Inside the haunted house

I quit my job this summer. It was one of many attempts to feel like we could start over. I took a new job working as an assistant in a historic mansion. The mansion is so big and sprawling that it’s hard to keep track of whether or not my co-workers are still here, if there’s someone upstairs or if they’ve already left. Sometimes I lift my head and wonder if I’m alone in this house. Or if there’s someone else here.

In what might be a coincidence, I’m working on a novel about a haunted house. I’ve been working on it off and on for a few years, but this is the first year it’s the only creative project I’m focused on. I’ve always loved haunted house books, and for years now I’ve been reading everything gothic and spooky I can get my hands on. So you might say I’m easily persuaded, when it comes to things like this.

Things move in the house. A ceramic horseshoe on the mantle is upside down one morning, even though there’s no overnight cleaning crew.

There’s things that click and shift in the house, even when I know I’m the only person there, things that might be the security system switching on, or a pipe creaking, but it’s hard to be sure. 

Every time the motion sensors pick up movement in the backyard, I get a notification from the security system. When I tap it, it brings up a live feed of the backyard, but there is no one there. I watch it for a few seconds, wondering.

For the most part, I like the excitement of a vaguely spooky workplace. My novel keeps coming back to the idea of ghosts and time travel — if we believe that time is more like a circle than a line, then what does it really mean to be dead, anyway? It was a question I liked asking, years ago when I started the book, and it’s a question that hovers differently now, just at my shoulder, every time I put another word into the manuscript. What happens to the ones who are gone? Is it possible they’re still close enough to hear?

My office looks directly out onto the wraparound porch, onto a historic bench swing that shifts in the wind like an invisible someone is rocking themselves in it. At first, it’s one of those vaguely creepy things that I enjoy getting a little scared over: ooohhh, who’s swinging in the empty swing? On my second week, as we’re leaving for the day, a co-worker points at the bench and says, “You know, that’s from the original construction. It actually converts into a crib.” 

There’s a line from Haunting of Hill House when the protagonist approaches the house she’s been traveling to for the entire first chapter, the house she thought she wanted to get into more than anything, when suddenly:

“Why am I here? She thought helplessly and all at once; why am I here?”

It’s a line that’s stuck with me. It comes back to me a lot, sometimes when I least expect it. Why am I here? Helplessly and all at once. 

What is this part of me that felt convinced I could move myself further from grief by changing my job, my hair, my shoes? That already expects to have a clean, finished story about what I’ve been through? I think it is the part that is convinced I can somehow skip this stage, fast forward to where I’m strong and healed enough to look at the porch crib without crying, that thinks the way to get there faster is by forcing myself to look now, again and again, to convince myself I can handle it. The truth is, I can’t handle it. The truth is, I am still stuck in a haunted house, all these months later. People speak to me like I am a normal person and maybe I even still look like one when I am nodding and smiling and I am somehow still behind glass, looking out into the yard like a ghost.

Sometimes I think that it’s just the pace of healing — you can’t control how long it takes. It moves in its own time. 

Other times I wonder if I’m choosing to stay in the house. If I’m torturing myself. If I’ve become familiar with sadness and am now seeking comfort from it.

Or am I exploring the place that I’ve found myself, trying to understand it?

I’m not sure how to tell the difference, most days. Some days I open the window at work and am shocked by the cold, fresh air. Some days I’m seized with questions I can’t answer. Some days I stop listening for ghosts, put my coat on, and go home.