The Language of Houses

I was never specifically haunted by a house. As much as I have always thought it would be fascinating to live in a house where objects moved across the room, where paintings fell off walls, where doors shut when there wasn't the faintest sign of a draft, the closest I've been to a haunting is a shimmer at the end of a disused prison corridor and a mysterious light switch incident in the records room of an old auditorium.

But houses have spoken to me before. When I remember lying awake in the upstairs bedroom of the farmhouse in northern Ohio where my dad grew up, unable to sleep, I remember those moments in the dark as conversations with the room around me. Feeling out its corners, listening to it settle in the dark. Trying to decide if it sounded weary or content. The House on Bishop Street, too, which I remember less as an abode and more as a relative, and old acquaintance, an imaginary friend from my youth. The rooms were like organs to me. I was one to draw houses with faces, windows as eyes. I think a lot of children do this; I think they're able to interpret the creaks and groans in their own special language of childhood imagination.

But I like to think it's possible to retain this belief as we get older. There's something lovely about a house that speaks to you. It makes you know you'll never be completely alone.

It's no wonder, then, that I love books where houses are lead characters. Living, breathing, imagination-consuming characters. House of Leaves. Howards End. Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, of course, Queen of Haunted Houses. Even the first book I ever lost myself in, Rebecca, whose attraction to me can be attributed to the power Manderley had, its halls swallowing me whole as I lay wrapped up in a pastel patterned comforter, unaware of my mom calling me to dinner from upstairs.

Most recently, it was Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger and its Hundreds Hall, haunted by the spectres of a past that no longer existed. (This whole post was originally meant to be a review of the book, until I realized that it was turning into something else entirely, and that others had already written about it much better than I could, here, and here.) I finished The Little Stranger sitting in the corner of a small library in a 16th century Italian farmhouse. The house had an Escher-esque entrance, and I found myself turning unexpected corners more than once, finding myself lost in its many rooms, its floorplan a foreign language. At night the floors creaked, and we marveled at how they could possibly have fit the giant armoire through the doors into the library. We decided in the end that it had to have been built inside the room.

The massive armoire seemed a fitting puzzle to watch over me as I finished this book - something creaky and old, built inside something else creaky and old, obscuring the light in the room, giving the sense that there was something there, something in the shadows, something with a story to tell, if only I could understand its language...

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.