A hymn to haunted houses

On the homes we make, and the ones that make us

I live in a haunted house.

By ‘haunted’ I don’t mean that unquiet spirits live here, although that’s always a possibility. I mean that this house is alive, in all the many ways a thing can be alive.

On one level of aliveness we have all the creatures that live here. Two humans, but also rats, bats, scorpions, flatties and rain spiders, paper wasps and potter wasps, giant moths and praying mantises, frogs and geckos. Our windows don’t quite seal shut and some are simply boarded over with ill-fitting wooden planks, allowing access to anything able to crawl or slither. There is also a cat flap in the kitchen door, through which the genet climbs nightly. With springtime’s arrival the boomslang(s) will be lured closer by the resident rodents. Black scorpions the size of my palm will soon appear perched on our walls and in the kitchen sink, even though our house stands high above the ground. Winter or summer, things seen and unseen come and go, thudding, squealing, and scurrying through the days and nights.

I’m not always sure whether these creatures account for all the noise, however. This is a talkative house; an opinionated one, even. Often the floor creaks as if someone is walking in the adjoining room. Things clatter in the kitchen. Pipes rattle. Out of the blue the house sways back and forth like a top-heavy stiltwalker, and the wind teases at a single window latch. All the sounds that living bodies make – creaks, gurgles and snores, giggles, sighs, the odd fart – echo between these walls, even when we humans are quietly drifting off to sleep. Even, I would wager, when we aren’t here at all.

Then there are the memories. This house was built by its owner himself, gradually, exactly how he wanted it. Although some finishing touches have been worn away, everything here was meticulously dreamt, planned, and sweated into existence. Then for many years a truly eccentric assortment of people came and went. Innumerable parties were held, glasses broken, instruments played, drugs taken, meals made. People have fallen in love here. People have wept here. Pets have been buried here. Dave and I, relatively tame compared to previous inhabitants, are only one notch in the bedposts of this house, only one iteration of its many guests. And it seems to me that all the lives lived here have soaked into the walls, knocking paintings askew, gently going bump in the night.

And, of course: The house is built entirely of wood. And wood was once tree, which grew somewhere, which interacted with mycelium and moss, with insects and birds. When I go for a walk in the forest I often struggle to distinguish dead trees from the living – every decaying tree hosts so many lichens, toadstools, birds’ nests, that calling it dead, when it is feeding so many living things, feels completely arbitrary. Similarly, I know the trees that make up our house are technically dead, but still they carry something of the forest inside their cells. They bring the outside world inside, in a way that other building materials just don’t.

But is there something else in this house, beyond all the alivenesses that inhabit it? Does the house itself have a… soul?

I have always been something of an animist. As a child, I felt that everything I looked at was looking back at me, which was just as creepy as it sounds, and also a little bit wonderful. I still feel this way, if I’m being honest. I wonder if maybe all of us feel it, a little bit, when we allow ourselves to be as imaginative as we really are. People name their cars, after all. People talk to their computers, the contents of their handbags, their favourite clothes; they swear at broken kettles and loudly call their missing socks.

But I am not saying that all things are actually alive (whatever that means). I am not saying that our house has a coherent consciousness, a creature inside its walls that is not a tiny animal but the soul of the house itself. I mean, it very well might, and our understanding of consciousness just hasn’t caught up yet. Or it might be haunted by the spirit of a being who once was here. And if ghosts do exist, then I hope with all my heart that our house is haunted by the spirit of my dog. (Although if he were here I would have heard his ghostly self endlessly licking his own butthole by now.)

Point is, I don’t know if ghosts in that literal sense of the word actually exist, and more importantly, I don’t know if it matters. It would be weird and interesting if they did, but that’s not the only way a place can be alive. Regardless of any supernatural phenomena, this house is alive because of the thousands of living things that traverse it, that have dreamt and hunted and died here, that have consciousnesses small and large – some more alien than I can even conceive of. On top of that we have a thick layer of intention, heartbreak and love poured into these walls, the very wooden walls that still carry forest stories inside their fibres. All in all, I’d say that’s quite enough soul for any one house.

Dave and Woud, winter of 2023. 💚

***

I turn 35 tomorrow. I don’t tend to get weird about ageing, but this one felt significant. For one, legally I am now no longer a young person. Student initiatives, bursaries, youth empowerment programmes – they all cut off at 35. I still don’t know how to do my taxes, I laugh at butt jokes, and most of my dearly-held certainties have awkwardly faded back into questions. Yet, officially, I am no longer in the flower of my youth. If I were to conceive now, my pregnancy would be called a geriatric pregnancy. Chew on that.

I never had a clear plan for my adulthood. But what I did imagine, as a child, was that one day I would be less fucking awkward. One day I would be able to maintain eye contact effortlessly. One day I would figure out what to do with my hands when talking to people. One day I would be the centre of attention at dinner parties, flinging my head back and laughing with full-throated gusto. I would be unreservedly sexy, and a little bit glamorous, and not shy at all.

And for a little while, in my 20s, I actually got a taste of that. Cocaine and cocktails helped, as did the fact that I was living in a student town where people would move away before seeing my wobbly bits in the daylight. But these days I am made of wobbly bits. Living with another person has made me acutely conscious of my odd little anxieties, of how much I talk to myself, and sing really awful songs loudly throughout the house, and interrupt deep conversations because I saw a cool bird, and inexplicably burst into tears. Unexamined parts of my personality and habits suddenly stick out bony as my shoulder blades.

And developing friendships without a looming expiration date has meant accepting being seen again and again, by the same people, and hoping that they’ll stick around. Suddenly I am all thumbs, and unfunny jokes, and manic pixie girl mannerisms. Glamour feels further away than ever. If I were a house, estate agents would optimistically describe me as a “fixer-upper with lovely bones.”

But ah, I am so full of stories. Some of these stories are mine, and some I am guarding for other people, and some I’ve made up, but all of them are alive, bouncing inside the walls of my body like lightning bugs. Every unwieldy part of me opens and closes to the breath of story.

Here is a story that has been making a home for itself in my heart lately. Like all tales, it is only one way of understanding things, but right now it is the one I like the best:

I am not just myself, I am all the selves I’ve ever been. And on top of that I’ve assimilated parts of everyone I’ve ever loved. Somewhere in my gut lives a colony of bacteria who remember the taste of my very first beer. Somewhere in my brain there is grey matter charged exclusively with guarding the memory of my first kiss. In the movement of my hands are mannerisms I learned from high-school BFFs. My childhood fears live on in my nervous system.

Every day my brain throws out old information, and lets other information in, and my past is reshaped without so much as a wince. Every month my body presents me with another possible child, then lets it go, then tries again. And all the while, my crone self slumbers patiently beneath my breastbone, biding her time. At 35, I am an infinite hub of both history and possibilities, my roots forking into the past and future as far as the eye can see.

I am not just myself, I am the minuscule creatures that live in my gut and on my skin – more cells of them than there are cells of me (whatever me is). Inside and around me, entire ecosystems exist because I do. Tiny mites live in my hair follicles. Mosquitoes keep their young alive with my blood. Bees dive head-first into the flowers I’ve planted. The genet eats my leftovers, the bushpigs burrow in my compost heap. I don’t even want to imagine the many creatures nourished by our septic tank. And one day when I die, all these creatures and more will help distribute me into the far corners of the earth.

I fit into my life exactly. Nothing is superfluous, nothing is lost. Whatever I find odd about myself, there is a reason for it (and probably something that wants to eat it, too). Wherever I go, clouds of creatures accompany me like minuscule Labradors. Wherever I live, ecosystems spring up around me. I belong to this world.

I am, in a word, held.