Welcome Home — a suburban ghost story

I used to live in a haunted house.

It wasn’t on the outskirts of town. It wasn’t old. It wasn’t ominous or creepy. It wasn’t obvious. My haunted abode was a three floor townhome in the middle of a long row of identical looking units next to a university. The only definitive feature it had to set it apart from the other homes on the row was the large, pink rhododendron outside the front door, and even then, a neighbour several doors down had a purple one that was almost the exact same size. Inside the house, the walls connected neatly and were brightly colored; turquoise in the bathroom, lilac in the bedrooms, there was even a closet that was the exact shade of dandelions in the spring. Sun shone through the expansive windows and aside from a penchant for antique furniture, the house’s features were predominantly mid century and very, very ordinary.

My parents purchased this ordinary home in the middle of an ordinary town after years and years of saving up, working over time, and cutting corners. It wasn’t the nicest, or the biggest home we’d ever lived in, but it was the result of hard work and dedication and it meant a lot to them. The importance of this purchase was made very clear to both myself and my siblings as we prepared to move, and we all allowed ourselves to dream big dreams for this modest home. We imagined what our rooms would look like, what color we would paint the walls, where we would put our things, but the one thing we didn’t imagine, the one thing that became evident the very day we moved in, was that the unassuming townhouse in the middle of the unassuming town was haunted.

I was sixteen when we moved in, the oldest of my siblings by seven years, but despite their young age, each one of us knew almost instantly that our new home wasn’t completely empty. My father, traditionally the biggest skeptic among us, was the first person to have an encounter with the man whom we would come to share our home with. None of the other kids were there to witness this moment; having six and nine year olds underfoot while you’re moving furniture is never a good idea, so while they played in the empty rooms that would soon be filled with their things, I helped my parents lug things up and down the multiple staircases. When the moving truck was half empty with most of the boxes deposited onto one side of the living room, we decided to take a break. My mother went out to buy lunch and my father and I grabbed a few of the dining room chairs so that we’d have something to sit on besides the cold hardwood floor.

“Did you see the cracked tile in the kitchen?” he asked as we rounded the top of the steps, each of us gripping the back of a heavy oak chair.

“Yeah, there’s another one on the other side too, near the back door.”

He made it to the top of the stairs and put his chair down before turning around to help me with mine. “We’ll have to repla–” He stopped mid sentence, and his eyes blinked at the space in front of me, specifically at the space right above my head. It was only for a second, his gaze flicking towards me and then up, his features contorting slightly, and then once again back to me, as if I had just gone invisible and then reappeared in front of him.

“What the fuck was that?” I asked, turning my head and looking above and then behind me, laughing nervously.

“Nothing,” he said, a little too short to be believed. “Don’t say fuck.”

My father was, through most of my lifetime, a man of few emotions, one might even go so far as to say only two: happiness or anger. There was rarely any in between, besides just common complacency of course, which was most of the time, and where his children were concerned, he was never sad and never scared. In that moment, however, as his eyes darted around the empty space and back, the look that flickered behind them could only have been described as pure fear, and it startled me.

“Okay…” I said, nervously, “Are you sure?”

“We’ll probably just replace the whole floor,” he said, pushing the foreign emotion to the pit of his stomach and continuing where he’d left off. “There’s no way we’re going to be able to match it anyway, it’s gotta be thirty years old at this point.” He took the chair out of my hands and placed it on the floor next to the other one, then pushed past me and headed back down to the truck as if nothing had happened.

“Wait!” I called down after him, ”What did you just see?” But he was gone, already out the front door, grabbing another one of the dining room chairs to bring up for my mother. I glanced up again at the space ahead of me, at the empty landing that led into the living room, and slowly raised my hands up, feeling the air. There was nothing there. I turned and looked behind me again, this time taking a few steps backwards to stand on the landing, looking at where I had just been. Still nothing, just some ugly gray carpet and walls the color of dried clay, but as I stood there, my eyes searching, the corner where the stairs pivoted at a sharp right angle began to draw my focus. It was so dark. Why was it so dark? The rest of the stairs were draped in sunlight, but this corner, this little angle, was almost black. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and a little shiver ran up my spine but I couldn’t look away. All I could see was the darkness. Was it moving? Was it getting bigger?

“Mar! Go get the kids, your mom’s back!” My father’s voice hit me with a cold slap on the face and I blinked. The darkness was gone and suddenly I was just staring at a normal, empty staircase. Just a normal corner in a normal home.

Later that evening, surrounded by boxes and sitting on the scattered dining room chairs, exhausted from the day’s work, my youngest sister, Josephine (at the time only six) asked my mother if she believed in ghosts. “I think I saw one,” she said, her voice very small.

My mother, who was sitting on the floor, sorting through a box of kitchen items in search of utensils, looked unfazed by the question. “Probably,” she said, without looking up, “Your father saw one today, so maybe it was the same ghost.”

