A Ghost's House

The places we’ve haunted don’t forget us. Maybe they even miss us.

photo by Tonya Morton

I used to wonder if that house was haunted. I would think I saw movement, just a suggestion of a dark blur before I turned my head. Some nights I felt a sudden panic as I walked up the stairs to the bedroom. There was just a hint of a presence behind me. I felt a tightening in my shoulders. A clench in my chest. I tried to walk slowly up the stairs like an adult who isn’t afraid of the dark. But sometimes I gave in. I’d feel that rush of panic and I’d race up the steps, holding my breath, until I was safely in the lamplight of the bedroom. 

It wasn’t a big house, but I was always conscious, when I was in one room, of the volume of the empty rooms around me. Upstairs, I was aware of the ceiling fan turning in the living room below me. The front door (did I lock it? Had I checked?) and the thin metal latch on the back door. Any whistling around the windows. Any creak in the settling old floors. I almost never went down to the basement, with its thick spider webs and damp concrete walls. But I always knew it was there, below everything else. Empty, hopefully. There was always the chance it wasn’t empty. The old house, with its warped and faded window glass and its crumbled plaster walls, inevitably suggested the presence of something that may or may not have been visible. 

My then-future husband and I moved into that house in Kansas in 2010. We were married in 2011. Sometime not much later, we were across the street with our neighbors for the Fourth of July, eating hot dogs in their backyard, when Jana, my neighbor Terry’s daughter, looked steadily at the two of us and said, “You know that house is haunted, right?”

Terry laughed across the patio table. “Not really,” she reassured us. “It’s just something we say.”

“The White Lady, though.” This was Skylar, Jana’s twelve-year-old daughter. “I saw her in the window,” she said.

“No, you didn’t.” Terry again. “That was just your mother.” She gave Jana a pointed look. 

“Okay,” Jana admitted. “Yes, that was me. Sorry, Skylar.” She flicked the ashes from her cigarette onto the brick patio. “We’d been talking about the White Lady and that house being haunted for years. It seemed like a funny idea to go over there in a white dress one Halloween and really scare the bejesus out of the kids.”

Skylar looked at her mother and her grandmother, bemused. “So it isn’t haunted?” she asked. 

“No,” agreed Terry. 

“Hell yes, it is,” Jana maintained. “I mean, seriously. Just look at it.” 

We all turned to look across the street. 

She had a point. Just look at it. 

It could be so quiet in that house. Quiet as a grave. There were those terrible days when it felt like I was living in a museum. Like some long-closed museum to something completely unimportant. Those days, I sat in the living room and watched the dust blow in around the doors and windows. It collected on the lampshades. On the tops of all the books. An occasional black spider darted out from behind the living room paneling and then retreated again, but otherwise, no one would be visiting. No one would be calling. If someone did call, I wouldn’t answer. I wouldn’t go to the grocery store or wave at my neighbors. Not when it was that kind of quiet. 

If I had tried to speak to anyone, the sound of my voice would have given me away. So I didn’t talk. Not on the quiet days while my husband was asleep upstairs. He would sleep away the whole day. Often two whole days and two whole nights, before he finally creaked slowly down the staircase from the bedroom, then along the hallway, and passed through the living room on his way to the kitchen or his office. He needed to come through the living room to get anywhere. And I was usually there, sitting just where he had left me, in my chair by the window.

As he passed, I waited silently, invisibly. I didn’t breathe until he was gone. I sat and waited to see, after he had typed something on his computer or eaten something out the fridge, whether he would just turn back around and go up the steps to be with his pills and the bed again; or whether he would come back into the living room to make some dark announcement to me; or whether he would finally, without any preamble, just begin to live his life again, eating at the table, watching the television, and walking in and out of the rooms as though I wasn’t there at all. At that point, it would only be a day. Possibly two days before he would look at me again, unhappily, as though I were as unwelcome as the spiders darting out from behind the paneling, and possibly he would say “yes” or “no” to me if I asked a question. And even longer, another day or two days, until he would allow me to be touched or hugged or fully a part of his life again. 

It happened often enough that I had a mantra for those long, silent days. “I’m here again,” I said to myself. “I’m here again,” I wrote in my journal. Padding noiselessly through the dark house. Bringing in the mail and paying bills and staying on top of whatever work I could accomplish while my mind went over the same words over and over. “How did this happen again? How did I get here again?”

