On Houses, Ghosts, and “Good Bones”

We used to live in a haunted house. You wouldn’t think so looking at it from the outside. It was a modest brick ranch in the suburbs of Chicago, not a Gothic castle or a gabled Victorian. We didn’t have so much as a single tower or hidden room. It was not a particularly old house either. It was built in 1956, during the postwar boom, when suburbs sprouted like mushrooms at the edges of America’s cities. There’s a certain arithmetic to haunted houses, after all. Any sufficiently old house will have contained a certain number of human deaths, and of that number, a certain few will linger as malcontent ghosts. The newer the house, the less chance of a haunting.

No one had ever died in our old house, at least that I was aware of. We hadn’t seen or heard any ghosts in the first four years after we bought the place. Then in February of 2020, shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic forced all of us to restlessly pace our halls for months on end, I began seeing things. I glimpsed shadows moving in empty rooms. I’d wake in the middle of the night and hear someone playing in the basement. It wasn’t my son, Liam; he was fast asleep down the hall. One evening, as we lay in bed, my wife, Ayako, suddenly said, “Who are you? What are you doing here?” to a dark spot in the corner. She said she felt someone else in the room with us. I had nightmares about a black shadow with white eyes watching us as we slept. Strangest of all, some mornings I’d find Liam’s toys, which I’d carefully put away in plastic bins the night before, scattered across the living room floor. Another time, I dreamed I came downstairs to find a little girl with a bob of black hair playing with Liam’s toys. She wore a yellow dress with white ribbons. The kind of dress a girl would wear in 1956.

Our ghost first appeared in the wake of a disaster, albeit a minor one. A couple of weeks earlier, we’d arrived home and found our house inundated with water. An old galvanized steel pipe—original to the house, hidden in the wall behind our upstairs bathroom vanity—had rusted through and snapped during the day. For hours, water gushed out onto the floors, down through the walls, into the basement. The white plaster of the basement ceiling pimpled and bulged and then broke. Water cascaded onto our furniture, Liam’s toys, Ayako’s sewing machine and materials. The carpet, the walls, the furniture. Everything sopping wet.

The water-mitigation company tore the walls open and the ceiling down. They ripped up the beige carpet, installed in the 1980s, exposing the original flooring below: wide, square scarlet tiles. We hadn’t seen the tiles before, but the previous owner, whose parents built the house, had told us about them. She said that after her father cleaned and polished the basement floor, she and her girlhood friends would run and glide across it like an ice rink. Here the tiles were again, after all these decades, the hidden made visible.

When we bought the house, the inspector delivered that old bon mot: It had “good bones.” Now we could see those bones, the struts and beams, in the holes in the wall. I dreaded coming home each day, worried something else had broken or malfunctioned, plunging us into yet another disaster. I knew so little about the functions of the house, the veins of electricity and water that ran unseen inside the walls. What else could go wrong? Meanwhile, the water-mitigation company performed what realtors call a “gut rehab.” The workers peeled pale-yellow wallpaper like strips of dead skin. They carried out coils of wet carpet like monstrous intestines.

We stayed upstairs while the work continued in the basement. At night, I’d go downstairs to use the bathroom since it was the only one with a working sink. It felt like descending through time, into the house’s memory. Upstairs we still had our wall colors, furniture, and pictures. In the basement it was 1956 again. Surely, this was how the house had looked when it was being built. The scarlet tiles. The wall struts and ceiling beams prickled with nails. The exposed web of pipes and wires. The house reverted to its original state.

Our soaked possessions had been piled in the middle of the room, under a big dusty tarp. Not quite a white shroud, but close enough. Sometimes when Ayako and I were brushing our teeth at night, one of Liam’s toys under the tarp would inexplicably come to life and we’d hear it beep or sing an annoying jingle. Like an invisible child was down there with us, playing with the soaked, discarded toys.

I became half-convinced we lived with a ghost and that this ghost had broken our pipe in a fit of mischief. It wasn’t the ghost of the previous owner, who’s alive and well in Florida. More and more, I began to feel like we were haunted by the house itself. It had become unrecognizable to us after the flood. It had become uncanny.

The workers peeled pale-yellow wallpaper like strips of dead skin. They carried out coils of wet carpet like monstrous intestines.

In his famous essay on “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud describes it as “That class of terrifying that leads us back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” In Freud’s German, the word is unheimlich, literally “unhomely.” For Freud, the crucial component of the word home is its meaning as a place both comfortable and private. A home becomes unheimlich when it’s turned inside out, when the hidden becomes visible. “Unsettling” may be a more accurate English translation—when we discover what we thought was set and determined isn’t. When the floor moves beneath our feet.

It’s a familiar sensation to anyone who’s ever moved into a new home. A house takes getting used to. Our furniture and possessions are all familiar, but the space feels wrong. Late last year, after we moved out of our haunted house and into a new one here in Houston, there was a space of two weeks or so when it didn’t feel like home. We didn’t belong to it yet. Every morning I’d wake up and have a brief moment of confusion: “Where am I?” There was no single moment when everything slid into place, when the house became “home.” It simply took time for my mental space to fill in the dimensions of the house, like water trickling into a container.