“Aileene,” my father scolded, his tone a by now familiar sound of disappointment that was used whenever my mother forgot how to talk like a mother, which was quite often. “She’s only kidding,” he said, turning his attention back to Jo, his tone now a calming mix of gentle and teasing, a commonly used Band-Aid over my mother’s callousness. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. I don’t know what I saw.”

Jo looked down at her hands, nervously pulling at the row of colorful friendship bracelets lining her wrist, and whispered, “I saw a man. He was standing on the stairs.”

I looked over at my father in time to see that same fearful look cross his face, but only for a moment this time, and then it was gone, replaced with a small smile that didn’t quite reach his blue eyes. “I don’t know what I saw,” he repeated, his tone hollow, and left it at that.

As time moved forward, the man at the top of the stairs became just another part of the house, like the beaded curtain my mother made that hung on the closet door near where he stood; a fixture, nothing more. He was something we came to dismiss rather than fear; “sometimes the back door sticks in the summer,” or “the window in the kitchen is a little drafty,” and “there’s a man who stands on the landing of the staircase.”

When you entered the house, the front door was on the ground level that consisted of little more than a cold tile floor that was always scattered with shoes, my skateboard, Jo’s roller skates, and a closet full of coats. There was a basement room, connected to the front entrance way, but that was mine, and no one was allowed in there, so when visiting, one would usually proceed directly to a set of curved stairs that would lead them up to the very large living space that was the bulk of the main floor. It was here, on the landing between two floors, a space of nothingness, where our ghost lived. We didn’t have a haunted room, or a haunted closet, or even an attic; we had a haunted landing in the corner of a very average staircase. He didn’t jump out and scare you, or rattle his chains or wail and moan, he just stood there; a corner of uneasiness. Every now and then we would have a visitor who would see him, and I mean really see him. Their eyes would flick towards the space as they ascended into the living room, often doing a double take when they realized the seemingly occupied space was suddenly empty. “Strange,” they would say, “I could have sworn I saw a man standing there.” Sometimes they wouldn’t say anything at all, a battle of emotions showing on their face as they tossed around in their head what they had just seen, wondering if they should voice their confusion. It was always an echo of my father’s face on that first day. Most people, however, didn’t see him at all.

Josephine named him George, though to this day, she has no idea why, but it stuck, and during the first year, everything that George did was met with fear as we adjusted to the idea that we had just moved in with a ghost. When I had a friend over one night, the two of us hanging out in the living room while the rest of my family was asleep, we fled the house after George turned on the hallway light and noisily ran up the stairs, causing the beaded curtain over the closet to shake and jingle in his wake. The event finished with the slamming of the bathroom door on the third floor. I still remember the seemingly infinite space of time, the two of us looking at each other, neither one of us daring to breathe, let alone move and then finally, when the hallway light suddenly turned off again, snapping to attention and running downstairs and into the night, our shoes in hand, not stopping until we were blocks away. We walked alongside the highway that night to get to her house, an act that could have killed us, but at the time, seemed less dangerous than facing the unknown specter of the tall man on the stairs.

Eventually, after that first year, the fear turned into something closer to annoyance, and that bone chilling feeling that arose whenever George would make his presence known, faded almost entirely. At least during the daylight it did. Whenever he would do something, we’d ask him to stop, momentarily giving him the attention he wanted, while at the same time expressing our frustration. When the dog would sit and bark at the empty space, we’d sigh and huff, “George, leave Rita alone,” shooing her away with the same level of impatience we used when telling her to stop barking at the neighbor’s cat. After a few years, even our regular house guests had picked up the habit of telling George to “piss off.”

By the time I moved out at eighteen, George was almost a pet of sorts. I returned for family dinners and holidays, and George stayed right where he was, on the landing of the stairs. I went to school, moved to a house on the beach in California, had my heart broken and moved back, met another man and moved again, started a career, and then changed my mind and started another one, and all the while, George stayed right where he was. Eventually my parents decided to move back to eastern Canada where we had originally come from, and in doing so, signed the house over to their children. All of us, except for Jo, had by now left home, scattered around the globe, and I was the only one willing to come back. My partener, Lawrence and I had been making due with a shoebox of an apartment in a very bad part of town, so moving into the townhouse in the sleepy university neighborhood was like a dream. Three floors, a pool in the summer, and more space than we knew what to do with. Jo decided to stay and live with us, and we excitedly discussed all the things we wanted to change to make the house our own.

It wasn’t until the day we moved in that I remembered about George.

I’d told my partner about him, years before that, but he’d never paid much attention to the concept of ghosts and probably didn’t believe me at the time. He also didn’t really visit my family’s home often, certainly never overnight, and so his interactions with the ghost had been kept to a minimum.

“He probably won’t even bother us,” I remember saying. “I haven’t heard anyone talk about him in ages.”

