"The House, Crooked to the Eye"

 Author’s Note:

The house referred to in this essay is a real place. You can go there. Whether or not any artifact of my upbringing there exists outside of my own memory, or that of my brother, I have no way of knowing. The title of this essay comes, with respect, from Shirley Jackson. She, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, and many other “Gothic” authors have contributed to my blurred rememberings of that place, but though it reads like fiction, the story is true.

From October 1982 to October 1997, I lived there, just off North Market Street in Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania. Across the road was an ancient cemetery on a high hill overlooking part of the town, where some of us played hide-and-seek or dared one another to visit under the full moon. No children came down the winding lane past the gooseberry bushes to trick-or-treat at our door because of how unsettlingly frightening it looked. Parents of school friends invited me to their houses rather than sending their kids to mine. Several attempted birthday parties never happened because classmates—or their parents—wanted nothing to do with the property or the house.

It was a historical marvel, but even the Revolutionary-era inscriptions left by Hessian mercenaries weren’t enough to make the townspeople overlook the site’s unsettling atmosphere.

Family visited, yes, but mainly stayed outside. We always went elsewhere for holidays. Big family dinners were only ever held with the immediate members of our clan. There were never parties or gatherings there. Even my stepfather’s mother, who lived in her own house on the property, rarely ever came down the hill to the house. We would sooner scrunch into her tiny but cozy domicile than gather around the table in the big house.

All of this to say that, whatever skepticism you may feel as you read about the house I grew up in, please know that it nevertheless made people feel unsettled and uncomfortable. It was a feeling that the residents got used to, but not one that could be ignored.

The house we lived in when I was a boy was built in 1757. It was a huge cubic block of gray limestone and ancient timbers that previous owners had tried and failed to hammer into modernity. My stepfather, the most recent in a line of owners who attempted to square the house with the era, insisted that it had a great deal of character, which was a nice way of saying that it was cold in the winter, hot in the summer, always murky inside, and without the conveniences other houses had. “The house, crooked to the eye,” as Shirley Jackson said, looked like a house from the outside, but once in its dim recesses, perception and mood changed. My lifelong fascination with all things dark and Gothic originates from my hope—in fact, my need—to understand and confront that unsettling childhood house.

After she and my father divorced, my mother remarried a few years later and packed up her sons and our belongings and moved us there. I was just four. Whatever I felt then, as we drove down that lane and the house loomed up before me, is gone now, like pain from a long-healed wound; I know I must have had feelings about it, but I can’t get back to them. I do remember that my new stepbrothers took no pity on me and used the house’s weird angles, inky corners, steep and treacherous stairs, and odd, twisting hallways to scare me at every opportunity.

We had no real bedrooms. Instead, my stepfather constructed walls made with boards, joined to fit together seamlessly, and screwed into the ceiling beams. This formed a barrier between the space my brother and I shared and my mom and stepdad’s room. Rather than a door, a curtain of stiff fabric covered a rectangular opening. Likewise, the only other door into my room was a curtain hanging between the chimney structure at the head of my bed and an inside wall. Despite the house’s shadows, draped fabric walls, and oddly constructed “rooms,” I accepted it as any child would, simply because it was where we lived.

As children, we cover each part of our childhood dwellings with tiny fingerprints, examining everything from the floor level up. At age four, I was learning, recording, building connections, and strengthening neurons. Rather than carpeted floors and ceiling fans and closets, as my peers were experiencing, my childlike imagination was fed by the old house. I learned early to count steps as I went up and came down because the number sometimes changed. I learned to feel my way through the gloomy maze of hallways and rooms, as the angles of the corners were sometimes hairpin and sometimes wide, but never exactly ninety degrees. The hallway would curve left when it should have gone straight, dumping me into gloom that smelled of nowhere I’d been before. Upstairs especially, one had to take special care, as the spaces seemed to expand and contract. A midnight trip to the kitchen might be quick and soundless, but returning, I might find that I had wandered unwittingly into another room I had never been in before.

Lying on my bed, staring at the beams carved with Hessian bayonets, I sometimes felt as if the bed was affixed to the wall and I was suspended on its surface, other times as if I was on the ceiling looking down. The stone facades cast shadows that looked like unkind faces, especially when the shadows grew long. After inviting historians and anthropologists to investigate certain anomalies in the house’s attic structure, those college men said that one of the original families had a child with special needs that they kept up there. After they departed with their notes, we all listened in quiet horror as steamer trunks and footlockers and other items were agonizingly put back to their original places, but not by any of us. The sense of being watched, that the house was breathing, that the shadows grew more tenebrous on brighter days, were all part of the house’s overpowering nature.

Even today, if I think hard enough, I can still hear the creaking floors and other strange sounds and feel the light trying to penetrate the gloom. It is a part of me, the way any childhood home is for one’s formative years, but this house came with a powerful and brooding personality all its own.

