Home is Where the Hauntings Are

CW: Contains mentions of child death.

For most people, buying a haunted Victorian manor in the middle of nowhere would be a bad idea. These people were probably right, but as Teresa looked up at the house, breathing in thick air that smelled like rain, she knew she’d made the right choice.

Actually, she knew on the house tour when the realtor had announced, with great reluctance, that the house was known for, “Spiritual activity.” She’d said it in a whisper, as if she hoped Teresa wouldn’t catch it. However, if she hadn’t heard the realtor’s words, she absolutely heard a door slam shut on the floor above them, right on cue. Teresa made an offer on the spot.

Her mother had been unamused. She begged Teresa to reconsider moving back home, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She’d gone from living at home, to a college dorm, to with a serious boyfriend, to with her future ex-husband. Teresa had never lived on her own, and being fresh off of a divorce, she was ready for some time alone.

She’d purchased the house with her divorce settlement. She got half the money. Eric got their beagle, Dexter. Teresa would rather have had the dog.

Woodward Manor sat against the backdrop of a cool gray sky, making the green siding of the house look sickly, like the skin of a zombie. It was two stories tall with a tower on one side, and a curved wraparound porch that she could already imagine sitting on with a cup of tea, listening to the pitter patter of rain. The houses in this area were so far apart that from where she stood on the walkway she could only see the faint outlines of houses in the distance, covered in a filter of fog.

While the exterior of the house was ill looking, the inside was doubly as bad. The dark brown walls and floors were permanently tinted gray from years of accumulated dust, and furniture from conflicting eras was scattered throughout the rooms. A vintage couch coated in deep red velvet was in the sitting room, while the bathroom had been decorated in matching mauve everything, from the tiles to the toilet.

Teresa now stood in the entryway, facing the grand staircasing, ignoring the missing balusters. A door slammed upstairs.

She could make his work.

So, with nothing but a few precious belongings in the trunk of her car, Teresa was ready for a fresh start.

It quickly became clear that Teresa’s ghost roommate was not happy about the new living situation. Throughout the first week, the ghost slammed all the kitchen cabinets as she tried to open them, and turned on every television in the house at exactly 10:32 each night.

One day, Teresa paced through the house, cell phone to her ear.

“It’s in the downstairs closet,” she explained. It was the third call she’d gotten from him that day. Despite getting the house he’d so desperately wanted, he didn’t seem to be able to find anything in it.

“I don’t know, Eric, you’re the one that wanted the dog, so maybe you should figure it out yourself.”

Just as he took a breath to prepare for a long-winded beratement of how she, “never let him help with anything,” or how he was, “always working to provide for her,” the phone hung up completely on its own.

“I know you think you’re messing with me,” Teresa shouted out into the house. “But I was done with that conversation, anyway.”

Smoke drifted from the bundle as Teresa went from room to room, waving her arm in elegant motions from side to side. She made sure to get every corner of every room. The smoke filled her nose, warm and comforting, like the smell of a campfire. She hadn’t done this in years. Eric would complain about the smoke before storming outside to smoke a cigarette.

The smudging, however, proved ineffective, as Teresa still hadn’t been able to fill the kitchen cabinets, and the new dishes she’d bought sat abandoned in an open box in the entryway.

Teresa needed a new approach if she wanted to appease her roommate. She had her suspicions that it was only one ghost, but she needed to know more about it. Lucky for her, searching the internet for “Woodward Manor” brought up plenty of information about the house’s hauntedness. Everyone who’d lived there in the past forty years had described increased disturbances until there was nothing left to do but leave all of their things and abandon the house entirely. When the last owner died, having not set foot in the house since the 90s, the house was put on the market for a record low price, which Teresa had gleefully paid in full.

There was, however, a newspaper clipping detailing the accidental death of an 11 year old girl, who tripped down the stairs and fell from the second to the first floor. There had been a garden party in the manor's spacious backyard, leaving her unattended. It was a freak thing. She just landed wrong. A tragic, unnecessary death.

True to the reports, the nature of the ghost’s actions increased in ferocity the longer Teresa was there. Once quirky acts of slamming a door shut behind her turned to locks clicking shut, or doors almost breaking her hands. 

Teresa persisted nonetheless. She made offerings at the bottom of the staircase, lighting candles and placing candy in a plastic, clear bowl, and going so far as to try and find as close of matches as she could to what the ghost might have had in the 1900s. She was determined to win the ghost over.

In the morning, the candy bowl had shifted slightly to the left. Noticed, but in the end left behind.

“That’s it!” Teresa announced one day, standing in the middle of the kitchen, once again unable to keep a single cabinet open. “I want this house, and you can’t chase me out of it.” She felt ridiculous, a 39 year old woman talking to the ghost of a child, but it needed to be said. Crossing her arms across her chest, she pouted, wondering if, wherever the ghost was, she could see her standing her ground.

Two doors slammed upstairs, then… Nothing. It was quiet. Teresa reached over and slowly opened a kitchen cabinet. She jerked her hand back, expecting it to shut, but the cabinet stayed open.

This continued throughout the day. Teresa attempted to go through her usual routine, but something was wrong. The house was suffocating. She walked down a hallway and it was like the walls were closing in. Her chest tightened as she gasped for breath.

It was as if the silence of the house was taking up physical space, like humidity surrounding her, clinging to her skin, expanding in her throat. The flower petals on the wallpaper swayed back and forth in her vision so much she had to scrunch her eyes closed to make them stop, make them go away.

Sleep. She just needed to sleep, and it would be better in the morning.

This was immediately proved wrong when she lay in bed, unable to close her eyes for even a minute of sleep. In the dark bedroom, she heard every creak of the house as it groaned with age, like an old woman standing up from a low chair. The wind whistled outside, rustling the trees so their branches clawed at the house like they were trying to get in. Teresa’s heart sped. She curled up on her side, knees to her chest, and buried her face in the pillow.

She missed the doors slamming throughout the house. She missed the whispers through the halls. She missed the TVs turning on at night. Less than 24 hours without any interaction with the ghost and Teresa was losing her mind. The facade was crumbling as she realized that the past weeks she hadn’t really been living alone, and now that the ghost had gone silent… She was terrified. Being alone was scarier than having a ghost.

Tears ran hot down her cheeks. Her cries were muffled in the pillow as she heaved full body sobs. She couldn’t do this. In the morning, she’d call her mother and cave, tell her she’d move home, and finally admit to herself that she couldn’t really live alone.

Just as she’d accepted she’d lie awake in bed all night, there was a CLICK from downstairs, followed by a flood of static. Teresa lifted her head off of the pillow. A TV had turned on. Her heartbeat instantly slowed as she sat up in bed. Across from her, the television set seated on top of the dresser spurred to life. Light filled the room as static began to blare, clustered on the screen as it buzzed.

Teresa exhaled with relief. She wasn’t alone after all. Flopping back into bed, she took deep breaths. Her muscles were still weak from her body shaking as she melted into the bed, eyelids heavy now.

“Thank you,” she whispered. The TV flickered across from her two times, as if it was saying, “You’re welcome.”