If I hadn’t spoken at the wrong moment. If I hadn’t forgotten whatever had been forgotten. If I hadn’t argued. If only I could learn not to make mistakes, then this wouldn’t keep happening.

Sometimes, when I could hear the loud rumble of his sleep above me, and I knew he wouldn’t hear me moving around, I went into the kitchen and sat against the cabinets. I preferred the lower corner to the left of the sink, where the wood of the cabinet doors behind me was smooth against my shoulders. It was solid against my back. It was almost like being held, a little bit. Or else I would clean the kitchen, top to bottom. I would wipe down the top of the refrigerator with vinegar and then wipe down the sink with bleach, then all the countertops and the stovetop, and finally run a wet mop over the floor until the whole room smelled like cleaning chemicals. And I would diffuse lemon oil in my diffuser and stand at the kitchen sink, looking out onto the garden in the side yard, just thinking about things. I would think about time passing.

When it was late, and I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, I went up in the dark and took my place on the far side of the bed. I knew he couldn’t tell whether I was there or not.

It’s odd, but I felt no fear of ghosts on those nights. Not even while I was walking up the steps. Not even in the total darkness, with the blackout curtains pulled tight over the bedroom windows, and no light on in the whole house. I lay awake for hours, conscious of the volume of the whole house around me in a different way. It was my own house on those nights. Just mine. I was the only one awake to care about it. It was my house and I was its ghost. 

I don’t like to remember this part of the story. The part where I dithered in a silent house for days, for years. The decade in which I couldn’t see how the door opened, and that there was an entire world outside the walls of that house. 

I would prefer to think about the months after I finally left, and all the things I have now—my long fearless walks in the city, feeling like I can navigate as well as anyone. Learning to be an equal partner with someone for the first time. A new insistence on saying what I need and answering to my own needs. I like to think of the friendships I’ve nurtured, and all the risks I have taken, in the two and a half years since I left Kansas. I prefer to think about the future. A big world. I will never again let my world be a small world. 

But it was inevitable that I would go back to that house. 

He died on a Sunday in March. He was found on Monday. On Tuesday, I answered a call from a strange Kansas phone number, and then I began to pack my things into the car for the long drive. 

Paul and I had been on vacation in Florida for a week beforehand. It had taken me a whole week to release the tensions I’d carried down from New York, all my worries about work. It took a week for me to stop thinking I was needed elsewhere. 

On the day my ex-husband died, Paul and I took the dog for a walk. I went to the gym and ran two miles. I answered work emails and we went on another dog walk, and I made a list of restaurants in Florida where I wanted to eat. I began to pack the box I wanted to ship back before my flight the next week. And, on that particular day, I made a decision. After a week of feeling tense and unsettled, and worrying I was letting everyone down, I decided to truly let myself be on vacation. To give myself that grace.

At dusk that night, I sat on the beach with Paul and our dog Santo, just a few feet from the surf. We looked out over the water at the big cruise ships and the tanker ships floating along the horizon. That evening, I let myself be happy. I took every lesson from the meditations I’d been forcing myself to listen to all week. I let all the anxious thoughts glide past like clouds in the sky, watching them like they were something outside myself. I went to bed that night in the little rented cottage in Fort Lauderdale and listened to another meditation. After reading another chapter of the book I was reading, I fell asleep to the hum of the air-conditioner, safe in bed next to Paul, with Santo under the covers, pressed warmly against my leg. 

I had no premonitions. No visions. I woke up and spent the whole next day in the sunlight. We found a new bookstore in Dania Beach. I ate a really great sandwich. I went to bed early and I woke up once, in the middle of the night, to see that I’d missed a phone call from an unknown Kansas phone number. No voicemail. I fell asleep again with no sense of what might have happened 1500 miles away. 

We drove for two and a half days. On Friday, I met my ex-husband’s friend Dave at the house in Kansas. He was the only person I knew for sure was having a worse week than I was. He told me, before he unlocked the door, that the scene had been cleaned up. I didn’t need to worry about what I would find inside. He opened the door and brought me in. And immediately I put a hand over my nose.

“The smell,” I said. “It’s the same smell.” which must have sounded strange. But, God, I used to fight against the musty air in that house. I had an arsenal of sprays and candles. I used to strategically open and close all the windows throughout the day. I did everything I could to push out that heavy smell. But now it was like the place had been shut up for years, not just a few days. The smell was overwhelming. And it was so dark. 

