Downstairs, there were custom-made amenities, like built-in bookcases, a glass chandelier, mantled fireplaces in the living and dining areas, a wood-paneled study, and an alcove in the foyer for a wall-mounted phone. There were also personalized eccentricities, like a dining room that was originally designed to double as a stage. Two long steps descended from it into the giant sunken living room, intended as the seating area. Other spaces evolved out of necessity, like the porch that later became a breakfast nook or the single-car garage that later became a laundry room.
Upstairs, the lay-out seemed like an afterthought, as if dinner-party ambiance and space for independent theater productions was ultimately more important than where people might sleep or brush their teeth. The rooms were nestled inside each other like a set of Russian dolls, with certain bedrooms and bathrooms that could only be accessed by walking through other rooms. Two of the four toilets in the house had windows directly behind them, so that someone in the yard might accidentally catch a glimpse of you pulling up your pants. Another toilet had a window directly beside it, so you looked like a thoughtful passenger on a slow-moving train to anyone peering up from the driveway if you happened to be doing your business when they arrived.
The last remaining bathroom was less of a “half” bath and more of an “eighth” bath, in that it consisted of no more than a single commode at the bottom of a hidden staircase. No sink. No tub. Just a toilet you had to step over to get into the next room. The one-eighth bathroom was no bigger than a mineshaft, with just enough space for the window-behind-the-toilet that apparently came standard with the home’s construction. The door that you faced as you sat on the stool, was a louvered Dutch-door design, with open slats like blinds, and top and bottom halves that opened and closed independently of one another. Leave the top half open, and you could carry on a conversation with someone in the adjoining room, like a bank teller who also happened to be taking a dump while he sorted your cash. Leave the bottom half open, and you could surprise unsuspecting intruders with the disturbing tableau of a defecating torso, severed and headless, in what would look to them like a closet at the edge of the room.
In addition to the maze of upstairs rooms and oddly placed commodes, there were other unexpected accents. There was a seemingly unnecessary window between the kitchen and the study, leftover from when the breakfast nook was an outdoor porch. And perpendicular to the Dutch door in the ⅛ bath was a regular door that opened to the bottom of the hidden staircase (or “secret stairs” as my siblings and I called them). From this claustrophobic foyer, you could exit the house through a rarely used side door infested with daddy-long-leg spiders. Or you could climb the dark, wood paneled staircase, carpeted with a long strip of ancient oriental rug, tucked accordion-style at the crease of each individual step. The top of the stairs was usually sealed, creating the haunting Esher-esque effect of a staircase ascending to nowhere. The second-level opening to the staircase was a rectangular section of floor the length and width of a burial plot in the far corner of a back bedroom. It pulled up like the entrance to storm cellar and was tethered to the wall with rusty chain. This floor/door was heavy, like a miniature replica of a medieval drawbridge, and would easily crush anything in its path if allowed to slam shut.
These days, families tend to decorate with cheerful landscape paintings or benign little knick-knacks purchased on vacation. The decor in my grandfather’s house was decidedly darker, possibly derived from the original floor plans of Disney’s Haunted Mansion. On opposite ends of the living and dining rooms, the painted portraits of my grandfather and grandmother peered down with the optical illusion of a gaze that followed you across the room. Similar portraits of their five children (my aunts and uncles) were distributed throughout the house, so that eery eyes were always upon you from various angles, like a team of hunters setting sights on their prey from elevated hiding places in a dusky forest.
The built-in bookshelves were lined with tattered tomes of French literature that creaked open like tiny coffins and gargoyles that had been secretly plucked by my grandfather from the rubble of bombed French cathedrals in the aftermath of World War II. Above the door of my grandmother’s bedroom, where one might expect a needle point with the phrase “Home Sweet Home”, was a marble death mask that had once, presumably, been attached to a larger human likeness of a deceased woman in eternal repose on the lid of her tomb. On my grandmother’s night stand was a statue of St. Michael, stepping on the necks of demons.
My grandfather’s brand of interior decorating might have induced night terrors in the typical 1950s housewife, but my grandmother always seemed right at home among his collection of stolen French relics. After all, she had also been “discovered” in the post-war wreckage of France; not in a pile, but in Paris, where they were both stationed as translators. Maybe they mapped out their home’s interior together, like an eerie love song to the macabre corners of my grandmother’s French heritage. Maybe it was a reflection of Grandpa’s quirky sense of humor, like his set of prank wine glasses. The stems ranged from perfectly straight to impossibly crooked, designed to make one’s guest think that he or she was drunkenly hallucinating by the third serving of wine. Or maybe one era’s “normal” is just another era’s “creepy”. Like old-timey black-and-white photos where no one smiled and anyone who moved looked like an apparition. Or like china dolls that used to be fancy gifts for little girls, but now only turn up in movies like The Conjuring for the express purpose of scaring people shitless.
My grandfather passed away before I was old enough to remember him, a few years before we moved into his house. He was buried in the front yard, which wasn’t all that uncommon in Southern culture for families who lived on substantial amounts of land. Nevertheless, it was a creepy point of interest for little school friends who came over to play. On the one hand, our friends’ families didn’t bury their dead in the patch of grass between the porch and the sidewalk in their subdivisions. On the other hand, our front lawn was the length of a football field and the small boulder marking his gravesite was too far in the distance to notice it was actually a headstone.
Despite its spooky museum-vibe and impromptu graveyard, our house was just a house to us, like anyone else’s. If anything, we found it infinitely more boring than the average home, based on its glaring lack of sidewalks, cul-de-sacs, and other kids to play with. But like most kids, who complain about never doing anything fun as you’re driving them away from a trip to the beach, we were easily bored, ungrateful, and completely oblivious to how good we had it.
