Who, or What, Is Waiting?

This post was written on November 29, 2017

It’s the time of year when houses feel haunted, when the indoor life of a home takes precedence over porches and patios, backyards and neighborhood parks. It’s a claustrophobic time, if your kids are very little--I remember well those winter days in Brooklyn and, eventually, New Jersey, when my entire life was consumed by the question of how, or where, we’d spend our days. Pushing a stroller through the bitter wind to reach a coffee shop where I’d end up having to change a diaper or breastfeed--well, let’s just say I’m glad those days are over.

 It’s a relief, now, to have reason to be home, cozy in our warm house surrounded by all the things we love, and the things we love to do. The clanking radiators are a welcome sound of winter. Leg warmers and fleece-lined leggings and lambswool slippers are my reward for not leaving the house.

 But winter is also the time when ghosts rise up from the walls--a palpable energy that goes beyond personal memory. It’s a building up of emotion, the kind of intense feeling that accumulates over years, or a lifetime. Last year around this time, I wrote about the betrayal of my childhood home in Appalachia, how it was desecrated by heroin addicts who put raw meat through holes in the walls when they were evicted, who filled the attic with their foul waste and syringes, and whose children were living in the house with them, witnessing too much. The memory of that visit still chills me. I felt the ghost of my own childhood self there, dismayed and heartbroken. I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t bring her back.

 This year, I’ve written about the grand old houses in that same hometown--turreted and enormous but also crumbling, abused, forgotten--and the house we finally did adopt as our fixiest-fixer-upper yet. It’s been so fulfilling to watch this house’s progress over the past six months. I last visited in July, when the framing was in progress. Last week, I finally had the chance to see it again, in its nearly finished state. There are walls, windows, floors, lights, plumbing. Kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities are waiting for their turn to be placed. The light switches work. The house is warm. The smell of cat piss does not wallop you across the face when you step inside (though the contractor said it does rise up anytime they cut deep into the floors). The turret room is stunning, and the secret room inside the turret--accessible by a pull-down ladder in the ceiling--is reason enough to ditch our New Jersey life and move in ourselves instead of selling the place.

 And the tunnel in the basement, that goes halfway across the busy main street outside--well, the tunnel remains a mystery. Last week, for the first time, I ventured all the way in, to the point where it’s been blocked off, and studied every inch of the walls with a flashlight, hoping for clues. The house didn’t give up its secrets. I saw some petrified white spiders, some giant rusty nails supporting the structure, some remnants of wire affixed to the walls. I found a glass ashtray nestled into a crumbling alcove. But no indication of what the tunnel was, where it might lead, who may have used it--in the far or recent past.

 I’d hoped to sleep overnight in the house, to witness its secret nighttime life and leave myself open to the ghosts who are surely rattled--but pleased?--by the transformation, but that wasn’t possible this time. Perhaps I’ll still have the chance. Looking out from the turret in the middle of the night as people have done for over a century, into the hills of town, the tunnel underneath a gaping maw of mystery and my own childhood home nearly visible two blocks away--it’s a compelling thought, inspiring and terrifying. I wonder what I’d see, or what I’d hear. I wonder what, or who, is waiting for the house’s second life to begin.