4 a.m. in the big, blue house. in The Big, Blue House, year one.

This house is weird late at night. I get spooked easily, and I realize it’s no Victorian mansion, with its fourteen rooms and thirteen closets, but it’s huge for just two people. It’s the biggest house I’ve ever personally lived in, let alone to live in with just myself, Don, and several cats.

The floors creak, usually explainably. The clocks tick. The appliances run. The curtains wave in the wind from the ceiling fans. And all of these corners and doorways take on an almost sinister aspect, especially in the attic and the basement, where the layout is tight, and almost maze-like. And sometimes, a few times a month, one of the old doorbells rings on its own. I know it’s just humidity and temperature changes, but it’s neat, so I leave it.

And of course the big freezer is in the basement, all the way at the back. So it’s through the kitchen, through the basement door, down the stairs past the landing and the back/side door, all the way to the bottom, right into the “rec room”/basement bedroom, through that to the opposite side, into the wash room, right again and around the corner to the basement bathroom, then through a further door to the storage room. It’s directly under the first floor bathroom, in the furthest rear corner of the house.

As I pass the “octopus furnace” I say “Hi ghosts” because the shadows there overlap each other, from the several lights on different sides, and you can’t see behind the furnace. It creates a tiny space between the furnace and the back wall, where there are two closets and a trash can, and some of the previous owner’s old work coveralls are still down there.

Maybe I should wash them, and put them in garment bags. Then they might seem less spooky. I hear you, dear reader, “Why not throw them out?”. Because they’re so old that they’re kitchy. They’re a kind of plaid with naugahide knees and elbows that isn’t made any more.

They left us quite a bit of old stuff, that they probably just thought was crap, but I love it. It’s all 70s-80s vintage, and it reminds me of my childhood.

So I embrace the ghosts. The ghosts of decades gone, making me feel at home, in a house that my parents would’ve loved.

But then I sit up in my room with the lights on, because there’s no two ways around the fact that it is spooky.

Originally, I had my bed on the third floor, with its five closet doors, reminding me of countless horror movies where some ghost or creature lives inside an upstairs closet. The cats would sometimes stare at the back window, and that creeped me out. Now I’m on the second floor, which is slightly better, but still creepy. I could sleep on the couch I guess, but with all these bedrooms that seems like a shame.

Last updated August 16, 2022