A do-it-yourself haunting in Holmes County
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- October 30, 2022
- 1687
I had a book as a child called “Gus was a Friendly Ghost.” Gus just wanted to be friends with the family who lived in his house. He rattled his chains and stomped through the hallways to get attention. I recently found this book in a tiny library and delivered it to my grandson several weeks ago. The collection must be preserved.
Is it ghosts who haunt a house or is it us? I read a harrowing tale several months ago written by Austin Gilkeson for Catapult Magazine called “On Houses, Ghosts and “Good Bones.” It took my breath away when I first read it (https://catapult.co/stories/austin-gilkeson-houses-ghosts-good-bones-memory-legacies).
“When we moved out of our house, I wondered, ‘How much of our presence is still there? How much do we haunt the place?’” Gilkeson wrote. “We used to live in a haunted house. You wouldn’t think so looking at it from the outside. It was a modest brick ranch in the suburbs of Chicago, not a Gothic castle or a gabled Victorian. We didn’t have so much as a single tower or hidden room. It was not a particularly old house either. It was built in 1956, during the postwar boom, when suburbs sprouted like mushrooms at the edges of America’s cities. There’s a certain arithmetic to haunted houses, after all. Any sufficiently old house will have contained a certain number of human deaths, and of that number, a certain few will linger as malcontent ghosts. The newer the house, the less chance of a haunting.”
My little 1.5 story house sits just west of state Route 557 in Holmes County. She was built in 1936 before the spread of WWII and after the stock market crash. Her crooked floors were carefully constructed during the recession, every inch able to roll a marble into any corner with ease.
She had several owners before us that left their mark in one way or another — the weird, little room in the basement that had mysterious water paraphernalia or the once detached garage that had the skins of squirrels tacked to the walls. A house is changed by every family that lives there, and their echoes resound deep inside the studs.
In my time spent inside her walls, I’ve never been afraid. While there have been instances where others have seen and felt things, I have not. The only thing I’ve ever experienced was the bathroom door closing on its own, and that was in the section of the house where we built on, where only our presence has filled the rooms.
How much of ourselves are left in a home? The spaces in between where things go unnoticed? That landing on the stairwell we pass through or the steps leading to the outside? It’s the places we don’t notice that gather up the fragments of the past, the remnants of words that hang in the air, the sighs of pain we release when we’re alone. The house holds it all, close to its breast, close to its center.
After our house fire, my husband touched nearly every subsurface of the home. He put up new drywall and ceilings and installed flooring, resurfacing with stucco and paint. If a house can be made your own by touch alone, it now belonged to him. The pain a fire brings cannot be measured, and sometimes on a hot August day, when I stand on that landing going up the stairs, I can catch the tiniest whiff of smoke. It lingers inside the walls where the house gathered it.
I consider myself haunted by my love of hauntings, but I will never feel or see what others do.
My children have tales to tell of their upstairs bedrooms, once tiny and warren-like. Their dad took out the attic crawlspaces on each side of their room and vaulted the ceilings to make them bigger. That didn’t stop the spooky sightings they all had. When the last child moved out, I made their room my home office.
“Make it your own room, Mom,” he said.
The fire had started in the old bathroom beneath his room, I knew. It had destroyed the upstairs completely. I rid each layer of his closets, making way for my own things — my big library desk, my vast collection of coffee cups and books, my yellow velvet chair. I’ve felt creative and content in this space, the one I sit at today and type. I push back a curtain and look out on the backyard, where the late fall sun is shining steadily.
I believe I’ll be the one who haunts this house when I leave it. I have invested everything in my heart, down to the very deepest cellular level. When I leave it, my soul will remain ever entrenched here, this tiny spot on a spinning world. It will sit in the corner of the kitchen where I drank so many coffees and cried so many tears, and whoever inhabits this space will know me and what lingers of my joy and pain. And if it’s torn down, the memories will remain, circling in suspended air.
“We have to live with our ghosts,” Gilkeson wrote. “‘You live here, but this house doesn’t belong to you alone,’ they tell us. They were here first, after all. They’re home.”
Melissa Herrera is a columnist, published author and drinker of too many coffees based in Holmes County. You can find her book, “TOÑO LIVES,” at www.tinyurl.com/Tonolives or buy one from her in person (because all authors have boxes of their own novel). For inquiries or to purchase, email her at junkbabe68@gmail.com.