The move in had been almost easy. Most of the furniture in the house was what my parents had left behind. After some last ditch effort at the bohemian lifestyle they had always dreamed of living, they packed up some family heirlooms, photos and their clothes, and moved across the country carrying only what would fit into their car. The rest was left behind for us to sift through, deciding what was “us” and what wasn’t, but since the house was fully furnished, we moved in with only boxes, and still not very many of those. That night we snuggled into our new, cozy king size, oak framed bed in what would be our room for the next decade, feeling at ease and very grateful for what we considered to be a new beginning…

My eyes were open before I was even conscious that I was awake. It only felt like a few minutes had passed since I’d first closed them, but I could tell it was the dead of night and that something was wrong. Anyone who’s ever lived in a haunted house will tell you one thing: when you wake up in the middle of the night, you don’t open your eyes. It’s something the movies always get wrong, and I understand how it doesn’t play well for cinematic purposes, but in real life, it’s the last thing you do. I don’t think you could, as if your fear makes you physically incapable of doing it, even if you wanted to, which you don’t, you can’t. Yet there I was, eyes open, the foggy haze of sleep dissipating and the room around me falling into focus. I’d never opened my eyes in the middle of the night inside that house before. I’d been woken up plenty of times, to noises and sounds, one time to my four poster bed shaking, the rod iron banisters hitting against the wall rhythmically, over and over again, but I’d never opened my eyes, not once. Even though we had adopted a tolerance of George during the day, the night was still unknown territory. The night was the only time when he would leave his little corner of complacency and roam through the rest of the house.

I’d never actually seen George. Everyone else in the family had, but I hadn’t. Any opportunity on my part was always met with fear and the knee jerk reaction to cover my face with my hands until whatever was happening came to a stop. I both wanted and feared seeing him at the same time. Anyone that had seen him seemed unable to describe what it was like. “He’s a man, a tall man,” they’d say, “but not really a man… it’s just the image of one.” There was no way to envision what they described, but at the heart of their description was uneasiness and fear. I knew how I’d felt that first day, as the shadows on the stairs had bled outwards, the creeping coldness that felt like it would engulf me until I was trapped. I didn’t want to feel that again.

I’d felt pieces of it since that first day, feeling that I came to associate with his general presence in a space, especially that night when my bed was shaking. I knew he was standing in the doorway, watching me, but I’d refused to look. I’d covered my head with the blanket and regressed into a position I’d slept in as a small child, my knees tucked against my chest, hugging myself until the cold feeling had passed and the bed stilled beneath me, and even then, I stayed covered and safe until dawn.

I’d even heard him on occasion, awakening with the echo of a voice in my head, a baritone roar of frustration that sounded like it had come from a dream. As I became more and more conscious, shifting from that space between sleeping and awake, I’d realize that it had come from the room, and not my head. It had been the thing to wake me up. The next day the sound echoed in my ears, over and over again and eventually I started to equate it to the noise one makes when stubbing their toe. Ever eager to normalize George’s presence in my life, not wanting to live in fear, I decided that it was him being angry with his lack of a corporal form. I pictured him trying to play one of my records or pet the dog, and finding that his limbs didn’t function the way he’d like them to, he would cry out in frustration.

“I don’t know,” said Avery, one of the twins who were my middle siblings, “It sounds like George doesn’t like you. He’s never yelled at anyone else.” He looked at Alice, the other twin, and she shrugged in agreement.

“Why wouldn’t he like me?” I’d asked, instantly regretting my decision to confide in the children.

“Maybe because you’re a grumpy teenager?” Jo suggested.

I rewarded her honesty by chasing them out of my room and threatened all of them on pain of death to never come back, before slamming the door behind them. But in the back of my mind, I knew that Avery had been right; George didn’t like me, and I could feel it. I was the only one who was waking up in the night, the cold fingers of fear gripping my throat, unable to fall back asleep, and it made me feel unwelcome. Those moments of targeted fear, my personalized haunting, were the reason I had packed my bags at eighteen. The reason I never spent the night here after I had moved out, and in this moment, as the comfort of sleep moved further and further away, I chastised myself for forgetting what this felt like; for letting myself believe that George wasn’t real.

I wasn’t sure what had woken me up, but as the realization that my eyes were open washed over me, so too did that cold sinking feeling that accompanies fear in these kinds of situations. It pinned me against the bed, unable to move or even close my eyes again. I reluctantly scanned the space in front of me, fearful of what I would see, but unable to do anything else. My side of the bed faced the door and I could see out into the hallway. A night light at the far end of it gave off a dim glow and on the edges of that pool of light, I noticed a shadow. It was small, but it shifted when I spotted it, stretching out across the wall with wet, sluggish movements, into the room and out of my line of vision. It slithered behind me, towards the other side of the bed and I felt Lawrence shift and snore. That cold feeling crept out from my body and seeped into the mattress towards him and I pulled at my arm, willing it to move, but it didn’t.

It was just like the shadow I had seen that first day on the stairs, growing and moving, sliding over him, across him, and in my periphery I watched as he disappeared under it, overtaken by the slithering darkness. I tried to call out to him, to warn him. “You’re being taken!” I yelled in my head, “Wake up, Lawrence!” But no words came out, no sound, my mouth was just as immobile as the rest of me, and the chill in the room dipped from cold to freezing. I could see my breath, but still I could not move.

