April 26, 2025 - Day 15 of the Pink Moon

It's the eve of the new moon and I am emailing an abstracting company in Duluth to obtain a record of the prior owners of my childhood home.

In Gothic texts, therefore, the past is a site of terror, of an injustice that must be resolved, an evil that must be exorcised.

-Monica Michlin, quoting Catherine Spooner

I tend to see myself in unexpected narratives, and one narrative in which I see myself often is the haunted house. I won't go into the gritty details right now, but my childhood was not safe or stable. Before I understood the breadth and depth of its effect on me, I kept finding myself feeling haunted. My interior, unaddressed turmoil was the lens through which I experienced everything. This led to Disquiet, a term that I related to from the World of Darkness game Promethean: The Created:

When a Promethean spends enough time around humans, the humans begin to fall prey to Disquiet, the feeling that there is something not just fundamentally different, but utterly wrong about the Promethean. Disquiet initially manifests itself as distrust or avoidance of the Promethean; at its worst, it can blossom into mindless rage that can only be abated by the death of the Promethean.

I felt like there was this toxic element to me, and that everywhere I went slowly became more and more inhospitable to me. If I went to a coffee shop long enough to be recognized, I would stop going. If my barber would act familiar to me, I would change barbers.

This is a winding way of getting to my point: I do not know if I believe in hauntings, but in the home I grew up in, I felt haunted.

The Crawlspace

There were at least two doors we never opened in the house. One of them was in the bathroom, and the other was in my bedroom. They were both maybe two feet tall and a foot and a half wide, and latched with a hook-and-eye. My parents told me to never go inside because there was no air inside and I would suffocate. As an adult, I know this is bullshit, but as a child I believed it completely. A few times I opened the one in my room and just looked inside, only able to see a few feet of bare insulation before a seemingly total, absolute darkness enveloped the space. I could only stand for it to be open for a minute or so before I would close and lock it again. I never opened it at night, and I remember in one of my many nightmares as a kid, a long-limbed thing emerged from it in the middle of the night, and I lie on my side staring at it, the head of my bed along the wall next to it.

The Minotaur

From the first paragraphs of the novel, the father is introduced as a Minotaur-like figure through the connotations of the thread and animal imagery deployed: “From the house you hear the sound you have come to escape… From it travels a flat thread of sound, and you feel yourself go empty listening to it. ‘It’s Papa’, you say. A raw edge to the wind’s flight above the fields, a sound like an animal would make.”

The first thing I learned to hate was myself. The second thing I learned to hate was my father.

He was at times jovial, but most of the time aloof and prone to sudden outbursts of rage. He seemed to want nothing to do with being a father whatsoever, only preparing a meal for us once or twice in the 14 years he was in my life, and only because of my mother being out of town. He would get home from work a little after me and my mom, and when I heard his car pull into our gravel driveway, I would move whatever I was doing into my room, or if it was late enough I would turn out the lights and pretend to be asleep. I understood from as early as I could remember that he did not just not love me, but actively reviled me, the way he seemed to revile the whole of the world.

Whether a dream or a memory, I remember one night pretending to be asleep late at night, likely after suddenly waking up in the middle of the night as I have always done my entire life. I remember hearing him outside my door, keeping my eyes shut, as still as possible, as if playing dead. I heard the sliding and crinkling of my dysfunctional accordian door as he came into my room and walked towards me in my bed. I remained as still as possible while he stood over me, watching me. The memory falls apart and ends there as another frayed end of myself never quite tied off.

The Basement

For any perpetually terrified child, the basement is the breeding ground of nightmares. I was no exception. During the slow, warm summer afternoons, I would stand at the top of the descending steps in our kitchen down into that threatening darkness. I would look into it and it would look back into me, as if saying it may be bright where you are, but I can still reach out and hurt you.

The basement was always the domain of my father, with one room of it dedicated to his numerous old PCs, ancient computer hardware, and other miscellaneous media and electronics. He had mounted a pulley system in the beams of the ceiling that connected to a sort of leather or plastic cuff, which would go around his neck. He would then use it to pull, crack, or adjust his neck, but I always thought it looked like an attempted suicide.

In other parts of the basement, a black mold encroached on the white walls, like the darkness of the basement was staining the painted concrete itself. My mother, allergic to mold, would bleach down the walls herself, the idea of my father doing it out of the question. To my memory, it never stopped coming back.

In my last years in the house, my mother enlisted a contractor for repairs to the house that I cannot remember. What I do remember, though, is him going into the basement and reporting that someone had removed all of the supports for the first floor of the house save for one central support in the center. He was amazed that the house was still standing. The supports that may still be in the basement to this day are black metal, and they move like car jacks to buoy the ceiling from the earth.

After my father left, after the police took most of the hardware in his room in the basement, my sister and I set out to clear out the rest as a favor to our beset mother. All I remember is finding the magazine and two bullets for a Glock that nobody knew my father had, not even our mother.

The Walls

The same contractor who checked out the basement was working in the dining room. He had set out to repair the drywall in the room, but when he removed the existing cracked drywall, he found inside an interior wall, wallpaper. The wallpaper was a faded olive green, with scant white vertical stripes, and most notably it looked like it had been entirely engulfed in flame before being put out and walled over. The exposed supports behind this wallpaper were also entirely charred.

Opposite that wall was an exterior wall which abutted the gravel driveway. The clearance between an approaching car and the exterior wall was mere inches. When the contractor exposed the interior of this wall, he found similarly charred supports. However, these were also broken inward, in the rough shape of a car.

Now I position myself at the dining table in this room, eating dinner every night in tension I could cut with a knife. I always had to sit at the table extra long because the textures of foods were very difficult for me to handle. I would sit there in a stalemate with my mother, my sister and father already gone. A dusty chandelier hung above us, and above that the creeping rot of the accumulated water from the bathroom. To my back, the burned wallpaper, to my front the burnt and smashed supports, all built over with drywall.

The Rest

There's more assorted strangeness to the house that merits less narrative. My bedroom door would open and close with the wind if the windows were open, so much so that when I was pretty young the hinges tore out of the doorframe. My dad replaced it with the accordion door from my closet, and didn't affix the guide rail or latch properly at all, so it would limply hang halfway across the doorframe in its most-closed position, ensuring I never had privacy.

In the middle of the night one night, the drywall on the slanted ceiling above my sister's bed abruptly collapsed onto her. She wasn't injured, and the explanation given was that roofing work had cracked the drywall.

For some demented reason, possibly infected with the mind virus of HGTV in the early 2000s, my parents decided to install thick, ornate carpet in our bathroom to match the extremely poorly painted green trim. I think it was less than a year after when we started seeing water damage appearing on the ceiling of the dining room below the bathroom, because the carpet retained every iota of moisture from baths and showers. They tore it out shortly after, leaving the wood bare and exposing carpet adhesive, nails, and paint.

The Present

Now I live in a small, one-bedroom apartment with only my cat. It has been over a decade since I've seen the house, but I still think about it anytime I hear a strange noise in the night, anytime I see motion out of the corner of my eye. I have done a lot of work to heal and to re-raise the parts of myself that were raised to hate themselves above all else. It is from this position of strength and wellbeing that I am approaching the narrative of my life and my origin. My sister has been the family storyteller since we left that place, so much so that it has become her career. It is only now that I am taking hold of my own narrative, and my own place in my history.

So in a long, roundabout way, that is why I am contacting an abstracting company in St. Louis County, Minnesota. To identify the previous owners of the property, to see if I can find out what happened there.