To This Haunted House in my Neighborhood

A little girl calls you “spooky” and when she walks by, she edges her way to the far side of the sidewalk and looks down. She can hear the ghosts singing. I listen. I hear the dry leaves rustle, though it’s spring.

She describes voices, so you must host several ghosts. They are frustrated and lonely, locked up in a house no one has lived in for 32 years. When people live in a house, they open the doors and windows to come and go, but without the living to turn the door knobs, to lift the sashes, the ghosts are trapped, their airy hands too delicate to turn the knobs.

You must have built, like most houses in the area, around 1923, for Goodyear executives and managers. The man who called you home was not happy, despite the growing business and the increased responsibility. They need him now more than ever, but, like so many with enough money to free their minds for self-reflection, he wonders if this is all there is. He feels a space open up somewhere deep inside him, cold and hollow, and he tries to pretend it’s not there. But every time he hears his daughter call his name, every day he pulls the car out of the drive, every time he has to shake someone’s hand and introduce himself, he feels the air stir in that space. He feels the ghost inside him growing.

He’s not the kind to take his own life and doesn’t even consider it, but he does little to encourage the one that he has. When his daughter, who he tried to love but couldn’t, says she leaving, he’s silent. When his wife makes him dinner but leaves him to eat alone, he says nothing. When the snow builds up around the windows, three years to the day since the market crashed, he stands and watches the light play across the lawn, the emptiness filling the entire street.

So it’s not surprising that when he died, he had nowhere to go. He had not planned on his life after death and he had not lived deeply enough so that his soul felt free. And he trapped his wife. And his daughter, who died at 17 of consumption. The neighborhood rumor is that the city is tearing down you down this summer. The ghosts will be homeless but free of each other.