Stop it, George, I thought, stop it, stop it, stopitstopitstopit. Over and over, I screamed it inside my head, willing him to hear me, begging him to leave, but still I couldn’t move or make a sound.

I felt Lawrence shift beside me. I couldn’t see him under the shadow, but I sensed he was waking up, becoming aware of his fate. I heard him cry out, yell, his voice choked with panic and far away. He called my name, and I tried to reach out to him, tried to tell him I was beside him.

I heard my name again, the vowel at the end a high pitched tone tinged with his fear. “Wake up,” he yelled, “Marcela, wake up!”

I struggled to move, to show him that I was awake, but something slammed into me from above, pressing me to the bed. Invisible hands on my shoulders squeezed me to the point of pain and I opened my mouth, desperately willing a sound to come out. Scream! I thought, just open your mouth and scream! Something internal told me that if I could only manage to make a sound that it would somehow make all of this stop.

I heard Lawrence yell my name again, but this time he sounded as if he was right next to my ear. He hadn’t moved, he was still being swallowed by the shadow, his arm barely visible on the edges of the dark mass, but his voice was so close. The invisible force slammed into me again, shook me as before, and the unseen hands gripped at my shoulders harder.

Scream!!

The hands on my shoulders pushed into my flesh, digging at my muscles, and I strained every part of my body.

Just scream, god dammit!!

The thought pushed from my brain to my mouth and a long, ragged sound tore from my throat. It pulled me out of my paralysis, like the sounding of an alarm, and I closed my eyes, my body straining to sit up, pushing against the hands that still held me. Bursts of light appeared in my vision, and I scrunched my eyes closed against the halos of orange tinging the edges of the darkness. Some distant, instinctual part of my brain told me that the room around me was no longer dark, that I was seeing the light beyond my eyelids and I blinked, feeling confused. My vision was blurry and broken as I looked around and took in my surroundings. Lawrence was kneeling beside me, hovering over me, his hands gripping my shoulders tightly, a panicked look on his face. I blinked again.

“What’s going on?”

“What’s going on?” He echoed my question, his voice coated in confusion. “You were screaming,” he said.

“I was what?” The fog of sleep was thick and I was having trouble forming my own words let alone making sense of his. “I was screaming?” I closed my eyes again, unable to keep them open and rubbed my temples as it dawned on me that everything I had just experienced had been a dream. “I thought you were screaming.” I blinked again as my vision cleared and took in the now very normal looking room. The door was partially closed instead of wide open, and the light from his bedside lamp spilled into all the corners; no slick shadows, no monsters, just an average suburban bedroom. “I’m sorry,” I said, as the confusion started to dissipate, “I was having a nightmare…”

Lawrence gave me a look that told me the word, “nightmare,” was a bit of an understatement, but decided now was not the time to talk about it. He pulled me back down to the bed and wrapped his arms around me. “Your legs…” he whispered, but didn’t elaborate. I couldn’t seem to keep my eyes open. Despite the fear I had felt only moments before, the long day was still pulling at me and I was unable to hold off sleep. I wanted to ask him what he meant, but I felt myself drift off into darkness instead.

George didn’t bother me a second time that night, he’d made his point, and I decided that this was his way of welcoming me home.

Piss off, George, I thought, and reluctantly let sleep take me.

“Why do you keep looking at me like that?” I asked, eyeing Lawrence across the kitchen table. I was nibbling on a piece of toast and he was pushing his spoon around a now soggy bowl of cereal; neither of us felt much like eating. “It was just a nightmare, that’s all.”

“It wasn’t just a nightmare, Mar.” He dropped his spoon and sat back in his chair, “Your legs…” Again, he didn’t finish his sentence, just like the night before, and I dropped the slice of toast back onto my plate and looked at him.

“You said that last night. What was wrong with my legs?”

“I don’t know!” He looked down, his mouth opening and closing slightly, unable to find the words. “They were… in the air, like… like… they were floating.”

“Floating?” I raised an eyebrow in disbelief, “My legs were floating?”

“Floating is the wrong word… levitating?”

“What was the rest of me doing?”

“Laying on the bed. You looked completely normal, except your legs were in the air… like someone was holding them. Or pulling on them.” He shrugged a little, dissatisfied with his own explanation and placed his hands together, bending all four fingers upwards in a curve, “Like that.” There was another long pause and he dropped his palms back down to the table, “It was unnatural.”

I didn’t know what to say, an eerie chill made its way up my spine as I let the image he’d put in my head slowly solidify. What was George doing? His presence was a constant thing in this house, but it had never been physical, it was just there, like the chandelier in the dining room or the missing piece of tile in the corner of the kitchen that we’d never actually fixed; he was just part of the space.

“Are you going to be okay alone?” I jumped slightly at the sound of his voice, completely lost in thought, and looked up to find him standing at the sink pouring his uneaten cereal down the garburator. I hadn’t even noticed he’d stood up.

I shook off the cold feeling that was creeping down my spine and cleared my throat, “Yes, I’ll be fine, don’t worry.” I emphasized the “fine” with a smile, but I knew it didn’t reach my eyes and he didn’t smile back.

