House By The Railroad by Edward Hopper, 1925. Source: Wikipedia
I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.
—William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Any time I go into an old house I can feel the weight of years of lived memories. It’s not ghosts—I’m skeptical about their existence. When I was young I really believed in ghosts and really wanted to meet one, though I also didn’t want to meet one because that would be terrifying. Aside from Casper The Friendly Ghost most of the ghosts I’d read about or seen on TV or in the movies were terrifying, or at least as terrifying as semi-translucent wisps can be. And anyway most of them turned out to be Old Man Jenkins who would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids, but that’s another story.
To get back to what I was saying old houses always seem to have a certain character from years of being lived in. No matter how much people scrub, clean, vacuum, sweep, mop, and renovate it’s inevitable that an old house will have discolored spots, crumbling bricks, ivied walls. These aren’t flaws. They’re part of what make a house a home.
My family moved when I was four, just old enough to remember the old house without having ever really had a chance to build up any memories that made me sad to leave. Moving was exciting. The new house was bigger, with a bigger yard and more places to explore. It was a relatively new neighborhood too and there was a house across the street that was still under construction that I explored. I know you’re never supposed to go into a house while it’s still being built but in my defense I was only four years old and it was the middle of summer and the construction crew disappeared for long periods of time so what was I supposed to do?
It was intriguing to wander along the bare plywood floors and among walls that were only partially covered, the wooden bones of the framework visible, like seeing the interior of a body. In one of those coincidences almost too strange to be true some other kid had left a toy skeleton sitting up on a crossbeam. I was very imaginative—that is, I was really easily scared, especially terrified of skulls, but somehow that toy skeleton just seemed like it was hanging out, as interested in checking out the new house as I was. Maybe the memory has been colored by the intervening years but it seems like I felt a house under construction was as unhaunted as it’s possible for any place to be. Nothing had happened there yet so there was no chance for anything, good or evil, to have left its trace.
The people who live next door to my wife and I have just told us they’re planning to move soon. I’m sorry to see them go—they’re nice people, older, but the guy and I have bonded over Doctor Who and we’ve traded books and jokes over the fence. Their house is very much like ours: rectangular, single floor, more than half a century old now but still sturdy. They also have a tool shed at the very back of their yard. It’s rusting and they’ve wrapped a bright green tarp around one corner, held on with bright yellow pieces of tape so it looks like the shed’s being consumed by a giant caterpillar from a childhood nightmare, which we’ve laughed about.
Unfortunately we know the house’s fate once it’s unoccupied. It’s the same thing that’s happened to every house on our block, every house in our neighborhood, that’s been sold over the last decade or so: it’ll be knocked down, scraped away, and a newer, bigger, probably multilevel beast will take its place. The new house will, like all the other new ones, be painted white. This makes them a blank slate for the new owners but also, in places where they’re between older houses of reddish and brown brick and dark roofs, a ghostly quality. But they’re not ghosts.
Not yet, anyway.
Beautifully writting, Chris, and haunting.
I’m glad you enjoyed it and brought your always thoughtful perspective to the unhauntedness of new homes.