A.B.: All right. So do you have any questions, or do you just want me to retell my experience?
Interviewer: I think you should retell your experience, and if there’s cultural significance for the particular ghost, context would also be great.
A.B.: Yeah, absolutely. So when I was a kid, we lived in this really old house, about 250 years old. It was a farm, used to be a significantly large farm in Pennsylvania, about 30 to 45 minutes outside of Philadelphia, the Westchester area. The farm had a ton of land originally, and then as the suburbs sprung up, it got smaller and smaller. When my parents left Philly, we moved to this farm, about six acres, which is large for the suburbs. Really the only farm left in that area. But a lot of the original structures were still on our property: the original house, the original barn, milksheds, silos, this really creepy cool structure built with slats to dry corn. We still had all of that, though the property had obviously shrunk.
As a kid, I had a pretty wild imagination and I was terrified of this house. I loved it, there were aspects I loved, but I’m an only child, so I was really the only kid in that space. When friends were over, I’d be happy to go into the super creepy basement, explore all of these parts of the house that were really old and seemingly random. But when I was alone, I was afraid. Things would happen, the house would creak, the house would move, weird noises. I was convinced, because I knew it was an old house, that it was haunted. I’d get the stereotypical chills, a cold draft here and there, doors would open and close. My parents would say it’s just how the house is built, it’s just drafty, it’s just an old house, all of those parental excuses. I did have the hair-pulling experience. I never saw anything, but it was stuff you can explain away, or make sense of however you see fit.
We also had a house cat we brought from Philly, and she hated this house. She never came out, always hiding. She’d eat and dip, that was her game. It got so bad that when I was about nine or ten, she started coming out in the evening. My mom would be on the couch watching the news, the cat would come out of the kitchen, jump on my mom, and literally piss on her. Very odd behavior, she was purposely doing this. We had to put her on Prozac. We moved out when I was eleven or twelve. The cat completely changed.
As a teenager and young adult, we started having conversations about the old house as a family, and my parents admitted that yes, the house was haunted, because a family friend had seen ghosts there. There was the hair-pulling. She would see a little girl. It turned out, unsurprisingly for a very old house, people had died there, because people didn’t go to hospitals, doctors came to you. And there was a man who committed suicide. Perhaps that was the angry old man. He did it in either the basement or the attic. I hated the attic as a kid. Would not go up there alone. To this day, if you took me to that house, I would not go in the attic alone.
This little girl also died somehow in the house. The craziest part, especially on my parents’ part, there is a portrait of her, and we still have it. She’s adorable. I feel some sort of kinship with her now, I can look at it and feel warmth. But as a kid, absolutely not. The eyes follow you, the usual portraiture thing.
It was a really interesting experience to grow up in a space like that. Old houses are so fun for kids, and watching The Haunting of Hill House reminded me so much of my childhood. Obviously it wasn’t frightening in the same way. I didn’t have siblings daring me to go different places, there wasn’t a locked room. But all of these elements of haunting are really attractive to kids because they’re fun. Going somewhere different, somewhere unexplored, that’s what you do as you’re growing up, getting to know your own home.
It’s very weird to experience something like that, have your own relativist take on it, and then have it validated years later, particularly by people like my parents, who are incredibly logical. My mom is one of the most logical people I’ve ever met, and yet she accepts that the house was haunted and happily names it. As a teenager I thought, oh my god, you lied to me. As a young adult, it’s like, of course they did. They weren’t going to say, yeah kid, the house is haunted, good night. But it’s very interesting to see that side of your parents, the ones who have to say this isn’t happening. You see that in Hill House too, the adults experiencing it, having to come to grips with what this is, knowing or thinking they know, being okay admitting one thing but creating a different narrative around it.
Interviewer: Was this house known within the community, was it a thing where people said yes, this place is haunted by this particular ghost? Or was it more of a happenstance sort of thing?
A.B.: We weren’t close with a lot of our neighbors, they didn’t really have any interest in being around us. But in my parents’ social circles, yes, for sure. They just kind of accepted it, that’s the fact of the matter. There wasn’t a lot of drama surrounding it. There was a reason my parents chose to live in an old house. They love old houses, old structures, they feel very comfortable in them, and a lot of their friends do too. They just accepted it. It wasn’t a don’t-go-in-there situation, nobody visits, reclusive. This isn’t Wuthering Heights, this isn’t Nosferatu’s mansion with peasants along the way saying don’t go in there.
Interviewer: Okay, yeah, thank you for telling me that. I think that’s going to be a very interesting thing to write about for your submission.
A.B.: Honestly. What I’ve thought about a lot as an adult, especially with what I’m writing about, is how rural spaces exist within the encroaching of suburban development. To me, it’s really fascinating that this space persisted among stucco suburban homes. I’ve thought about the ghosts with empathy, because yeah, they lived and existed here in a very different fashion than we did. They didn’t have neighbors calling to complain about farm animals, they just had them, and it wasn’t an issue.
Interviewer: Right.
A.B.: It’s really interesting to think about in terms of how Pennsylvania exists, particularly southeastern Pennsylvania, where you can drive 20 minutes out of Philly or 20 minutes out of Westchester in any direction and be in a completely different space, simply because of how development has taken over. I’m sure the same can be said of a lot of other purple states, of smaller older cities that haven’t really expanded. Not the massive cities like Houston or New York. Those states with smaller, older cities that haven’t expanded as much.
Context: This story was told to the Interviewer by his high school English teacher in early April. This occurred to her when she was growing up in rural Pennsylvania with the area around them being known to be haunted.
Their Thoughts: This tale illustrates a ghostly take on the classic haunted childhood home situation often portrayed in pop culture. A.B had not fully reckoned with the extent of the haunting until her adulthood due to being constantly told that it was just her overactive imagination by her parents. Her encounters are unique because she never fully saw the ghost but experienced the effects of its haunting regularly. She fully believes in being haunted but does not believe there was any malice behind it.The cat being afraid of the attic is a common motif across ghost stories, with animals seeming to have a more attuned sense of haunting when compared to people.
Thoughts: I think this is an incredibly interesting story. The way it was described was a newer interpretation to me; I always thought of ghosts having an elaborate story and some kind of unfinished business. But here, the ghost seemed to just exist within the house like any normal person would.