His trip out of town had been planned for months, long before we knew we’d be moving here, and there was no way around it.

“Yes,” I repeated, more for myself than for him, “I’m just going to get some unpacking done, maybe paint the bathroom. I’ll be fine,” I repeated, trying to sound more sure of myself than I felt. Again, it didn’t work.

That evening was uneventful, besides the nervousness I felt at going to bed, but Lawrence held me close and eventually I drifted off into an uninterrupted sleep. The next morning we had breakfast and then he left for the airport. I didn’t tell Jo about the dream, or how badly George had scared us, because I wasn’t sure how she’d react. As a child, her connection to George had almost been akin to an imaginary friend, but she had grown into quite the skeptic as an adult, and anytime he was mentioned, she’d tend to roll her eyes and loudly proclaim, “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” despite all evidence inside our house to support the opposite. I wasn’t sure if that was a survival mechanism, a way for her to not be scared, or if she truly didn’t believe in him anymore.

Jo had never left this house, not like the rest of us had. She’d grown up here and now, as an adult, she was still here. Our own Abigail Crane; raised with ghosts, only far less sermonizing in our house. To her, the things happening around her were normal, part of her day to day, so it was no wonder she didn’t believe they were the result of supernatural activity. Even if I had told her about my dream, or about how scared I was, she wouldn’t have taken it seriously. She wouldn’t have understood what it had done to me; so I didn’t tell her. Which is exactly why, at about four o’clock that evening, she texted me to tell me she was staying the night at her girlfriend’s house and suddenly, totally unprepared to do so, I was now spending the night alone, with George.

There was a part of me that had been okay with Lawrence leaving. I liked having time to myself, the freedom to stay up and watch whatever I wanted, or read until I fell asleep with the lights on, and the part of me that was nervous about sharing a house with a ghost had been sedated by the thought that I wouldn’t truly be alone. Jo had claimed my old basement as her domain long before we had moved in, and had created her own little hideout down there. I wasn’t expecting to see much of her, but just knowing she was down there was enough to calm me. Now as I sat in the living room, looking at the message on my phone informing me that I was well and truly alone, I felt the empty house wrap around me, as if it might swallow me whole. I locked my eyes on the bright screen, reading Jo’s words over and over again, willing my body into submission as every fiber of my being fought to look over at the landing of the stairs.

Is he there?

Is he watching me?

Does he know I’m alone?

I knew the answer was yes. I could feel him. My lungs felt tight, my back stiff, and I focused on steady breaths and calming thoughts.

By the time the icy feeling of fear had subsided, the sun had gone down and I found myself sitting in not only an empty house, but a dark one. George was still there, I hadn’t looked, but even if I had, I wouldn’t have seen him. I could feel him, just as I had when I was younger and awoke to him standing in my doorway. He was there just as much as I was.

“Okay,” I said out loud, both to myself and to him, “I guess I should eat…” The words felt loud in the open space and each sound that followed, the squeak of the leather couch, the creaking of the floor, echoed in my ears, as if anything besides silence was unwelcome. When I walked past the top of the stairs on my way into the kitchen, I instinctively closed my eyes, not wanting to see him standing in the corner, watching me.

My cats circled my feet as I opened a can of soup and I shooed them away, “It’s not tuna, you idiots,” I scolded, brushing past them towards the cupboard to grab a pot. The sounds of the kitchen were just as loud as everything else had and I rubbed my temples while standing in front of the stove. Music, I thought, I need music, and even the sounds of my inner monologue seemed loud. I patted my pockets for my phone and realized that I had left it out in the living room. Great. As I turned to leave the kitchen I saw one of the cats jump onto the counter, poking her nose into the discarded soup can. “Hey!” I shouted, turning around in the doorway and snapping my fingers at her. She paused, giving me a guilty look, and jumped gingerly back onto the floor. I laughed, for a moment forgetting my woes, and turned around to head into the living room, stopping dead in my tracks as I came face to face with George.

He loomed in front of me, blocking my path, a black shadow swirling before me, his face, a stern, white visage that glared at me from the darkness. It reminded me of an old daguerreotype photo, like the one of my great grandfather that had hung in my uncle’s study when I was a child. His eyes had that same empty glow, tiny pupils lost to the exposure, with unchecked anger behind them that I instinctively knew was directed at me. “I don’t know, it sounds like George doesn’t like you.” The stern expression drew deep wrinkles on his forehead, thick and unwavering, as if carved into something harder than skin. The shadows that extended from his face to the floor, at first glance the body of a man clad in black, were in fact a shapeless swirling mass, like dark smoke. He hadn’t been hiding in the shadows, he was the shadows. They moved and shifted around him, circling him in a mass and drawing attention to the fact that his expression, though stern and angry, was fixed and unmoving. Again I thought of the photograph and realized that this was both George, and the memory of George. This was as much George as the photo in the study had been Laird William MacKenzie. It wasn’t a man, it was the idea of one.

