I have to admit, I first listened to this one a few months ago. I couldn’t bring myself to write down what I heard; I didn’t want to make it real. I don’t normally get spooked by stories like this, especially when they’re told by a desert quack. But the house he describes, it is so incredibly familiar to me. It’s a generic description, but idk something about it reminds me of the stories my parents used to tell me about our first house. Maybe that’s the point.
[start of recording]
There is a house, which for nearly two centuries has stood fast while a town grew out from the surrounding farmland. At first it was a monolith, and as the first dwelling erected for miles, it would have commanded the attention of anyone passing through. Between then and now, it has been a witness to so much history, things considered too mundane to record, or to strange to talk about. But now, buttressed between two newcomers, it would hardly get a glance from the delinquents that slithered past. But as you know, here, we don’t shy away from the mundane or the strange. Tonight I would like to share a few personal pieces of that house’s history, as I spent the first dozen years of my life under that roof.
Have you ever had to turn off the last light before running up the stairs? In the dark I would climb through a place of transition, ensconced in the center of the house like a spinal cord. In any other place, if I turned around, there would nothing there. But in this house, I could see the silhouette of something hovering just beyond the inky veil of night.
A bride and groom, set in sepia tone, their stern faces bereft of joy stood vigil from a portrait in an oval frame hung on the wall of the lower landing. The picture itself was unsettling, made more so by the shadows cast from its hefty frame. While they were technically relatives, I could never find myself in them. Still, I was drawn to stare, locking eyes across time from the top of the steps, by a peculiar feature of the image. Many old portraits, perhaps through tricks of light and shadow, tend to convince the eye that they are following your movement around the room. But the occupants of this portrait seemed to focus on a single spot, the landing at the top of the stairs. And if I met their gaze there, the bride would move her lips, as if whispering to me in the dark. As disturbing as it was, I never felt threatened by the picture. But try as I might, I could never hear whatever message she seemed keen to send.
Some nights, driven by nightmares, or visions of specters, or scared by whispers from between the slats of a closet door, I would flee my room and curl up on the ground on the second-floor landing, tucked far enough back to avoid the stare of the bride. I would be too afraid to go back, but I somehow felt comfortable lying on the floor in the dark. From this central location I could hear the house speaking in groans as it settled, and whispering as wind found its way through the cracks in the attic. I don’t know how many nights I spent out there, though it must have gone on for years, but I know what it was that made me stop.
I was playing in the living room, when I heard a floorboard creak. One heavy groan at first, as something shifted its weight above me. I paused; the sound came from my sister’s room, but I was alone in the house. My father had been working outside, but I reasoned he must have slipped up the stairs without me noticing. Surely, I would have heard him? The creaking resumed; but now it was footsteps. Drawn by curiosity, I crept to the bottom of the stairs and paused, and as I did, so did the creaking. I slowly stepped up to the lower landing, right under the portrait, and shakily called out, “Dad?”. As I did, a dark figure walked slowly across the second-floor landing.
It should have been a shadow it was so black, but it occupied space, taking the general form of a person, breaking enough from expectation to occupy the uncanny valley. It had emerged from my sister’s room, and moved silently to the attic door, where it disappeared out of sight. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it wasn’t supposed to be there. I remember feeling like something had grabbed my heart and squeezed, I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to scream.
To my left I heard the sound of my dad coming in from outside. I don’t remember much after that, except my dad stalking room to room with a bat after I told him someone was upstairs. I know he didn’t find a person though. Maybe he saw it too, a solid shadow imitating a human form, or maybe marking where a person once stood.
Years later, long after we had left that house behind, my sister and I spent a night swapping stories about the weird things we experienced there. Being older, we were able to joke about most of it; the portrait, even the shadow figure. But when I told her about sleeping at the top of the stairs, the color left her face, and she asked if I was being serious. I said, “Of course. I didn’t sleep in my own bed as often as I slept on the landing”.
Her eyes wide, her voice shaking, she replied, “Neither did I”.
Stairs are spaces of transition, physical connections between stories. In the case of one old house, they may have connected the present with the stories of the past. You may be unable to swallow the truth of what happened, or you may choose to believe. I find a healthy dose of curious skepticism to be the medicine of choice.
I’ve always wanted to return to that place, knock on the door, and ask who ever lives there now if they’d had any similar experiences. I can’t imagine a quicker way to have a door slammed in your face. And I don’t know if I could work up the courage, not because I’m still afraid of that house, or the staircase, but because if they said no, nothing strange has ever happened here, I would be forced to admit that maybe the house wasn’t the problem.