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When I was twelve, my mother was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia. By the time I turned fourteen, she and my stepfather had embarked on an ongoing quest for treatment. His mother lived on the property in a small log house that he restored and updated, but I stayed in the old house. From then on, until I was halfway through high school, I was alone there.

Like Hareton Earnshaw, the sad, uneducated, nearly feral character in Wuthering Heights, with whom I have so much in common that to read that book today is to harrow up old feelings of neglect and frustrated individuality, I was left to my own devices in the black heart of that old house. It was during these prolonged absences, though, that the poisonous atmosphere of my mother’s deep Evangelical beliefs broke and parted like fog in a wind, and portions of the world could be experienced without her sometimes zealous parental oversight. In the absence of family activity and the bustle of daily life, the house grew more potent. It wrapped me in its ample darkness until I became a creature of gloom within its bending, shifting, shadowy walls.

My mother and stepfather would come back from time to time and instigate a little routine in my life. Then there were quarrels about grades, homework, chores, the messiness of my room, and the house’s power would recede a bit, as if frightened by the noise of more than one inhabitant. Then they would be gone again, seeking treatment, and I’d be alone. Then the house would close in again.

Once, midway through high school, they came home and stayed for several months together after a particularly trying experimental treatment had fallen far short of its promised efficacy. My mother felt the somber nature of the house in her spirit by then, I think, and it nearly broke her. She succumbed to deep bouts of depression. Desperate to help her, my stepfather took her for electric shock treatments, which made her childlike and vague, sometimes vacant. After that, the house seemed to feed on our misery and forced us into the lightless corners of our own dread. I remember feeling stifled, suffocated, unable to get a deep breath, and running full bore out of the house on frigid winter nights just to feel the clean, cold air on my skin.

Not long after, learning from her doctors that my mother’s health situation was dire, they departed again, this time seeking more serious intervention. Soon after they drove up the lane away from the house, I entered and felt myself swallowed again by the shadows within.

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Inside, I dwelt in an imaginary realm where I was a normal kid from a normal family, with doting parents that actually cared about my emotional well-being, nice clothes, a dependable used car, like my best friend Lee and so many of my other friends had, and prospects for the future. By late adolescence, I had not yet arrived at the point in my life where neglect during my upbringing in that house would show through in a young man with severe social anxiety, deep feelings of impenetrable loneliness, and an inability to feel anything about myself except unworthiness to be anywhere but alone in the house. Every daydream, every fantasy, every heartfelt wish, every desire to be accepted and loved was perpetually contaminated by the darkness within those walls, which only deepened my feelings of being left alone, unwanted, and forgotten. I lost myself in a realm of unending imagination that I couldn’t shake. The house offered me false dreams and then consumed the despair born from my recognition of the deception.

It was part prison, part sanctuary, part companion, and part jailor, and it was full of centuries of bad feelings of all who ever dwelled there. It haunted me with those hopeless memories and left its mark on my spirit. It tied the worst loss of my young life to itself so that the only memories I have of my mother stem mainly from the house. When the anniversary of her birth or death rolls around, it brings my mind swiveling back to those twilit, meandering halls and mysterious, shadow-strewn rooms. I joke that I am only truly at ease in a dark room or in the long nights of the dark half of the year. It is because, in some way, the gloom of the house now resides inside me with those memories, as much a part of me as my bones.

These impressions are rather stark, and yet it seems as though I can only remember from the vantage point of a third-person witness, not my own experiences. I was young when we moved to Schaefferstown, so there is a chance that the upheaval from that period of transition burned out some of the memories that average kids have. Even so, these feelings are so deeply rooted in my formative years that, to me, they are incontestable. There are some vague impressions from my mother’s second wedding, but those are mainly based on old photos. I very clearly remember starting school, my teachers, and visits to Pop Bare and my grandmothers.

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As hard as it can be to acknowledge the murky memories of the house, I know that my time there was real. The darkness of the place dwelt in me for years after I was kicked out. The tendrils of it clung to me even back then. When I periodically visited my grandmothers or my father on every other weekend, the experience of being in modern homes felt cloying, suffocating, and overwhelming. Their homes were warm in the winter and cool in the summer and were not inhabited by the unseen chittering and jibbering of restless things in the attic or the arched-ceilinged basement. There were no echoes of furniture moving or floorboards creaking when I was alone in the house. The silence felt jarring. It was too quiet, and it felt painfully empty. Those other houses had the same number of steps going up or coming down. Their upstairs hallways and corridors had an unchanging number of rooms secured by wooden doors and painted walls adorned with family pictures. They felt inviting, safe, and homey.

Over the years since I left the Schaefferstown house for the last time, I have routinely remarked that that part of my life was cobbled together from the best—or worst—bits of Dickens, Poe, Hawthorne, and Henry James, with Shirley Jackson and Lovecraft trickled in for good measure. With the house as the centerpiece of my childhood, it is a wonder that I got out with my sanity intact. I got out of it, but the house still lives on in my head and heart. I sometimes still dream that I am there, wandering the meandering, dreary halls, unable to find a way out. I have never been back, except to drive Micki past it once early in our relationship, maybe as proof, or to snoop via Google Earth in moments of bleak nostalgia. It belongs to new owners now, but I hear that they live in other housing on the property and that the house stands empty again, perhaps awaiting new inhabitants to devour.

