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By Root 426 0

always been forbidden to do. Next thing I knew, I was shoved across the room. “Keep away from me, you little bastard,” she yelled. Immediately, my father was between her and me, shaking his fist; my brothers were between him and my mother, trying to calm the two of them down; and I was holding on to my father and reaching out for my mother, trying to make it all okay. I remember my father pulling me out the door and my mother regretting what she had done, crying, reaching out, saying, “No, Frank, bring him back! I’m sorry. You know how much I love him!” And I remember Gaylen saying, “Jesus Christ, I’m getting the hell out of here, I can’t take any more of this shit,” and Frank following us all out to the car. From there, my father and brothers and I went to a Chinese restaurant, and it was dark before we got back home. My mother had baked some chocolate chip cookies while we were gone and had them waiting for me. It was my favorite thing that she made, and she was the best cook I’ve ever known. She had also decided by then that she didn’t really mind the floor pattern all that much, and she’d be happy to live with it—provided, that is, they could just redo the entire wall patterns throughout the downstairs in a different color. “That’s fine,” my father said. “Whatever you want.”

I felt horribly sorry for both my parents at that moment—for my father because, I guess, I recognized then that he was a broken, finished, doomed man; for my mother because I knew that none of this was what she really wanted, and that she would have to live with this disappointment for the rest of her life. The funny part is, it was a fairly common floor pattern of various-sized squares, one you still see in many kitchens and bathrooms. I never see it without memories of that day and without memories of what was about to happen in that haunted palace of ours.

LATE ONE WINTER AFTERNOON, MY MOTHER was home alone at our new place, working in the kitchen. She heard an odd noise in the adjoining dining room and looked around the corner just in time to see the figure of a man disappearing through the glass doors of the back-room sunporch. She thought it must have been Frank Jr. or Gaylen, home early. She went and opened the door to the room, but nobody was there.

This could have been discounted as merely another example of my mother’s hyperactive imagination, but the incidents kept happening. One evening a week or two later, Gaylen was seated in the back sunporch, watching one of our four televisions. The door opened, and a man in white clothes with gray hair, he said, stood staring at him for a moment, then moved back through the doors. Gaylen went and found my mother and asked her who the stranger was. She said: “What stranger?”

Before we moved into the house on Oatfield, it had belonged to a well-known local doctor. According to one report we heard, the doctor had died in the house, lying on a sofa in the back sunporch. The stuff of a typical haunting, except there was no emotional resonance to the story. Did this doctor die an unhappy or bedeviled man? Not as far as I know. So what would keep him bound to the house he died in? Why would he bother to spook the place?

These questions hardly mattered. Once my mother heard this story, she was convinced we had another haunted house on our hands. For a while, she even thought we should give up the place, but my father was not moved by this suggestion.

Still, odd things kept happening. They never stopped happening. Let me repeat what I said before: I do not believe in ghosts. But like everybody else in my family, I heard and felt strange things in that house that I could not account for. There was an unusually large gap space between two of the upstairs bedrooms, and we could not figure why that space existed, or what it might hold. There was an attic structure built onto the house, but there was no entrance available to the attic—no trapdoor, no ladder or staircase. Maybe the gap space had once held a narrow staircase, but like the stairwell in Robert Frost’s poem “The Witch of Coos,” maybe it had