I was seven when we moved into a haunted house. It wasn’t your obvious ghosts screaming in your face sort of haunting. These were the kind of ghosts that lurked. They sighed heavily in the wardrobe, they slid through the pipes and rattled the radiators against the walls. They sobbed on full moons. I got the distinct impression that they were bored.
On the day of the move I sat on the edge of my old bed and refused to leave. We lived in a perfectly normal bungalow, on a perfectly normal road. There were net curtains at the windows that my mother liked to twitch. There was a holiday camp with a freezing cold pool across the street that I learned to swim in. Betty, our neighbour, cooked me hot sausage rolls and let me eat them sitting on her lap whilst she raced up and down the driveway in her wheelchair. A willow tree wept consistently in the front yard. “I want to stay here.” I told my mother. I didn’t want to move into the higgledy piggledy house with its two sets of wobbly stairs and ghosts slithering about in the dark. I had visited the house once and that was enough to figure out the haunting problem. There was no need to go back.
“You have a very vivid imagination Claire. There are no such things as ghosts.” My mother lied, taking my hand in hers. Her skin, even then, felt as thin as the tracing paper we used to press over picture books in class.
To be fair, I wasn’t the most reliable of children. I was convinced that Mr. Toad and Badger climbed out of my Wind in the Willows posters and got into bed with me at night. I told my parents that someone else must have written my name in a thick wax crayon on the bedroom wall. I ate the dust that gathered on the bottom of my shoes because it tasted like school. I deliberately put sand in my sandwiches at the beach and had a habit of licking my knees in public. “But they taste delicious.” I told my mum after being scolded that it wasn’t socially acceptable to lick any parts of one’s own body in company. They only just tolerated it from the dog.
Our new haunted home was once a working farmhouse. It was built in the 1700’s, which should have been enough information to tell my parents it was bound to have a ghost or two. My bedroom was in the oldest part of the house, sandwiched between two horrible 1960’s extensions covered in pebble dash. My aunt’s first response was to say to my mother, “Darling, It looks like someone threw up all over it.” Then she made the sign of the cross before stepping over the threshold. My bedroom had a door on either side and was often used as a cut through to get to wherever anybody in the house was going. I got used to guests or family members wafting through unannounced, on their way to a place which I was never deemed important enough to be told. Next to the left door of my bedroom was a narrow set of stairs. Each one was so steep, it felt like a drop into the abyss. The staircase was enclosed on both sides by brown and white embroidered wallpaper that was so knobbly with damp, it looked like tree roots were growing underneath it. The stairs led down directly to another door, that opened up into a living room, that despite a new gas fire, never got warm. At the top of the stairs there was a tiny bathroom which contained a child’s sink and toilet. My first duty on arrival was to tell my parents that I had found a vampire’s tooth at the bottom of the toilet bowl and that we shouldn’t bother to unpack.
For years I heard scurrying and scratching in the attic above my bedroom. My mother sent my father up the ladder to reassure me there was nothing there. I was confident, however, that up there lived a wafer thin urchin from the olden days and it was scrambling to get out. “It won’t show itself in the daylight.” I told my dad. “You need to go up there in the dark!” My sister dragged her mattress into my room on nights when the north wind howled so hard through her window that he pressed his face against the glass. The pipes clanged at the most indecent of hours, like prisoners rattling their chains at us. It was as if something was always trying to break free in that house.
There was the ghost that liked to breathe in my sisters wardrobe. It huffed and puffed and scared her friends. Then there was the sound of a baby crying in one of the bricked up walls. My grandmother heard it when she came to babysit. She would climb the stairs and hunt the rooms, following the wail of a phantom child. When my parents knocked through that wall and built another bathroom, it stopped. It was probably put off by the plush eighties mink carpet, green bidet and garish tiles. “How do you get rid of a ghost?” My aunt used to joke. “Scare it away with a mint coloured bathroom suite and put pink flamingo tiles on the wall.”
It wasn’t until we’d been living in the house for six months that Peggy, our neighbour, let slip that our house was built on top of a Roman burial plot. I don’t know how my parents could have possibly overlooked this vital piece of information. I felt for sure then that we would leave, but we did not. Instead, my father bought me a second hand metal detector and told me there must be treasures to be found. So, I spent most of my days in the wild garden, wearing headphones, listening out for the sound of gold. I got a plastic tub, borrowed from one of my mother’s Tupperware parties and I filled it with treasures I had found. My finder’s hoard included shards of amber, bits of pottery with lilacs etched on them, a soldiers button with a lion’s face on it, bronze coins that felt heavy and important in my hands. I found a glass eye once; it’s sea green iris glinted up at me from the ground.
I liked the garden. I liked the porcelain owl that the previous owners left. I liked the big apple trees and the little dens to hide in. I liked the hill we were allowed to roll down. I even liked the old covered well with the crack at the top. I used to lay on my tummy, close one eye and squint down it. My mother put a stop to that after I told her that children lived down there. I informed her that I’d seen their small mouths stuffed with silt and their silvery fingers clawing out of the dirt.
When my father dug up a piece of the garden to build a pond, we found the remains of a horse. Its rib cage clung to the mud and its skull was full of sand and loam. My dad and his friend laid out the huge skeleton, piece by piece on the grass. There was an old stable on the grounds with a door that banged, even though we always kept it locked. We thought it must’ve been the wind. After we found the horse, I wondered if it was its spirit pushing its hooves against the stable door desperate to find its bones.
In the end I grew to love that house. Old friends still say there was something off about it and, when I mention it, they give a little shudder. For me though, it's the only place that’s ever truly felt like home. I lived in that house for fourteen years, its the longest time I’ve ever lived anywhere. My mother was there for over thirty. My father left long before either of us did. I asked my mum recently if she ever thinks about that house. “All the time.” she said. “I dream of it nearly every night.” I confessed that I did too. “Was it haunted?” I asked.
She hesitated on the phone then said,
“My darling girl, of course it was.”
*You might be surprised to find me in your inbox as I have not written on my Substack page for a few months. I have been lurking and reading lots of wonderful writers on here. I have left the Romance novel writing game behind and decided to focus on what I love to write. I plan (!) to write on here weekly whilst I work on my novel about a girl, the sea and her lost mother. I have a few things I plan to post about the creative process as well as sharing what I’m reading and more lyrical pieces and short stories. I’d love it if you stayed around:)
Thanks, Claire, nice piece. I lived my first eleven years in an old, drafty house that I dreamt about for most of my life. By the way, have you read "The Beckoning Fairground" by Oliver Onions? Best haunted house story ever.