That realization, of course, did nothing to quell the fear that riveted me to the spot. My mouth opened and I gasped, sucking in a mouthful of cold air that seemed to dissipate in my body, seeping out before making it to my lungs. I wavered for a moment, trapped, unable to breathe, and then, just as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone. I blinked and then gulped a long, ragged breath like I had just resurfaced in a pool of water. The cold air that had been pouring out of the dark shadow subsided, but I still couldn’t move, only dart my eyes around the space before me, back and forth across the narrow passage between the kitchen and the living room, searching for any lingering signs of what I had just seen. It had happened so quickly that I was unsure it had happened at all, aside from the memory of his angry expression, now burned into my brain. There were no signs of the man I had just come face to face with, at least no physical ones. At the end of the short hall was his perch, his space on the stairs, and just as before, I could feel him there, watching me.

What the fuck, George?

Many years before, when Jo was nine and the twins were eleven, my parents had left them home alone while they went out to a farmers market. My mother had walked the dog and then left her home with my siblings who excitedly settled down in front of the TV in the basement for an entire afternoon of uninterrupted video games. None of them was sure how much time had passed, maybe three or four levels worth of Mario, before they heard a very loud crash from upstairs. They looked at each other. “George?” asked Jo, as if an old friend they didn’t know was coming to visit had just announced his presence. Avery and Alive probably shrugged in unison and the three of them got up and ventured upstairs to see what had happened.

Jo took the living room, looking around for things that could have fallen over and the twins wandered into the kitchen where they found Rita, our dog, passed out on the tiled floor, seemingly dead. My parents were called, Rita was taken to the vet, where it was found she had ingested something poisonous, but was miraculously not dead, and everyone returned home. The vet told them they were very lucky that they had found her when they did and with all of the chaos coming to a close, the children finally wondered what it was that they had heard that brought them upstairs in the first place. It wasn’t until later, when my mother went to take a bath, that they found out. At first she thought it had been her children and immediately called them all upstairs to explain themselves, but when she saw the look on their frightened faces as they peered into the bathroom, she realized it hadn’t been them, and immediately regretted even showing them the mess.

It was as if a bomb had exploded, everything that had been on every surface of the bathroom was scattered over the marble floor. Bars of soap, bottles of shampoo, toothbrushes, toothpaste, vitamins and pills, their liquids spilling out onto the floor and over the counter tops. Alice walked past my mother, into the room, and picked up one of the bottles, placing it on the counter, then bent down to grab another. My mother followed, then Jo and Avery, and the four of them wordlessly cleaned the entire room until it was as if nothing had ever happened. My mother, now too tired to take a bath, went to bed and the children disappeared into their own rooms. No one said it, but everyone was thinking the same thing: It had been George calling out to them.

I had moved out by then, and the removal of my presence in the home had allowed George to become the legend he now was. He helped more than hindered, and he appeared less and less, as if he knew the uneasiness that he caused, and didn’t want to burden anyone with his presence. He no longer had me to haunt, and so he seemed to retire from haunting entirely; a grandfatherly version of Casper.

But now here I was, at one end of the hall, and him at the other, and all I could see was his hauntingly still expression of anger, burned in my memory like a burst of light behind my eyes.

My house!

I’d heard the words in my head, though he hadn’t said it, his expression had implied it; George was definitely not happy I was home. So much for the friendly ghost theory, there had been nothing friendly about George’s face.

A noise from the kitchen grabbed my attention, making me jump, and I ran back to the stove, grabbing the overflowing pot off the element and dropping it into the sink before turning around and switching on the hood vent. The whirring noise of the fans filled the space and for the first time since Jo had sent that text, I took a deep, steady breath in, happy to no longer be swimming in the overwhelming silence. I grabbed the dishcloth and wiped off the dark red tomato soup from around the element and then looked at the clock. I wasn’t hungry anymore, and it was too early for bed, but I didn’t care, I just didn’t want to be down here alone. At least in my room there were blankets and places to hide.

I looked around the corner into the hallway and felt like a child peeking under the bed to check for monsters. He wasn’t there, and though I hadn’t been expecting to see him, relief still flooded through me at the sight of the empty hall.

“Okay, George,” I said, in a loud, clear voice. “I’m going upstairs. I won’t bother you anymore today.”

My house, I heard again, and somehow I just knew that’s what all this was about. I’d left, and now I was back, completely undeserving of the gift that I had been given. Unlike my parents, I hadn’t saved up or worked hard, I had been handed something that a lot of people can never afford; my own house. Deep down, I knew that’s what George was angry about; he felt betrayed. My house!! The grumpy teenager had come back, and now I had what he wanted.

I took another deep breath, my hands balled into fists, and bolted out of the kitchen. A rush of cold air hit me at the landing of the stairs. MY HOUSE! I didn’t stop to look around, there was no part of me that wanted to see his horrible face again, so I didn’t stop. I scooped up my phone from the arm of the couch and then sprinted up the stairs, down the hall and into my bedroom, slamming the door behind me. MY HOUSE! I paused next to the bed for a moment, but a crashing noise from out in the hallway made me scream and I jumped onto the mattress and wrapped the blankets around me. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and called Lawrence, but it went immediately to voicemail; he was probably still in the air. There was another loud noise out in the hall, “PISS OFF, GEORGE!” I yelled and looked around for something to throw at the closed door. There was a box at the foot of the bed and I grabbed a paperback off the top and tossed it. It hit the wall with more of a hiss than a thump and then slumped placidly onto the floor. I sat and listened, straining to hear what was happening out in the hallway.

