The A Street house

The A street house... 

The house on A street was the first proper house my partner and I had rented together, and I moved there newly pregnant. I ran a daycare as my home business, a role that seemed to suit our phase in life, so we set about making a picket fence around the place. We smuggled our favorite hen into the yard and tried to remain blissfully unaware of the town's ordinances. The house grudgingly accepted our presence, and we painted and nested and worked making it the hub of our businesses and soon-to-be expanding family. We used the downstairs bedroom across from the bathroom at the bottom of the stairs for the daycare nap room and guest room. It was on the shady side of the house and was perpetually dim, with a closet door that never seemed to latch securely.  

During that peculiar time in our lives as I was waxing heavy with our first child, I was taking art classes, and the teacher insisted we do a series of self-portraits. Trying to squirm out of such wanton hubris, I drew myself in charcoals wearing a feathered mask. When I drew my eyes behind the mask, they scared me. I hid the sketch in the back of the guest room closet. I pulled it out later to show my friends; the eyes seemed to have taken a life of their own, shadowed behind the feathery façade. I always put it back, faced the corner, and tried to forget it was there. When we moved out of the house, we never found that picture.  

After our baby daughter died, stillborn, and I had surrendered her body to the mortician, I wondered if she would haunt me. I had cursed her in my womb, after all. I had wished not to have a daughter. How could I not blame myself for her death? 

Since our house was in the middle of town and we ran our businesses out of it, we had people over more often than not. The Halloween after our child died, friends brought over a Ouija board. I had mixed feelings about it, because the energy of the house made me feel as though I was not alone. I was still in my mid- twenties and had only recently made the separation from my childhood religion, Southern Baptist. Ouija boards, dancing, and cards were definitely verboten. Trying to shake off my superstitions, I suggested we retire to the creepy back bedroom to try the board out.  

We refilled our glasses from the box of wine in the refrigerator and laughed into the quiet bedroom. Lighting candles to set the mood, we laid our finger tips on the plaquette. I resolved to let the spirit move me. Deep inside, I was uneasy, knowing that the veil is the thinnest near Samhain. I dreaded speaking to my newly dead infant daughter. Of course, the pointer began moving, and after we asked a couple of general questions, it spelled out her name.  

I broke the connection and went for more wine, pretending it was all a big joke. They didn’t know the cries I had sent out to the Universe as my daughter lay cold and still in the operating room. How I had called out to god, goddess, the universe, SOMETHING! Not to bargain for her life, because I knew she was gone, but for companionship in my life’s darkest hour. To know that I didn’t have to bear this terrible truth alone.  

The universe was silent.  

I vowed to that silence, that profound emptiness, that if it wasn’t there for me now, I could deal with everything else life threw me by myself. In my greatest hour of despair, I was my only comfort, and the act of consoling my partner, her father, was the only thing that kept me from curling up and dying with her.  

So that night, months later, I did not trust my self-destructive girlfriends and their catty, thoughtless ways. I suspected that the Ouija board was being driven by young, foolish women who were sorting out their own sexuality, fertility, and power. Still, those eyes behind the self -portrait that disappeared and the Ouija board messages from my dead, infant daughter haunt me like the memories and dreams for her life that we had between those walls, the empty nursery quietly dismantled, hidden in an obscure storage building to gather dust. 

A visit with Ada & Friends

In my twenties I worked for a historical hotel at a dilapidated seaside resort on San Juan Island. Its greatest claim to fame was that Teddy Roosevelt had slept there, and hotel clerks dutifully schlepped the antique guest roster featuring his name in its heavy wood and glass case back and forth from the lobby to the back offices. Locally it was also known for more sinister events. 

In the not-so-distant past, a love triangle had formed between year-round employees over a damp and insular winter. The jealous boyfriend had stalked his unfaithful lover and found her in a compromising position with one of their co-workers, the two of them tangled together on the chintz cover of one twin bed in the shabby off-season hotel. In a fit of passion, he shot them both and then himself. The housekeepers whispered that the blood stains could still be seen around the baseboards in Room 8, faded in amongst the outdated flowery wall-paper and the tired carpet. 

