Writing Exercise #1 con't

The Haunted House

In the middle of the 400 block of Perry Street was a haunted house. Raymond and David and Patty and I knew it was haunted because when we walked past, it made all those little hairs on the backs of our necks stand up, even in the daylight. At one time it must have been grand and white, but most of the paint had peeled away over the years, making it hardly any color at all. The wood siding was loose in many places, especially on the second floor. And the backyard was a weedy jungle. Even the sidewalk in front seemed dangerous because between the walk and the street loomed the largest tree on the block which heaved up the concrete with its big knobby roots.

We used to dare each other to go up on the rotting square porch with its wobbly balastrads and look in the wavy windows. The lace curtains had rotted away so we could see that the inside was filled with old Victorian furniture still arranged the way it had been the last time anyone had lived in the house over ten years before. The owner died before any of us were born, and no one had ever come to change anything. The couches spilled their stuffing as mice and squirrels got in to make nests. Books still sat on the marble-topped tables, consumed by bugs rather than readers. And over everything was a grey pall of dust. At the very end of the shadowy parlor, we thought we could see the top of a bald head above one of the wing chairs, but we were never sure.

We used to dare each other to go into the house, but none of us ever had to because the windows were all intact and the doors were tightly locked, even the one in back. And since we were good kids, it never occurred to us to break in; besides, we were afraid. We'd rather wonder about the house, "Who had lived there?" "How did they die?" "Why was it left empty?" "Was that really a ghost or a body in the wing chair?" We discussed it on those twilight summer evenings when the lightning bugs were just coming out or in the fall when the cicadas buzzed in the trees. The haunted house was always there, waiting for us to solve the mystery.

But one spring day a truck pulled into the cinder drive next to the house, and men got out and went in. They started dragging the furniture into the side yard and setting up long tables on which they piled all of the motheaten, forgotten treasures from the closets and drawers and shelves of the house. Some men set up tents and a farm wagon, while others dragged the horsehair furniture from the parlor onto the porch where it sat with its stuffing exposed to the sunshine. Even the bald headed corpse was exposed as a bulbous vase that had sat on a round table behind the wing chair. A day later an auctioneer was calling for bids over a loudspeaker, and a small crowd of onlookers carried away the contents of the house.

Two weeks later a wrecking crew came, and in a few days the haunted house was gone. Even the huge old tree was cut into enormous logs and hauled away. The city crews repaired the sidewalk. Shortly after, the Baptist church erected a tiny, yellow, one story modular house on the lot and the minister and his family moved in.

That summer Patty and David started "going steady" and in the fall went off to junior high, leaving me behind. Raymond seemed too babyish to play with, still dragging his little trucks around with a string. And one by one, our elderly neighbors started to die, and new, younger families moved into their homes.