We did only what we needed to do. I went briefly into the kitchen and noted the crusted-over dishes in the sink, the arrangement of empty liquor bottles on the countertop. The single shot glass. I followed Dave to the room that had been my office, which now held a twin bed. A sleeping bag. There were clothes on the floor. More clothes thrown over an empty chair. I glanced once toward the stairs that led up to our old bedroom, then felt sorry for doing it. I saw the memory of the previous Monday night fall over Dave’s face. 

I didn’t need to go up the stairs yet. Not on that first day, when the atmosphere inside was still so dark and airless. We gathered the papers he’d left on the table and Dave handed me a set of keys. I looked at them, and thought briefly how strange this all was, before putting them into my purse.

I couldn’t linger at the house. I drove three blocks to the funeral home to make preparations. Then I went another few blocks to the Sheriff’s office and I gave him permission to destroy the gun. 

The next day, Saturday, I went back with Paul. It was different to walk into the house for the second time. Already the atmosphere had dissipated slightly, just from my being there the day before. I began by cleaning the dishes in the sink and throwing out the stained Tupperware containers on his drying rack. I walked through the ground floor with black garbage bags and threw in dirty clothes, empty bottles, the stray food wrappers on the floor and the rotting contents of the refrigerator. 

I finally realized why it felt so dark when I walked in. At some point in the last two years, he had nailed an old gray blanket over the long south-facing window in the front door. I pulled out the nails, and removed the blanket, and then I went around opening all the window blinds. Light returned to the living room. It felt better, but now it was even more apparent that the rugs hadn’t been vacuumed. None of the tables or bookshelves had been dusted. In how long? I didn’t like to think.

I tried my best not to picture what the last two years had been like in this house. I didn’t want to see the ghost of those years. I knew, when I tried to fall asleep that night, it would descend on me again—the confused fog. All the questions I didn’t want answered. For now, I didn’t want to think. It was easier to work.

We spent the day cleaning and sorting. We began to figure out how we would pack up and dispose of everything the will had instructed me to dispose of. I took pictures of things for his family in Kentucky, so they could tell me what they wanted. I took pictures of his bookshelves. I stood in the living room, dividing tasks in my mind. There were only a few things I could do before the will was accepted by the court. Some tasks were for now. Most were for later.

I started up each of the vehicles and, while I waited for the engines to settle, I was forced to rest for a while. I sat in the driver’s seat of one of the cars and I looked at the house. My old house, which I thought I’d left for the last time, two and a half years earlier. We don’t always get to choose our last times. 

Maybe the places we’ve haunted don’t forget us. Maybe they even miss us. It felt like this house had missed me. I hadn’t expected it to feel so personal, all the weeds taking over the garden. The unfinished paint job on the east wall. The broken wood siding on one of the dormers where it looked like a squirrel or pack rat had tried to get in. The lawn was filled with scraggly, invasive trees that needed to be knocked down. There were dandelions growing between the concrete slabs of the wide, covered front porch. The place had never looked so haunted. 

I walked from one car to the other, turning off the engines. I knew the cars would be sitting in place for at least another month while the probate process began, and I debated whether it was worth my time to worry about them being unused for that long. For two years, these old cars hadn’t been my problem. In a few months, they wouldn’t be again. There are better things to worry about.  

I walked back up to the house and stopped on the front porch. After a minute, Paul came out the door, carrying out another garbage bag.

“You doing okay?” He asked. 

“Yeah,” I said. He had caught me staring at the porch swing. “I was remembering one night, a long time ago,” I told him. “I was sitting out here in the summer while there was a baseball game playing on the TV inside.”

I didn’t know why that memory had surfaced all of a sudden. I looked away, out toward the yard.  “Anyway, it was nice.” 

“It sounds nice.”  

 He threw the garbage bag out into the can and came back up to the porch. 

“You know,” he said, “no matter what happened, this was a good house. You put a lot into it over the years.”

I nodded.

I hadn’t known until that moment how much I’d wanted him to say that. I had put so much into this house. And it was a good house. It really was. It had been my only company on so many quiet days. 

If I opened all the windows, I thought. If I just opened up the whole place, so that the air could push all the old memories out of the windows and the doors, and finally bring in something fresh. Maybe that would be the kindest thing I could do. 

“I’m going to open up some windows,” I said to Paul. He nodded and waited for me to finish. “Then I think it’s time to go upstairs.” 

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Tonya Morton is, among other things, the publisher of Juke.

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