The hotel was also said to be haunted by Ada, the ghost of the nanny for the family that had owned the limestone quarry at Roche Harbor in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. What was now the resort restaurant had been the family home, and the executive dining room at the top of it was rumored to be Ada’s favorite place to haunt. 

As the night clerk, it was my job to turn off all the lights in the hotel and lock the doors before leaving late each evening. I have always been a scaredy-cat, and when scheduled for the night shifts I would prudently go directly upstairs and turn off all the lights and shut each room’s door before the housekeeping crew and hotel manager had left for the day. This particular afternoon, I felt charged and sensitive as I moved down the hall past Room 8 at the top of the stairs. The narrow steps creaked as I climbed up them, and the low-slung afternoon autumn sunshine slanting through the wavy, antique windows, illuminated the mobiles of dust motes hanging in the still air. 

My habit had been to make my way across the crooked floorboards to the suite on each floor, negotiate the labyrinth of vintage furniture to the small bathroom, and work my way through each room, checking to make sure that they were ready for any spontaneous guests that might check in on a quiet, fall evening. The hotel gave one the feeling that wherever you were, there was someone on the other side of the emptiness. In a closet, around a door, on the top floor when you were in the bowels of the laundry room or under the stairs.  A glimpse of movement in the watery reflection of an old standing mirror. The in-house phone would ring sporadically and when you placed the receiver up to your ear, the underwater phone cables seemed to be trying to convey some garbled message. Eventually, after too many calls to make sense, I would just answer the phone and say, “Hi Ada! How are you?”

Once I had turned all the lights out and shut all the doors in the hotel, it was time to stand watch at the front desk and mind the resort phone as the shadows lengthened and the shorter day came to an end. Off season was a solitary time, with just the bare-bones restaurant crew, the general property manager, and me to wait out the time clocks. The hotel was empty of guests and only a few condos were occupied, so I languished informally on the desk, chatting with my boyfriend on the phone to keep the heebie-jeebies away. I was very engaged with our conversation, yearning for him in that new romance sort of way, when a small, modestly dressed older woman materialized right in front of me on the other side of the desk. In the blink of an eye it took me to register her presence, she was gone, and the air in the lobby had a feeling of being emptier than a moment before.

The exclamation of surprise was still falling from my lips into my lover’s ear while I wondered if I had really seen her. I told him what had just happened, we marveled at the uber creepiness of it all. I was more surprised than frightened, and she hadn’t seemed menacing in any way, but the hotel felt less settled than usual. The pallid sun had warmed the wooden facade and the evening was turning crisp and dark in a way only a Pacific Northwest autumn can bring, so maybe that was why the hotel creaked and groaned ominously. Brooding dark trees and dripping moss coupled with the sharp chill in the air made everything more somber, foreshadowing the winter months to come. Unfortunately, I had ridden my motorcycle to work and parked it behind the hotel. I wasn’t relishing the idea of the cold ride home, even though it was less than a mile away.

The property manager bumbled by. When I told him about Ada he guffawed. “Ada?! What’s she doing over here?” He agreed that given how quiet the evening was and my recent ghost sighting, I could leave early. Then he disappeared into the darkness to make his erstwhile rounds. 

With a sense of relief, I started packing up my things and closing down the front desk office. The hotel staircase reflected darkly in the window of the side door as I trundled Teddy Roosevelt’s precious signature and its protective case to the back office and quickly shut the doors. I switched off the last lights, plunging the hotel into complete blackness, then grabbed my backpack and coat and hurriedly shut and locked the door. A few faint lampposts illuminated the cobblestone pathway in front, and the heels of my boots clicked on the hard surface, making me feel exposed. I hastened up the side of the hotel and to the back parking area where the housekeeping carts were plugged in, waiting for the morning housekeepers to blearily begin tomorrow’s drudgery.

A light caught the edge of my peripheral vision. I glanced up to see the light in Room 8 shining through the vintage lace curtains. 

That’s odd, I thought to myself, I’m sure I turned that off.

I looked up again, just in time to see the curtains move. The hair on my neck stood on end. I jumped on my motorcycle and popped it into first gear, spraying loose gravel on the old white boards of the hotel as I revved up the back hill, past the abandoned doctor’s house and the old green garden shed. The windows of the buildings stared back at me darkly. All except for Room 8, which shone like a beacon behind me.