Silence.

No slamming, no crashing, no George. No anything. Just that same drowning silence from before.

This time I grabbed my phone and selected my meditation playlist and turned up the volume, letting Erik Satie fill the room. He can’t hurt you, I repeated, over and over again in my head, closing my eyes and letting the lazy notes of Gnossienne to pull me into a calm and relaxed place. As calm and relaxed as I could be, at least. He can’t hurt you… Most people in this situation would be sitting there convincing themselves that it had all been in their head, that there was no such thing as ghosts, but I didn’t need to convince myself of that, I knew there was a ghost; a ghost who hated my guts.

I don’t know how long I sat there, huddled inside the comforter, or how many times my playlist repeated, but I remember feeling the emptiness below me. In my mind I could see the dark living room, the shadows pulling at the corners, closing it in, and below that, the basement, Jo’s room, scattered with laundry and shoes; each space full of things, but still as empty as could be. I could feel the emptiness in my soul, stretching and expanding outwards towards every corner of every room. Alone. I was alone. Eventually my eyelids became heavy and I slumped onto the mattress, reluctantly letting my body pull me into the darkness of sleep. There were no dreams, no monsters or ghouls chasing me, just deep, dark nothingness. My dreams were as empty as the house below me.

Scream!

The thought slapped me across the face, waking me up with a start and pulling me from the empty abyss. Something was wrong. I felt the choking hesitation in my throat like I had the other night, the pulling at my vocal chords as they strained to make noise, unable to comply.

Scream!

But I didn’t. I couldn’t. My body was still asleep, though my brain was alert and ready to act. I was still wrapped in the duvet, but I was freezing cold and shaking. My trembling hands groped for the lamp on my bedside table, fumbling at the empty space. What the fuck was that noise? My hand pushed through the space where my lamp should be, but wasn’t, and my body jerked forward, like stepping off a last stair that isn’t actually there. I caught myself on the edge of the bed, straining to see through the darkness while my hand opened and closed over the suddenly empty space. My throat was still tight, my body sure even through the confusion, that fear was a necessary instinct. I moved my hand again, but nothing, no lamp, no table, no anything.

The room was silent now but there had been a noise that had woken me up, I was sure of it. It was still ringing in my ears. By now my body had caught up to my brain and I was awake and alert, but there was nothing, only the ragged sounds of my own breath, and even those were random and hesitant. I slid over to Lawrence’s side of the bed and groped for his lamp; this time my shaky fingers gripped the cold metal and I felt for the switch at the top, clicking it twice and bathing the room in a soft yellow light. The scream that had been holding in my throat burst forward as I turned back to my side of the bed, towards the now wide open door and the tall, swirling image of George standing just outside it in the dark hallway. His smoky body was barely visible within the shadows, melding with them, making him appear twice the size he had been downstairs. His daguerreotype face, just as angry and still as ever, almost glowed now, its whiteness a stark contrast to the darkness that surrounded him, its features still jagged and fearsome.

MY HOUSE!

His mouth didn’t move, but I heard the voice as if it were next to my ear and I swallowed another scream, terrified that if I let it out, I’d never stop.

George didn’t disappear as he had last time, gone in a blink of an eye, but instead he faded backwards, drifting down the hallway. His eyes, never breaking contact with me, were the last to disappear into the darkness as the temperature in the room returned to normal and the ringing in my ears subsided. I kept my gaze fixed on the spot where he had disappeared and focused on taking deep, steady breaths while clenching my hands into two tight fists, willing my body to stop shaking. It didn’t work. The tremors worked their way through my body and instead of breathing, I gasped and felt tears stream down my cheeks. The wrenching sob cut through the silence that George had left behind and I quickly clasped my hands over my mouth, fearful that it might bring him back.

I stared at the doorway, swaying unsteadily on my knees, my eyes fixed on the darkness for a seemingly unfathomable amount of time. It could have been seconds. It could have been hours. I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t until the swirling black began to dissipate and I began to see the wall at the end of the hallway, illuminated by the rising sun, that I dared even move. The space was empty, like I knew it would be, just some boxes in the corner between the wall and the doors to the other two bedrooms, both of which were closed. Were the rooms beyond them as empty as the rest of the house? Or was that where George had disappeared to? I closed my eyes, feeling the house again, feeling the empty spaces around me. It felt cold, and alone, but it didn’t feel scary. No George. He was probably back at his spot on the stairs. I let the air escape my body in one long whoosh and timidly moved towards the edge of the bed, clapping my hand over my mouth as the space between the bedframe and the door came into view.

