I’ve never had patience for ghosts—the TV kind, the séance kind, the cold-spot theatrics. My upbringing doesn’t lean that way, and my mind prefers a world with hinges. Still, the most accurate way to describe my childhood home is the sentence I’ve spent a lifetime trying not to use: I grew up in a haunted house.
We arrived when I was five. A post-war box on two lots, built board by board by a man named Stotts. The house was modest—two bedrooms, one bath—but to a child who’d lived under upstairs neighbors, it felt like a cathedral with grass. A laundry room with an interior window opening into the dining room only made it stranger, as if two sets of plans had been shuffled together without comment.
A month after moving in, Stotts returned. I remember him clearly, in the way memory sharpens certain figures unfairly: the fedora, the tired good manners, the slight lean forward as if the world had pushed him one step beyond balance. He offered to buy the house back—said he’d pay extra. My mother refused; she didn’t trust the universe enough to gamble twice. I watched him walk to his car, open the passenger door, and pull a bottle of whiskey from the glove compartment. He handed it to my father, who drank from it like a man in a black-and-white movie. They shook hands. Stotts drove off.
The next morning his name was in the paper. Suicide. Head wound. The man who built our house chose not to live anywhere else.
That was the beginning.
Neighbors now mentioned a man in a fedora walking our backyard late at night. They said it in the soft voice people use to deliver unwelcome news. My mother rejected the idea, but she stopped sitting down. She occupied the spot in front of the central gas heater, feet planted, back straight. Years later she admitted the reason: from that position she could see every doorway. She spent eleven years in that stance—half sentinel, half prisoner.
My own education in strangeness began when I was eight. One night my father was working the graveyard shift. I woke to find my mother sitting in my brother’s bed, holding his hand. The two of them stared at different windows like they were guarding separate borders. When I asked what they were doing, I was shushed.
What I wasn’t told until years later was this: my brother heard it first. He looked out the window and saw nothing. Then he brought my mother in, and she looked out and saw nothing. Only then did they wake me. And then the footsteps started again.
Slow, deliberate, unmistakably human. They walked the length of the new concrete path outside my window, paused, and then the gate latch clicked. The gate swung open. The steps continued beneath my brother’s window. Then the gate slammed shut, the bolt dropping into the drilled hole with a sound that hit the frame of the house like a tuning fork. And then the sequence repeated. And repeated. For twenty minutes.
I asked why my father was pacing outside. My mother said, without turning her head, “He’s at work.” My brother added, “Don’t look. If he sees you…” That unfinished warning was worse than anything I could have seen.
Other oddities followed. Once, waiting for a friend, I tried to open the front door and found it immovable. Not locked. Not stuck. Simply refusing. The back door did the same. By the time I reached the rear of the house I was running without knowing why. In the end I climbed out a porch window because it was the only thing that would yield. When I returned moments later, both doors opened as if nothing had happened. My friend refused to come inside again.
The last incident was my brother’s. We came home from a trip to find the my brother sitting on the front porch, and the kitchen changed. Above the stove the ceiling paint had blistered, heat-warped into small, puckered blisters—though the burners were off. Across the kitchen, on the pull-out cutting board, sat a new loaf of Wonder Bread. The wrapper had been shredded cleanly from top to bottom. And through the naked loaf, driven straight through from end to end, was our kitchen broom.
There was a halfhearted attempt to blame my brother, but he was adamant that it was that way when he came home. We threw away the bread, kept the broom, and said very little. He had arrived earlier, seen the blistered paint and the impaled bread, and left the house to sit on the porch. He just waited until Mom and Dad were home.
We moved a year later. None of us minded. Even my father packed quickly. I still don’t believe in ghosts. But I believe in memory, and in the things a house can hold long after the person who built it lets go.
