t think of it as a particularly haunted place – well, let me take that back. Peterborough, we understood, was one of those places where retired spooks – of the government kind – were safe-housed; but I’m referring here to the non-corporeal kind of spooks. 

One old house in which I rented a room from a 20-something who was subletting the place was filled with interesting artwork the real renters had collected from all over the world. The collection included different tribes’ objects of power, which came with their own resident spirits, which apparently took a dislike to me. I only stayed there briefly because I was woken over and over nightly by – I don’t know what; and because whenever I walked through the kitchen, cupboard doors popped open and inanimate objects launched themselves at me, which made preparing a meal problematic. I got pretty good at catching unexpected flying objects before I moved.

This ghost story, however, is about the house a colleague rented from owners who were away for several years on an anthropological journey. The anthropologists would come and go, gone usually for several years at a time; and they’d filled their house with all sorts of interesting objects, including death masks which hung on the stairway wall. The house itself had started life, a century before, as a slaughterhouse. It was abandoned when the farmer owner hung himself from one of the rafters, sat empty and desolate for a time, and then was converted into a very groovy ‘70’s house, complete with kitchen/dining room open to the rafters, lots of rough barn boards, a catwalk leading from open stairway to a large sitting room and a bedroom on the upper floor, and a sometimes fruit-fly-haunted composting toilet.

My colleague, The Writer, and I spent a fair amount of time there, talking about writing, editing, work friends, men, animals, what we expected our lives to become, and trying out recipes. We mostly sat in the kitchen, drinking tea or working at the big table; for some reason we weren’t drawn to the upstairs sitting room, and The Writer finally had to take down the death masks and pack them away before she was comfortable sleeping upstairs. 

We found we easily lost track of our conversations the longer we spent in the kitchen: a constantly moving energy was there, which was easy to get lost in if we weren’t paying attention. We’d look up and realize that many minutes had passed, and we had been – elsewhere. The Writer believed the energy of the hundreds of animals who had passed through the space on their last journey was stuck there, still milling about.

We knew the place was haunted. The Writer often woke in the middle of the night to music playing on the radio in the kitchen. Down the stairs she’d go, to turn off the radio; an hour or so later, it would be on again. Even unplugging the radio didn’t guarantee a quiet night - somehow it would be plugged in and playing after midnight. 

When we could no longer stand the constant motion we saw out of the corners of our eyes in the kitchen, going upstairs to the sitting room became more alluring. Each time we crossed the catwalk, however, I’d see some dark object swing down at me from the rafters above, and I’d duck. I never got hit, and didn’t say anything because I assumed The Writer truly had bats in her belfry, a matter too delicate to discuss. But eventually she asked, “Do you know you always duck at the same place whenever we come up here?” “I know!” I said. “You must have bats in here or a bird got in. Something keeps swooping down at me when we cross the catwalk.”

“Actually,” she said, “where you duck is the exact spot the owners told me the old farmer hung himself from the rafters.”

Huh.

Jekyll Beach Faces; Bonnie Lewis photo

We were young, and I’d only recently left the house that tossed kitchen items at me, so we laughed and didn’t think much more about it. Spooks? We weren’t scared of invisible spooks! Even ones that turned on dance music in the middle of the night!

One night The Writer had a party, inviting all the other folks who labored for slave wages at the magazine where we worked. Her sitting room was a great space for a party. I arrived a little late, ducked my way along the catwalk, and reaching the big room, noticed that The Writer’s father and a friend of his were also at the party. The old gents were sitting on a bench at the far side of the room, chatting quietly and watching our goings-on. I caught their eyes, smiled and nodded, and they smiled and nodded back.

It was a nice party, the food was great, the conversation was entertaining, there was flirting and laughing. Eventually it grew late, and we all started for home. 

“Great party!” I said to The Writer, as we headed downstairs. “I didn’t know your dad was visiting. Who’s the other gent, your uncle?”

The Writer looked at me oddly. “My father’s not here,” she said. 

“Oh; are those old guys neighbors, then?”

“What guys, exactly, are you talking about?” The Writer asked.

“The ones sitting on the bench,” I said. “I figured they didn’t join in because they didn’t want to dampen the young folks’ fun. Will you introduce me before I go?” I was feeling strangely confused.

The Writer stared at me. “There weren’t any old guys sitting on the bench,” she said, after a moment.

 We went back upstairs and peered into the room from the doorway. “Those guys,” I said quietly, not wanting to point. 

“There are no guys there, Deb” The Writer said. 

“They’re waving at us,” I said.

“Okaaay,” The Writer said. “Time to go home!”

“This is too weird,” I said. “Do you want to come with me?”

The Writer hesitated, then said, “I don’t see them. I’ll be okay.”

So I went out to my car, half-convinced my friend was playing a trick on me. I was part-way home when I heard an old guy voice from the back seat, “Are we nearly there yet?” In my rear-view mirror, all I could see was empty air in the darkness. 

But that’s another story.

Published 28 October 2018 in the Concord Monitor as “A Groovy Kind of Haunting.”