Renters flocked from all over the world to book stays in a real haunted house. They came for the fiery autumn leaves during the day and remained awake all night for the unexplainable sounds and hazy figures in the shadows. Athena’s rental policies only stoked the mystique: “Landlord cannot answer service calls between sundown and sunrise,” “If electricity fails, try generator. If generator fails, try prayer,” and a basket labeled, “Soiled bed linen here.”
Small charms and stick constructions hung from the trees between the guest house and the main house. Throughout the half-mile walk, Hanna lost count of how many oddities caught the midday light or spun on their rough twine tethers. A gentle breeze whispered through the maples, birches, and tamaracks, the rustle of leaves and needles like words breathed at the edge of her hearing.
Goosebumps rippled over her forearms. “Is the main house really haunted?” she asked.
“That may be the wrong question to ask,” Athena answered in a philosophical tone. “To answer that question, we would need to clarify it. A better question might be, ‘What is haunted?’”
“You know, ‘Is it haunted?’ really doesn’t seem like it would be difficult to answer. It’s ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and ‘no’ includes the subset of ‘people are so gullible’.”
“Very well. Is the main house haunted by what?”
Hanna remembered why she didn’t call Athena first. “Ghosts.”
“What are ghosts?”
“The spirits of dead people?”
“Spirits? Or memories?” Athena glanced over, a small smile curling up the edges of her lips. “I promise you, I am not attempting to be difficult on purpose. What I am attempting to do is to show you that ‘haunting’ and ‘ghost’ are not catch-all terms. There are different flavors, if you will, even outside of culturally specific ghosts. Each flavor indicates very different conditions.”
For every time Hanna wanted to strangle her friend for her inability to provide simple, straightforward answers, three more times when Hanna found herself fascinated presented themselves. “Memories can haunt places?”
“They surely haunt enough people, but that’s rather different. In my experience, placesdohave memories. The energies that pervade buildings, or land, remember the forms they once took. Consider an old house, one inhabited by the same people for decades. The people who lived within had certain routines. Every evening, the wife would go to the kitchen to wash dishes, scrub the stove, and look out the window at the woods beyond.”
“All right.”
“She wears that path in the energies every night for fifty years. Like acid etching patterns in glass. Then one day, she dies in her sleep. Her son inherits her home and chooses to live in it, because housing prices are nonsense.” Athena rolled her eyes. “One night, he steps into the kitchen and sees his mother at the sink. Her hands move, washing dishes that are no longer there, as she did a thousand times before. Her spirit is not there. She died with a clean conscience and felt no need to linger. Her home, however, remembers. An apparition of her now haunts the place, harmless and even fond.”
“That’s kind of beautiful,” Hanna said. “Does the main house have an apparition like that?”
“Several. The house has stood a long time. It has seen many people and events worth remembering.”
Hanna smiled.She’s poetic when she wants to be.“Is that all it’s haunted by?”
“No. If all it had was an infestation of apparitions, I would not need these.” Athena gestured at the charms hanging from the boughs around them. “Apparitions have no intent. They are visions programmed by the past, and they do not deviate from their coding. That woman in the kitchen does dishes forever, stares into the woods until the energies of the place are so disrupted that the memory is forgotten. She does not know her son is there. She does not know she had a son at all. She is what she is, neither more nor less. What you likely consider ‘ghosts’ are different.”
“They know you’re there, and know who they are? Or were?”
“Anecdotally, this differs for each individual haunt. Some are little better than the apparitions. They are stuck at a particular point in their lives, and they relive it, over and over again. Unlike apparitions, you can feel them. Cold air in their wake. A shiver when they pass through you. They will probably not even notice you in their obsession to complete the task that compels them.”
“But others do?”
“Yes. Some might notice you and mistake you for people they have known. Others will recognize you for an intruder, though they may not either know or recall your true identity. It seems difficult for the dead to retain information about the living. Perhaps because the world has moved on, and they remain stubbornly trapped in a time that exists only for them now. Not unlike half of Washington, DC.”
Hanna choked on her spit.
Athena continued while Hanna coughed. “Concept seems important to ghosts. They might not remember, say, the mother who lives in their home is called Mary and likes the color green. They will recognize her as The Mother. So if they remember their own mothers fondly, they may treat Mary well.”
“And if they didn’t like their mother, Mary isn’t going to have a good time.”
“Mary is going to sell the house and ponder becoming a nun, yes,” Athena said with a nod. “Most ghosts are harmless. They cannot hurt you, though the strongest of them can terrify or trick you into hurting yourself. Malicious shits, those. Being dead gives them a bad attitude.”
“Can’t say as I blame them for that,” Hanna said. Now she could see the house through the trees in front of them, painted a rustic green to harmonize with the natural colors around it.
Three floors, she decided, two main ones and a cellar, with dormer windows peeking out from the slope of the roof. A porch ran the full length of the home’s rear side, covered to shelter the comfortable furniture that waited for guests to relax in it. Either Athena or a hired landscaper had laid in bushes and flower patches near the house. A charming place, the perfect, quiet getaway for travelers who wanted a lovely retreat.
Except for the wall of cold around it. The heaviness of the air, thick and difficult to breathe in. Each inhalation provoked a primal response deep within, one that poured adrenaline into her bloodstream. Her hands began to tremble with uncontrollable shivers that grew worse the closer she approached the house. Stranger still, the flesh at the top of her spine burned, as if the ink she’d had tattooed into her skin threatened to catch fire.
Hanna stopped at the edge of the trees. She didn’t realize she’d done so until she noticed Athena ahead of her, staring back with one eyebrow cocked. “Are you all right?”