During the day, the house was our playground inside and out. We did gymnastics in the oversized living room, housed our hundreds of Barbies on the bedrooms’ built-in shelving, rode our bikes around the gravel parking circle, and made messes in the sand pile. This feature was exactly what it sounds like: a giant pile of sand emptied from a dump truck near the tree line of the property. It began as a miniature mountain of granulated red clay that stained the shit out of our hands and clothes until the rain eventually diluted its redness. The sand pile was periodically refreshed after a year or so of being stomped into the underlying earth with our dirty, bare feet.
We shared our playground with “the babysitting kids” during the work week, when my mom ran a daycare out of our downstairs. The parents of the kids she kept were totally enchanted by the big, white house on the hill, surrounded on all sides by grass and woods. It was charming and idyllic in the daylight and really, only as creepy as you made it. That being said, kids can have nightmares with the light from the hallway shining directly on their faces with the intensity of an interrogation lamp. With no street lights or neighbors, it got realllly dark at our house. Almost every kid is afraid of the dark.
In the 12 years I lived in that house, I rotated through 4 different bedrooms and easily found something to be deathly afraid of about each one. First, there was the room with the random chandelier, hung precariously over the bed from exposed wires, giving the impression that the 50 lb glass carcass was dangling by mere threads. For fear of being crushed from the waist down, I made sure to sleep with my legs either spread-eagle or sufficiently askew, in the event that some Phantom-of-the-Opera style ghost brought my chandelier crashing down in the night.
Next, there was the back bedroom with the lime green carpet and secret staircase hatch, where I once dreamt that a rabid version of the Cowardly Lion shook my small black-and-white TV like a snow globe. I woke up the next morning to find my TV was mysteriously broken in real life. The closets were also popular nesting places for various plagues of insects, from wasps and bees to wood roaches as big as small birds. My dad once beat one to death with a can of insecticide when the spray wasn’t up to the task.
From there, I moved across the house to “the purple room” whose south-facing window framed a tree that looked like a six-fingered hand. It grew up out of the ground like a giant forearm pawing its way from the depths of hell. Its branches extended from a vine-choked wrist at exactly the level of my window. Fortunately, I couIdn’t see it from my bed. But I knew it was there, frozen in ominous anticipation of some future moment when it would come crashing through the glass and snatch me out of my room.
My fourth and final move was to the much larger bedroom you could only access by walking through The Purple Room. Here, my uncles had left behind messages in glow-in-the-dark paint, wholesome proclamations from their formative years, like “Go Tarheels!” and “UNC #1”. The scariest part of this room was the wood-burning fireplace we had sealed up in recent years with wood glue and particle board. I was in high school when I lived in this room, so my fears were more practical in nature: 1) what kind of vermin might crawl down the chimney to gnaw through the partition and eat my face off while I slept? And 2) how possible is it to develop hypothermia in a room so poorly insulated that ice in a bedside water cup does not melt on a cold winter night?
This last fact had been discovered years prior, when my older sister was still living in that room. She liked to sleep with a glass of ice water by her bed and frequently woke up to find fully-formed cubes still floating in her cup the next morning. Her ice-water ritual was also significant in our memories of the house because it required some unlucky person to go downstairs after dark. After much guilt and convincing, that unfortunate someone was usually me.
The main staircase descended straight down onto a small landing, followed by another 2 steps. On this landing was a large window you approached head-on as you ascended the lowest two steps. The glass of the window looked opaque in the darkness, so my imagination filled in the blanks with what lurked behind it. Balancing a water cup I’d somehow been guilted into transporting, I would sprint past the window and then slide along the stairwell wall as if magnetized to the wallpaper. This way, the mysterious sniper I imagined in the bushes had a much less manageable angle to shoot me from. I thought I was the only one compelled to behave this way, until my older sister and I found ourselves downstairs together at night and nearly elbowed each other over the banister trying to run past the window. After confirming that we were both trying to avoid being shot, we decided it must be what everyone thinks when they pass a dark window. Having now witnessed countless other people pass dark windows over the course of my life, I can confidently refute that claim. For this particular window, in this particular house, however, that seemed to be the general consensus. Reminiscing nearly 10 years later with my younger sister, I confirmed that she also carried out the same staircase ritual, based on the seemingly irrational fear that someone might try to shoot her through the window as she ascended the stairs at night.
When I left for college, the family sold my grandfather’s house to a middle aged couple and their young son. The house changed hands a few times before ending up with a group of developers. Last I heard, they updated the interior to more modern standards and live there all together like a miniature commune of professional adults.
It’s been more than 20 years now since I’ve set foot in my grandfather’s house, that still stands where he built it at the outer-edge of town. Much like childhood, that house is a place I can’t get back to but love to look back on. It pops up as the backdrop in my dreams and draws my attention in the background of old family photos. I like to hope that one day, we’ll convince the current owners to let us take a tour, or at least take a lap around the parking circle while I point things out to my kids through the open car window. Judging from the emphatic “NO TRESPASSING” signs clearly posted at the bottom of the long gravel driveway, the owners are not yet on board with my plans.
These days, I live in a regular neighborhood. I have sidewalks, a community pool, and a modest front lawn with nobody buried in it. When I think about the current owners of my grandfather’s house, I wonder how their experience compares to mine. As fully formed adults, I doubt they’ve spent much time doing cartwheels in the living room, climbing trees (the ones that don’t look like six fingered hands), or stomping across sand piles until they’re flush with the ground. But I bet it still smells the same coming home from a week’s vacation, and that maybe, just maybe, they sprint past the stairwell window at night, hoping to avoid an unseen sniper hiding in the darkness.
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