an eerie light shimmers,
casting the cemetery aglow,
the wind throws shadows,
threading a ripple of shivers
below the chapel's brick facade,
lies a small, tidy room;
light gone-- now cast in gloom
surrounded by the damp of sod
hear the creak of old doors,
and the whispers of old souls,
the basement cold beneath the floor,
the secrets lost beneath the dust
I’m a bit late for the Halloween season, but I always feel that there is something special and spooky about this time of the year. Last week, my friend and I took a haunted trolley tour of a nearby city that included at least three cemeteries and tales of many unsolved murders and other local mysteries. The adventure had me wondering about the impression that we get of certain places and how some places or people leave certain feelings or energies behind. I’m not entirely sure that I believe a place can be “haunted”, but then again, I have almost certainly lived in one haunted house.
It was the place I lived with three other friends my last year in college. It was a little white house we aptly dubbed “Casa Blanca”, and it had three small bedrooms upstairs and one larger bedroom downstairs. I had the lone downstairs bedroom, and I would regularly have bizarre dreams about walking down the stairs to the basement as the walls around me were slowly covered with creeping, spiderlike black tendrils. I would always startle awake, and it didn’t help that the water heater in the basement made all kinds of eerie noises, and that there were at least a handful of mice that managed to sneak into and around the house, scurrying along the edges of walls and making weird creeping little noises. I’d wake up and hear these noises and not be able to fall back asleep. In one dream, I was sitting in a rocking chair in the living room of the Casa Blanca, talking to a young man; I couldn’t hear what he said, but then the black tendrils again crept up the wall and even though he was now shouting, I still couldn’t hear. I woke up feeling watched and confused, as though I’d forgotten about something important. I checked that my door was locked before burrowing deep under the blankets.
One time, our landlord told us that he’d bought that house from an old man, the original owner. Apparently, the old man (when he was much younger) had bought the supplies for the house in a Sears Roebuck catalogue, back in the day when that was something you could do. He built the house himself and lived there his entire life. He also had a nasty habit of smoking multiple packs of cigarettes per day. Apparently, when our landlord met the man, he was nearly blind and spent his days grumpily chain-smoking and stuffing cigarette butts into the vents. He’d mostly holed up in a couple rooms on the first floor (including my room), which had dark marks all along the walls from all the smoke.
It seemed that some remnant of the old man’s energy was still at Casa Blanca. I didn’t understand it, and it didn’t feel particularly terrifying; it was just…kind of a sad feeling, I guess. I would feel oddly uneasily sometimes, especially at night, and I was glad when we eventually moved out.
I’ve felt this similar, “off” sort of feeling in other locations over the years, most recently on the haunted trolley tour. We had special permission to enter the basement of this old church in the middle of a cemetery. The basement room held multiple “berths” where coffins used to sit during the winter until the ground thawed enough to bury them. Though that hadn’t been common practice for a few generations now (the old “elevator” contraption in the center of the room to raise and lower the coffins bore its last inspection sheet, dated 1967), there was still a weird energy down there, and I was among the first to go back upstairs. It felt…overwhelming, I guess is the best way to put it. Isn’t is odd how we’re drawn to these sorts of things while also, simultaneously, freaked out? I guess that’s what keeps the horror movie industry (and things like the haunted trolley tour!) in business.
