Houses, Haunted

Among my childhood drawings there's a crayon sign: HAUNTED HOUSE SQUEAKY DOOR!!  I had turned my bedroom—or maybe it was a room in our basement, the memory is hazy—into a spookhouse. Or maybe the sign was for one of the elaborate Halloween parties my mother put together for my friends. That holiday loomed large in our house, even more than Christmas. My parents designed and sewed extravagant costumes for my sister and me (every year we won "Best of" prizes in Hendy Avenue Elementary School). On Halloween my mother set out a buffet of candy dishes in our living room, at least a dozen, heaped with Zagnut bars and such, inviting trick-or-treaters into our home to fill their plastic pumpkins; there would be lines of kids at the door.

One of my fondest memories is of my kindergarten self walking down the street with my family in Golden Glow, a tiny riverfront hamlet outside Elmira, NY. In my mind the scene of candle-lit jack-o-lanterns on porches has morphed, romanticizing over the years; I think I probably conflate it with some blend of images from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, which first aired when I was 3 (my father was a Charles Schultz fanboy so he made sure we all watched it), and Sargent's painting "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose."

My favorite board game as a little kid was Green Ghost (later replaced with Masterpiece). Old Black Witch, a favorite book. And my favorite destination was the Eldridge Park Spookhouse with its jerky-jerky two-seater carts zipping through a pitch-black building with skeletons, caged apes, and speeding trains suddenly appearing around corners. A sign that yelled DUCK!, followed by a quack.

A half-century later I was back in my childhood house where my father, showing early signs of dementia, had barricaded himself for nearly two years, preventing any to enter save for a single plumber to enter the basement to fix the ancient boiler or attend to broken pipes. When I finally forced my way in I found the rooms filled with years' worth of garbage: hundreds, literally, of McDonald's wrappers; heaps of moldy clothes; drifts of shredded newspapers; damaged photo albums; dog filth; clouds and clouds of gnats; thick draperies of cobwebs. Even then I could not get my father to relocate, nor did I have any legal recourse to do so; that only happened when he walked away from a car accident and landed in the hospital, triggering the steps necessary to get him into assisted care. Cleaning out that house afterwards took months. They found a dead squirrel beneath one of the couches he used to sleep on.

My mother grew up in her own, far scarier haunted house in Penn Yan, NY. As a toddler and up through high school she was subjected to the most fantastical accounts of abuse at the hands of my mentally ill grandmother, memories my mother would repress until suffering a breakdown and subsequent hospitalization in her fifties, a tortured account I explore in detail in one of my books.

The haunted house is a glaringly obvious metaphor for the psyche, the mind an unending Sarah Winchester home filled with more doors that one can ever open. Lately I find it an apt metaphor as well for this country, where millions of next-door neighbors take giddy pride in displaying enthusiasm for a host of utterly sick cruelties.

These quick images weren't explicitly in response to any of the above thoughts. But the trope has stuck with me as a fertile site of strange paradoxes, and will likely nose its way into future work.