Buying Your First Haunted House
First-time homebuyers are untutored in the ways of making one of the most important and certainly the most expensive purchases of their lives.
They will take care to note the age of the furnace and the roof, the date of the last exterior house painting, the condition of the waterproofing on the desk, the reputation of the local school, the expected hit to the wallet when the annual Homeowner’s Association dues come around, the rise and fall of the utility bills with the passing seasons, without once giving suitable attention to how exactly the house is haunted.
Young couples, heretofore enjoying an almost eerie sense of unspoken communication, where the one has only to start a sentence for the other to finish it, find themselves at loggerheads on the important issue of whether to go with the mummified hand that scurries from room to room at the most inopportune times and on occasion seeks to strangle unsuspecting overnight guests, or the walls that seem to bleed at moments of emotional intensity.
They have taken pleasure in discovering their exact agreement on the matters of the movies they admire, the books they worship, their favorite colors, flavors, and ethnic dishes, fitting into each other like hand and glove, without once considering the possibility that their opinions may veer from one another, sometimes wildly, on the topic of hauntings, what is suitable and what is not.
It is as though they have planned a big night out and the one has in mind The Tofu Garden where they guarantee that no tofus — none at all! — were harmed in the cooking process and the other has a preference for choosing at the front door the bison to be slaughtered at tableside and then cut to order.
It’s a funny business and not an easy one to predict, for in this area people sometimes don’t conform to type. They can express interests that seem contrary to what you thought you knew about them.
Here is Brad, an extrovert if there ever was one, the life of every party, a wearer of loud sweaters at Christmastime, and his team’s colors at the football stadium, sometimes painted on his bare upper body in the subfreezing temperature.
Who would have thought that his preference would have been for the unsettling but unidentified sense of evil that pervades the very walls and fixtures of an otherwise perfectly attractive house?
His style of haunting leans heavily towards the subtly menacing, the kind of place that holds its darkness within, the kind of domicile that seems to insert disquieting thoughts in the dark hours of the night, despite the protagonist’s best efforts to while away the quiet hours, perhaps by enjoying the row upon row of spooky malign dolls that line the shelves of this one room that the previous owner had specially built before he turned into this complete madman type of guy, and whose eyes seemed to follow you closely as you went around the room. I speak of the spooky dolls’ eyes, not the previous owner’s.
Subtle, a sense of building menace, and the encroaching presence of the absolute meaninglessness as the center of the universe.
This is Brad we’re talking about? is what his friends might say.
The same guy who secretly placed fart cushions on the seats of the out-of-town relatives who came to visit that one Thanksgiving?
Yes, that Brad. Go figure.
And Brenda, his spouse. They have always been a study in contrasts, her so restrained and elegant, always with the understated fashion accessory, always with the soft murmur and quiet asides in conversation.
She just seems to carry with her an aura of refined sensibility and classy appreciation for the finer things in life.
Who in the world – in the absolute world – would think that what she was looking for in the way of hauntings was along the lines of a fellow who somehow or other has seemed to have had his head separated from his body but, unwilling to part with such an important part of his self-esteem, still carries it around with him, swinging it from his hand and sometimes hurtling it at those he wishes to leave an impression upon?
Not her spouse, I can tell you that much.
These tastes are a revelation to him, as his are to hers.
Soon enough, conversation grows terse and distant.
On the way home from the most recent home showing where Brenda has voiced her preferences, Brad can’t help but mutter, “a headless revenant, an unquiet spirit of the night bent on wreaking damage down through the ages? Do you think you can be a little more obvious, Brenda? Why not just conjure up a killer carnival clown and be done with it?”
His tone is not a pleasant one.
Brenda for her part retorts, “Maybe Mother was right about you after all. If the best you can come up with in the category of soul-chilling terror is some half-baked phony baloney mixture of ordinary unease and existential distress, I don’t see how you can ever take on the world as you said you would and keep me in the manner to which I had become accustomed.” And there is a bite to her words.
Well, they talk it out and eventually come to a common understanding and determine to take the other’s view into consideration in the future and decide to end up somewhere in the middle – perhaps a gibbering maniac creeping up from the basement at certain times of the year, who is also willing to have a conversation with his victims on the essential dilemma of the human condition before he cuts them up into a hearty stew suitable for the season – and they vow to never fight again. But it has been a close thing.
So all in all it is best in the early years of marriage and even during the engagement period, to truly understand your partner in these important matters. Pre-marriage counselors and real estate agents should also take note.