My bedside table, an old wooden Edwardian piece that my mother had inherited from a great aunt, was on its end, about ten feet away from the wall against which it had sat. Its two large drawers gaped open, their contents scattered about the floor. Odds and ends that my mother had left for me dotted the cream colored carpet in clusters that lead like a pathway towards the upturned table on the other side of the room. That must have been the noise that had woken me up.

My house!

I gingerly stepped off the bed and noticed a shard of glass from an antique Tiffany crystal bowl that had been sitting on top of the table. It was the one thing my mother had left me that had any real value, not only monetarily, but sentimental as well. I moved my eyes over the space, locating two more chunks of glass and then the bowl itself, resting against the closet door at the far end. As my eyes collected the pieces on the floor, I felt the memories of it begin to slip away; my little fingers moving over the edge of it, poking around at the earrings inside it as it rested on my mother’s makeup table. I hadn’t expected her to leave me something so valuable, but she had, and now here it was, smashed to pieces across the floor mere days after I had taken possession. Looking up, I glanced at the empty space near the end of the hall, glimpsing the edge of the stairs that led down towards the living room, and felt, for the first time since I had moved in, something other than fear. I felt anger. These were my things, my possessions, and George had ruined them. I snapped.

“MY HOUSE, GEORGE,” I yelled, so loud that I almost jumped at the sound of my voice, “MY HOUSE.” It had been involuntary, I hadn’t even realized I was yelling until I’d heard the words coming out of my mouth. The anger took hold, pushing the soft, passive fear into my stomach. It was the opposite of fear, hot instead of cold, and I felt my cheeks grow warm as I leapt over the pile of keepsakes and broken antique glass on the floor and into the hallway. I pushed forward instead of running away and made my way to the stairs. “Do you hear me, George?” I yelled, his name sounding almost like an insult, and started down the stairs. An old painting of my fathers, cowboys on horses riding into a Montana sunset, was resting on the carpet midway down. It had been on the wall at the top and was obviously the crashing sound I had heard the night before. The corner of the frame was broken, and like the Tiffany bowl, I let the insult fuel my anger until the fear was nothing more than a memory. I picked up the painting, clutching it against myself, and continued down towards the living room. “This is my house, not yours.” I took the last two steps in a jump, vaulting onto the landing and into his space as aggressively as I could. “My house! My house! MY HOUSE!”

“What the fuck, Mar?”

I screamed and spun around, my hands flailing outwards ready to defend myself as my father’s painting crashed onto the floor, only to find Jo standing in the living room dressed in a bathrobe, holding a towel. “Jesus, Jo, you scared me!”

“I scared you?” She gestured broadly, “What the fuck are you doing? Who are you yelling at?” She motioned to the painting on the floor. “What the fuck?” She repeated.

I glanced behind me towards the stairs and then back at her, shrugging my shoulders, “George?” It came out like a question, meek and unsure. “Why are you here?”

“I came home last night, I forgot my work clothes. I was thinking we could watch a movie but you were already in bed. Seriously, what’s going on?”

The living room was in full sun now, and the daylight coupled with Jo’s presence made me feel incredibly stupid. I struggled to find more words, wanting to tell her about what I had seen and heard, but as I recalled each moment, it began to feel more and more like a dream and less and less like a real threat. “I saw him,” I said, my fingers looping together, “I mean, I saw him.”

“Yeah, me too,” she said, “he’s right behind you.”

I jumped and turned around, ready to see that same terrible face, but found only a shadowed corner.

Jo laughed and picked up the painting, grabbing it in one hand as she pushed past me. “George isn’t real, idiot,” she said, walking up the stairs and yelling back as she disappeared around the corner. “There’s no such thing as ghosts!”

I opened my mouth to respond but she closed the bathroom door and I heard the shower turn on. I let out a sigh and turned around, once again facing the empty landing of the stairs. “My house,” I whispered menacingly into the shadows, “I don’t care if you don’t like me, it’s mine. I’m not leaving.” I stood there for a moment, daring him to appear, to argue with me, and then I followed Jo up the stairs, and headed back into my room to clean up the mess on my bedroom floor.

I never saw George again, but he was still there, a menace to the end. We’d wake up from time to time with the television on full volume, paintings would fly off the walls, glasses would explode, and items that were seemingly sturdy would be knocked to the floor. The cats would hiss, doors would slam, and things would break. It was constant, but neither myself, nor anyone else in the family ever saw him, not the way I had at least. We’d still get the odd person, here and there, who would spot him for a second, the tall man in a black suit, but the absolute terror he had caused during my night alone in the house had never been repeated. Whenever he had the odd temper tantrum, I’d make sure to lay my claim, firm and resolute, that this was my house, not his, and that he wasn’t going to frighten us away.

We lived in that home for almost a decade, turning it into our house piece by piece, taking more and more agency with the space as time crept on, until Jo got married and left. We decided four bedrooms and three floors was too big for our little family and sold it, but to my knowledge, George is still there. As we were packing up our things to leave, the real estate agent texted me to say that the new owners were asking if we could leave the gold chandelier that hung in the dining room. “Sure,” I replied, “it’s part of the house, but they have to keep the ghost too.”