We think of the house as the physical structure, all those good bones, while the home is the mental space, the mind inside the body. But it’s not just our mental space. A house has its own memory, like those scarlet tiles, or tiny holes in a wall where an unknown picture once hung. Whenever we “make a home,” we’re in conversation with the past. We had to fit our furniture and decorations to the house’s dimensions, of course, but even how we move in our home is preplanned. Good architecture leads you into and through a space. Our old house’s architect likely died years ago, but whenever I walked from the kitchen into the living room and then up the half flight of stairs to our bedroom, I was ushered by their design.

Like any homeowner, we also had to contend with the previous owners’ choices. After we moved in, the kitchen lights and flood-control system had to be replaced, and some DIY wiring they’d done for the sprinklers had to be taken out and completely redone. I quickly tired of words with re- as a prefix: renovate, replace, repair, redo. I felt like a ghost, actually—stuck in an endless time loop.

Time and physics do their work too. We’re always up against a house’s infuriating quirks, all the ways it resists our changes and presence. In our old house, it was the squeaky floorboards upstairs, the subtle warp in the walls of Liam’s room, the way the master bedroom door always stuck. If I neglected the lawn, native prairie plants pushed up through the dirt. It was like they’d been waiting there, just beneath the surface, for me to let my guard down. The present was only a thin layer of topsoil. Realtors sell you these quirks as a house’s “character.” But what happens when that character turns malevolent?

A few months after the flood, we visited a pumpkin patch that had a small haunted-house attraction. Liam ran excitedly to it but stopped abruptly at the front door and refused to go inside. He doesn’t scare easily. He loves Disney World’s Haunted Mansion, but this one proved too small and mean. An animatronic zombie stood shaking and screaming right inside the cramped entryway. Liam and Ayako stayed back, so I went alone through the dark, narrow passages. Motion-activated boogeymen popped out of dim, decaying rooms. Lights flickered. Doors suddenly slammed shut. A grotesque toilet roared with water. Later, Liam asked me which room was the scariest, and I said the bathroom. It reminded me of our own house after the pipe burst, after it had become unheimlich. One of the most frightening things we can imagine is a house having a breakdown, a house gone wrong.

American pop culture’s two most iconic haunted houses, the fictional Hill House and the very real 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York, both frighten us because the houses themselves are the monsters. Shirley Jackson’s haunted mansion is famously “not sane” and has “a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice.” Posters for movie versions of The Amityville Horror inevitably feature the house’s upper windows lit like demonic eyes. Amityville’s supernatural ills supposedly stemmed from the murders of the DeFeo family in the house the year before the Lutz family moved in. That’s the crux of most haunted-house stories—the previous residents won’t leave. Not even death can evict them. It’s what Tim Burton brilliantly captured in Beetlejuice, where a dead couple try to drive out their house’s new owners, who are intent on changing up the place. It’s a supernatural real estate dispute, the living versus the dead, past versus present. Who really owns the place? Who really belongs here?

I quickly tired of words with re- as a prefix: renovate, replace, repair, redo. I felt like a ghost, actually—stuck in an endless time loop.

The other part of Amityville’s staying power in our collective imagination is the ironic juxtaposition in the title, the word horror right next to that innocuous suburban-town name. The suburbs appeal as a safe space, a place families can make their own, unburdened by what came before. A place free of the past. One commentator in 1956 (the year our old house was built) remarked, “Thirty years ago [the average family] somehow had to fit themselves into the house, now the house is planned to fit them.” But history inevitably settles into a place and accumulates like layers of cobwebs and dust. What happens when the original family moves out? How do we fit into mental spaces planned for and made by someone else? Even the most thorough gut rehab can’t drive out all the ghosts.

When I was a kid, my grandfather told me about visiting a haunted castle in Britain. One of the resident spirits is a woman who paces the corridors. She appears short, cut off at the knees, because she’s walking on the castle’s old floor, over which the current one was built. I love that. We can build over the old floors or tear them out, but the dead still walk them. They show us the hidden layers beneath our feet, the architecture of the past. Perhaps the sensation of the uncanny—when we encounter doppelgängers, creepy robots, or ghosts—is the shock of realization that our minds are not so unique or isolated as we like to imagine. We live in, and in accordance with, spaces bounded by the plans and desires of others, most of them long dead. The borders between their mental spaces and ours are ill-defined and in constant dispute.

A few months before we sold our house and moved to Houston, I sensed the presence of our ghost again. The black shadow with white eyes, or the girl in yellow with white ribbons. I didn’t see her, but I told her she was free to stay in the house and to play with Liam’s toys if she liked. But please, no more scaring us and no more pranks. She seemed to agree; the house was quiet after that. It seemed at peace when the repairs finished, with new gray carpet over the scarlet tiles and a freshly painted plaster skin covering all those good bones. I wonder sometimes if the house’s new owners have seen or dreamed of that little girl in the yellow dress. I wonder, too, if any changes we made to the house now vex or delight them. How much of our presence is still there? How much do we haunt the place?

I haven’t encountered any ghosts yet in our house here in Houston, but this one is newer, built in the ’90s—even less mathematical chance of a haunting. But it has its own memories. It flooded during Hurricane Harvey. If we cracked open its skin, what might we find hidden among the metal veins and wooden bones? What unseen design guides our steps, and what character might I encounter in these halls? Whatever’s here, we’ll make room for each other.

We have to live with our ghosts. “You live here, but this house doesn’t belong to you alone,” they tell us. They were here first, after all. They’re home.

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