The cottonwood-lined driveway stretched so far that our house wasn’t visible until you were halfway down it. It rose into view, hulking and sharp-shouldered, with a cheerful yellow coat of paint and a wraparound porch. A smattering of undersized windows looked like they were added as an afterthought, like the air holes I punched into cardboard boxes confining toads I rescued from the basement window wells. It was three stories tall—“four if you count the basement,” I would boast to my classmates—which made it practically a mansion in our blue-collar Kansas community, if square footage was all that was factored in.
In truth, the house was a dire fixer upper, originally built in 1911. The house had been repossessed from the previous owner, and it sat untended for years until the bank put in on the market. My parents were charmed by its rustic details: the pressed tin ceiling in the kitchen; the expansive stone hearth; the sunny, barnwood-lined breakfast nook. But they couldn’t ignore its many problems, from the questionable foundation to the shingles curling off the roof. When they decided not to make an offer, the decision was accompanied by a sense of relief—they had walked away from a money pit. Still, the house lingered in their thoughts.
A few months later, a series of severe storms and tornadoes cut across south-central Kansas. Over the course of 19 hours, trees were splintered, homes were flung from their foundations, and 24 lives were taken. I was 5 years old and still sleeping soundly as my parents carried my older sister and me to the basement of our suburban house, where we rode out the 120-mph winds unharmed.
Afterward, news came of the farmhouse: It had suffered severe wind damage, and the branches and debris strewn across the property would take years to collect into piles and burn off. The bank had bottomed out the asking price. Though the work to be done had escalated, the price was undeniably attainable. We waved goodbye to our suburban lifestyle as we drove off to our new plot of 12 acres in the country.
Most of the effects of the house’s long neglect revealed themselves upfront. Others waited shyly to be coaxed out by a heavy rainstorm or strong wind, when joints would give and leaks would spring. It was a house of warnings: don’t breathe the fiberglass insulation, don’t touch the lead blinds, don’t drink the rust-colored water.
Its exterior was irreparably permeable and invited all forms of outside life inside. Each year brought a new plague of pests, and we became acquainted with the way the various species died: tiny elm beetles whose yellow guts oozed out; poisoned mice who would stumble out of hiding just before dying, dazed and panting; gray moths whose evaporated bodies crumbled into a sooty stain. Countless spiders, the occasional snake coiled among Christmas decorations in the basement shelves, and even a panicked bat that took a wrong turn down the chimney—all had shared the house’s walls with our family.
Beyond its rotating menagerie, the house itself was like a living thing. It complained constantly in a chorus of creaks and groans. As the temperature cooled in the evenings, the whole frame would shudder in resignation to the end of day. The noises were so reliable that I made up stories to tell friends spending the night about a ghost woman who paced the attic at night. “If you listen closely, you can hear her,” I would whisper, then fall silent. On cue, the house would release a tremulous creak, sure to incite gasps of fear from my friends.
The storytelling bravado of course backfired when I was listening to the creaks and shudders alone at night. With no light from lampposts or nearby neighbors, the untempered cloak of night seemed like a presence peering into the windows, formless and menacing. I would hurriedly turn the blinds down against it in the refuge of my bedroom, not knowing that those four walls held an even darker story.
After several years of living there, my mom, a tireless family historian, turned her penchant for research toward the house itself. We were regularly reminded of the lives that took place there before our own, revealed through tiny clues like the three BB pellets embedded in the smooth wooden boards of the kitchen wall. My mom’s research added shading and dimension to the gaps in our information, like the timeline of construction additions that branched tentacle-like from the central kitchen, and the property’s history as an airport landing strip for single-engine crop dusters, whose rusting hulls still scattered the fields like a giant’s discarded toys. But the most surprising story resulted not from a resident, but from one of the house’s guests.
As my mother uncovered, a former owner had taken in his alcoholic brother after he was kicked out by his wife. Drunk and despondent, the house guest had retired to the second-floor bedroom and lit a final cigarette for the evening. However, he didn’t stay conscious long enough to enjoy it. As he succumbed to his drunken fatigue, the embers of the still-lit cigarette ignited the bedding around him. The fire engulfed the room, eating through the floorboards so that the bed crashed into the dining room below, with its deceased occupant still in it. The rebuilt bedroom was where I slept each night.
The horror of this macabre tale was overshadowed by the gleeful knowledge that I had, hands down, the coolest story of anyone in my class, and perhaps the whole grade school. Each time I imagined it, the scene became more theatrical—the flaming headboard and singed bedsheets suspended in a slow-motion cascade toward the elegantly set dining room table below. In my mind, the moment was contained to itself. I did not imagine the brother startling awake to the smell of smoke, or the frantic family trying to contain the fire, or the man’s wife, alone in her bed across town, answering the final of what had perhaps been many late-night phone calls regarding her husband.
It was also hard to connect the death with my own rebuilt bedroom, filled with honey-hued furniture and papered with horse posters. Even if my family was prone to believe in the supernatural, we had lived in the house for several years without any unexplained circumstances. But spirits aside, there was no denying that the house had a history as engrained in its beams as the shadowy stains of smoke damage beneath layers of faded floral wallpaper.
Over the years, my parents labored to restore the house to pristine condition. The roof was re-shingled, the foundation restored, the musty shag carpeting pulled up, and bathroom floors re-tiled. It was thoughtfully outfitted with antique furnishings and homey touches. But the house retained a willful defiance, a fatalistic attachment to the elements. With every tile caulked and crevice sealed, a new ochre water stain fanned across the ceiling or a new crack marbled the sidewalk. After seven years of time and money spent, my parents decided they were through investing. I burst into tears when they announced that our home was officially for sale.
Since driving down the long gravel driveway for the last time, I’ve called at least a dozen houses and apartments home, but none have persisted in my memories like the old farmhouse. I now live in New York, where my Manhattan apartment is as far removed from the old yellow farmhouse as I am from the towheaded girl with skinned knees who pressed her handprints into the cool resistance of the hardening sidewalk concrete.
I will never know the history of my current building beyond its city permits and elevator inspections, and there are no clues about those whose daily routines took place here before me. The city’s thousands of apartment dwellers are a transient population who move in and out like actors across a stage. The stage presents a family drama one season, a romantic farce the next, but itself remains unaffected beyond wear and tear. Few addresses retain their stories the way that peeling houses on the prairie do.
The old farmhouse sold quickly. It had been transformed from a daunting fixer-upper to a “Family Paradise” for “Secluded & Peaceful Country Living,” according to the listing. When we moved out, it was to start over with a completely clean slate. My sister and I leaned over the blueprint, arguing over the crisp white rectangles that would be our bedrooms. We browsed the aisles at Home Depot, picking out closet doors and paint samples. Instead of fitting our stories into the spaces that had been built before us, we constructed the house specifically with our family in mind, down to the dimensions of our television for the built-in entertainment center.
The house my father built that summer was level and airtight, with modern fixtures and appliances. After the movers departed and the evening frenzy of unpacking subsided, I navigated through the maze of cardboard boxes and climbed into my bed. The faintly acetic smell of fresh paint and new carpet hung in the air. As I closed my eyes, I listened to the unfamiliar sounds around me. I made out the rustling of tree branches outside, the humming exhale of the ceiling vent, and even the throaty bass of a bullfrog calling across the nearby pond. But when my ears tuned in to the walls around me, I heard only silence.
Kelsey Rexroat is a writer, editor and avid traveler. You can contact her at kelseyrexroat.com for questions and freelance opportunities.
