Houses, Haunted

Among my childhood drawings there's a crayon sign: HAUNTED HOUSE SQUEAKY DOOR!!  As a kid I’d turned my bedroom into a spookhouse. (Or maybe the sign was for one of the elaborate Halloween parties my mother put together for my friends; it was a long time ago.) That holiday loomed large in our family, as much as if not more than Christmas. My parents designed and sewed extravagant costumes for my sister and me (each year we won "Best of" prizes in Hendy Avenue Elementary School). On Halloween my mother set out an elaborate buffet of candy dishes in our dining room, 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 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 back then was Green Ghost (later replaced with Masterpiece); Old Black Witch my favorite book; and my favorite destination the Eldridge Park Spookhouse with its herky-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. All quite tame by today's standards.

A half-century later I found myself back in my childhood house where my father, showing early signs of dementia, had barricaded himself for nearly two years. My mother was in a nursing home by then, and my father wouldn’t let me enter the house. When I finally forced my way in, I found the rooms filled with two 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; cobweb draperies. 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 under 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 an obvious metaphor for the psyche, the mind an unending Sarah Winchester house filled with more doors that one can ever open. An apt metaphor as well for this country, where millions of “patriots” take giddy pride in displaying enthusiasm for a host of utterly sick cruelties.

• handmade gesso courtesy JoMichelle Piper