Give Up the Ghost? Never!
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
By Susan Senator / Boston
I live in a dream house, but it’s also a nightmare house. It is an 1880s Victorian that we restored—and I use that term loosely, because a lot of it is still the way it was 140 years ago. (We ran out of money.) For me, the house has everything I had ever dreamed of: nine-foot ceilings, six fireplaces, an elaborate arch over a large window seat; original woodwork everywhere; a small, curved hobbit door to the kitchen.
And the pièce de résistance? A floor-to-ceiling Palladian window on the landing of the main staircase. I have often joked that the house is like a very old, dear relative—very infirm, needs a lot of love and attention, but part of our lives, nonetheless.
I always wanted a house like this, having grown up in a 1970s suburban Colonial. But be careful what you wish for. Even during the final walk-through, I could see through my rose-colored glasses that there was a lot of work to be done, but that long arched window in the staircase said, “don’t look at that old wallpaper, look at me!” Maybe I should have examined that window. But more about that later.
Most old house problems do not simply disappear with paint. Still, we found ways to deal with some of the larger issues, such as new roof and cedar siding. Termites and wisteria had pulled down the entire back deck, which ran around 20 feet from the side porch to a door off the playroom (or parlor). Without the deck, this useless parlor door leads to outside air. But we just keep it locked and call it the Door to Nowhere. In any case, we took care of the termites after we experienced a swarm in the basement.
There is a little powder room on the first floor, a brick broom closet-sized structure that was added onto the house in 1913 by the second owner, an elderly woman. How do we know she was elderly? I have inconveniently forgotten the answer. Complete with pull-chain, leaking toilet, we hired a plumber immediately, but he left after a few hours, saying the H-word: Haunted.
We laughed at this. To this day, I wish I had asked him what he meant. But that company never returned my calls. But of course, there were no ghosts. No such thing as ghosts.
But the first time our favorite babysitter came over was also the last, unfortunately. I tried to find out what she had seen, what had happened, but all she did was shake her head. Then, my youngest started waking me up every night telling me there was a “little blue ghost” scaring him. I was convinced it was somehow the blue fireplug outside his window. But one night I wandered over to the round wall by the back stairs and something kind of flew by. Was it a car light? Sure, it was! But there was no window there to reflect a car light.
Every now and then we hear loud clicks at night. My husband Ned, firmly grounded in science, computers, and all things nerdy, reported that these sounds are just the window latches opening on the Palladian window at the top of the staircase. Neither one of us discusses why this would happen. Creaks are one thing, but actual latches being flung open? On a window that is painted shut?
Still, when it happens, my husband says, “It’s just the window latches,” and I reply, “I’m sure it’s fine.” The wind, an old house, settling, shifting–there’s always a good reason for these things. Silly old house.
Except for that morning, about 20 years ago, shortly after we’d moved in. My husband was awake before I was and had gone downstairs to make coffee. He glanced up at the staircase and saw a woman there. He thought it was me. Except for the fact that I don’t wear large hoopskirts. He looked again and she was gone.
It’s one thing if I had been the one to see her. I’m the emotional, dreamy, believer-in-astrology member of the family. But it did not happen to me. It happened to Ned.
We just kind of laughed about it but was a whistling-past-the-graveyard kind of laugh. I could maybe still shrug it off. But there was that beautiful evening recently when I was sitting on the sunny side porch and I heard someone on the sidewalk below say, “Door to Nowhere.” I got chills and ran outside to meet the person who knew this strange thing about my house.
It turned out she was the former owner’s daughter. She had grown up there. My excitement rose up like balloons as she described what it was like living there. The Door to Nowhere. The strange room off the upstairs bathroom—her uncle had nicknamed it The Pumpkin Room—but no one knew why. It was understood that if she was naughty, she’d be sent to The Pumpkin Room. In my family there is no such threat; we merely try to keep it closed but of course it pops open every so often.
And then I asked the woman, “Did you ever see—”
We both said it at once: “The Old Lady.”
“I never saw her,” the woman told me, “but my brother did.”
“My husband did.”
We thought about this in silence for a moment, and then I took her on a tour of the house to show her what we had done to it so far. She was duly impressed.
I could have ended up feeling completely freaked out, but somehow, I was not. I felt—the only way to describe it is—special. Honored? Because after all, if there is some presence, she is benign. She merely wants the big window open. Well, so do I. And she visits the Pumpkin Room. She thumps a little, clicks a little. I can live with that. Because whether ours is just a finicky, needy old house, or we have a ghost who is finicky and needy, she is our finicky old house ghost and well, sigh, I am never going to sell it.
Especially now that I’ve gone public with the whole H-word thing.
Susan Senator is an author, blogger and journalist living in the Boston area with her husband Ned Batchelder. They have three sons, the oldest of whom is 36 and has profound autism. Ms. Senator is the author of Making Peace With Autism as well as The Autism Mom’s Survival Guide and Autism Adulthood: Insights and Creative Strategies for a Fulfilling Life. A journalist since 1997, she has a column in Psychology Today, and she has published many pieces on parenting, autism, and living happily, in journals like the New York Times, Time magazine, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and NPR. Senator has appeared as a guest on “The Today Show,” MSNBC, ABC News, PBS, NPR and CNN.
Your words drew me directly into your house. It’s quite lovely to be comforted by the past.