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In October of 1997, just shy of the first anniversary of my mother’s death, my stepfather and brother had a brutal falling out. I came home from school to be invited to a meeting with him in which he made it clear that we would be parting ways. He asked me to call Pop Bare and have him come get me and my things by the end of that week. He made it clear that anything we couldn’t take, he would destroy. He was as good as his word. No photos exist of our time there with the house in the background. There are no pictures from inside, either, which is yet another oddity that I sometimes cannot confront squarely. After her death, and along with her other possessions that I couldn’t take, my stepfather burned all evidence of us ever having lived there. Except for my brother’s corroboration and shared experiences, especially early on, I sometimes wonder if there is any tangible proof except from inside my head and heart.

As Pop Bare pulled up the long sloping driveway, his pickup truck filled to brimming with all the things I could fit into it, I felt an uncertainty and dread that would become a close friend over the next few years. As we moved away, I felt a sudden, sharp pain in my core that ripped the poorly healed scabs off the wounds of my loss. In that moment, I had a sense, too agonizing to understand fully, that the dark roots of my childhood house were being yanked free and that the house was sinking back into the abyss of long years and unhappy memories and that I was floating up out of the sunless depths to an uncertain and emotionally painful future. Maybe it was a premonition, at the very horizon of which I saw hope and peace for myself. Maybe it was merely the final, permanent removal of the house’s influence.

Whenever I think of that old place, though, that’s how I see it: hulking, lightless, like some monstrous creature lurking at the bottom of a sullen lake, black and imposing in the dim depths of memory; aware and, to further reference Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, not sane.

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I eventually found hope in my life away from that house. Its shadows have long been chased away by the bright, warming sunlight of unconditional love and acceptance from my family. It took me years, but I have since come to the understanding that the boy in that house deserved—but also desperately needed—love and acceptance, whether or not he was an inconvenient child. I used to feel dismal resentment at being born a walking daydream, with insatiable curiosity and a love of books and music, because those things made me different. The house found a sad boy—lonely, bullied by his stepbrothers and classmates, ignored and neglected by his parents, a casualty of divorce and remarriage—and settled on me and devoured my melancholy. That boy needed a home where love ruled, with parents who protected and encouraged his individuality. Instead, he got a haunted wreck of a house, writhen with its own centuries-old loneliness and the burdens of generations of sad, helpless mortality. That boy and that house became unlikely companions, and it is a wonder he survived the friendship.

Today my heart has healed, and I am no longer poisoned by those feelings of neglect and sadness. And yet, we are products of our environment growing up, and my environment inside that house was a mixture of the dark tales of Emily Brontë and Shirley Jackson and others, and it left me with a desire for dark rooms and a love of Gothic tales. All of which is because they remind me of my childhood home.

That place is as much a part of me as any other home I have dwelled in. I will never want to fully excise it from my history. The house, my life there, and the people who mattered then and still matter today will be with me at the last hour. I got out of there and missed being poisoned by its insanity. For this, I owe my stepfather a great deal. Burdened by the inescapable grief of my mother’s death, he brutally cut me free from my childhood home and all that it had become to me. I ached from the suddenness and trauma of his deed for years. That pain fed my alcoholism and brutal social anxiety. I resented him for taking it away from me and casting me into an uncertain future.

With the benefit of therapy and eventual recovery, I now realize that, as twisted and brutal as it was to be severed and pushed away from my childhood home, had he not done so, I might still be there myself, like the house—haunted, twisted, shrouded in solitary, feral memories long devoid of hope or light—if I had survived at all. So, odd as it sounds, I am grateful. Wrung with insane grief, the man did something that may have saved my life. It’s taken a long time, but mingled with my pain at the memory, I also now feel a sort of unexpected gratitude.

Unlike anyone else’s upbringing I know of outside Gothic fiction, I was raised in a house filled with misty half-rememberings and strange, shifting spaces, bad feelings, miserable fantasies, and a soul-devouring sentience. I realize that I’m not like other people. The term weird has been used liberally throughout my life to describe my eccentricities, perhaps justifiably so. Rather than feel upset by the epithet, I understand and accept it. When I have haltingly explained to Micki or our boys that during the most important period of development—when other kids were gathering to watch family movies or play board games—I was wandering through an old house that was and still is a dark and malignant place, mostly left to myself to explore the unsettling labyrinth within those clammy, stifling stone walls.

I might be weird, but knowing what I came through, if that’s all that’s wrong with me, then I’m incredibly lucky, and I know that very well. Reworking the old adage, I have often reflected that, you can take the boy out of the house, but can you take the house out of the boy? I'm living proof you can.