You are a poltergeist in a haunted house, and you are in love with a possessed artifact. However, she was taken by the last owners when they moved out. After years of gathering your power, you’re finally strong enough to leave the house and search for her.
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She was beauty. She was light and love. The only good thing in my dark existence.
Before her there was only anger. Rage, to be more accurate. I wanted peace. I wanted quiet. This is my house. I lived here and I died here, and that makes it mine. And yet, there is a steady stream of intruders. First it was the police to cart away my body. That was fine. I no longer needed it. Then it was a cleaning crew to scrub away the blood with their acrid chemicals and box up my things. No! Those were mine. My favourite doll from my childhood, my father’s old pocket knife, the quilt my grandmother made for me, my mother’s earrings, my beloved plants. They took everything. My home was left cold and hollow.
I was not strong enough to stop them. Not then. But the anger simmered.
Perhaps that’s why I changed.
With the anger I grew stronger. More solid. I couldn’t tell you the exact moment I made the shift from innocent spirit or benign ghost to a poltergeist. But with the shift came power. I could pick up plates from the kitchen and hurl them to shatter against the wall while the new family ate dinner, relishing in their horrified silence as the shards fell to the floor.
This was my house. I would make sure they knew.
The family did not last long here. Perhaps because of the children. The youngest boy seemed to sense me. He cried whenever I came near. The father scolded him and told him not to make up stories. I turned the lights on and off, and his face went pale and he carried the boy out of the room. The family moved out soon after.
A ‘For Sale’ sign was put up in the yard. I could see it from the front window, though I couldn’t leave the house no matter how hard I tried. After that there was a revolving door of realtors and prospective buyers, as if they had the right to sell and
buy my home out from under me. I soon learned that my nails could leave deep grooves in the walls, and that was unnerving to the people who came through. It didn’t discourage everyone. I seethed the day the ‘Sold’ sign was put up.
That family didn’t last long either.
They all blurred together after that. Should I have bothered to keep track? Stupid loud people with their stompy feet and their high pitched screams and their crying babies. Ugh. Get out. Get out!
And then she came.
Another moving day. Loads of boxes left higgledy-piggledy in my home, which had been blissfully quiet for too short a time. The boxes made me curious, they always do, and the couple blamed each other if something wasn’t where they left it, so I could go through them as I pleased. They had nice things.
Nothing as nice as what had been mine, but nothing was mine anymore. Nothing except this house.
It took a long time for them to unpack all the boxes and put everything away. This was normal. It was odd, though, that other than the essentials they needed to get through the day-to-day, the first thing they put out was a doll. A beautiful ceramic doll that must have been a family heirloom. She was set in a sunny spot in the window. Her bright blue eyes seemed to stare at me when I went over to inspect her. It shames me now, but I thought about throwing her across the room as my first warning to the couple that they weren’t welcome here. I didn’t, though. She was too pretty.
The couple went to bed. I was drifting through the house, wondering what hell I could raise to rouse them, when I noticed the doll was missing from the front window. How strange. The couple had seemed pleased with her placement, so I had not thought they would move her so soon. My curiosity got the better of me, and I searched the house for her.
I found her in the bathroom, on the back of the toilet. A strange place for such a pretty creature.
By the next afternoon, she was sat in the centre of the living room. A single beam of sunlight from the window illuminated her among the shadows of sheet-covered furniture, not yet set where the couple wanted them for the duration of their stay.
I started to suspect that there was something up with her. My suspicions were all but confirmed when the young man, upon entering the living room, paused at the sight of her and laughed. “Meg! I found Auntie Hannah! She’s in the living room.” And he picked her up and set her on the mantle. “There you go, Hannah. You’ll get dirty if you wander before we’ve got everything cleaned up.”
Wander? A doll? Dolls don’t move by themselves.
Yet over the following days, Hannah appeared in various locations around the house. The kitchen. The basement. The little room that Trevor, the man, was turning into a home office. And once, the back garden, which alarmed Meg as she scooped Hannah up and made sure she wasn’t dirty. “Hannah,” she sighed as she carried the doll back into the house. “Please stay inside.”
It was peculiar, but do not think I stopped my efforts to frighten the couple into leaving just because of some strange doll. Not at all. I wanted them gone! I smashed an antique teapot and made Meg cry. But no matter what I did, the couple thought Hannah was the culprit.
“Hannah, how could you?”
“Why are you angry?”
“Here’s a different dress. Is that better?”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with her, Trevor. She hasn’t acted like this since my cousin died and she was passed on to me.”
It was after the teapot incident that I finally saw Hannah move. I was in the living room, now a cozy little space with couches and bookshelves and pictures of smiling people on the walls as if they had a right to claim them. I was trying to decide if I wanted to throw the pictures or the spiderplants on the mantle, or both, when footsteps came behind me. They were too light to be human, and when I turned, there she was.
She stood in the doorway with her little perfectly formed fingers on her hips, her new purple dress flared around her. The purple ribbon Meg had lovingly tied into her cloud of brown curls brought out the blue of her eyes beautifully. And yet when she spoke, her face never moved.
“If you hurt Megan or Trevor, I’ll make you pay for it,” she informed me in a rich voice that I never would have expected from a doll. “They are my people, and I will make you leave if I have to.”
“This is my house.” I knocked one of the framed wedding photos to the ground to illustrate my point. “Mine. And I’ll do whatever I want.”
“You’re dead. You can’t own anything.” She stomped into the room on her doll feet and pulled herself onto the couch. “Just like me. Not even this doll body belongs to me. It belonged to Marcia, then Joan, then briefly to poor Tracy, and now it’s Meghan’s. Isn’t this house the same?”
Despite myself, I was fascinated. I couldn’t leave my house, so I only knew how being dead worked for me. I did not know that other ghosts could experience other things. It didn’t occur to me that ghosts could haunt things other than houses.
So I sat with Hannah on the couch and we talked and talked and talked. She told me that Meghan was her distant relative, a great-great-great niece or something, and that she’d been passed through the family after she had died and possessed the doll. It was so nice to have company. And unlike me, Hannah could be moved from place to place. Oh, the stories she told me! Her granddaughter Joan was quite the traveler, and she had brought Hannah to places like England, Scotland, Mexico, Nepal, Thailand, and the list went on and on. I was fascinated by her stories.
Hannah and I talked every night, and I was too busy with her to spend time making trouble. By the time I realized what she was doing, I was attached and didn’t want her to leave. And for her to stay, Meghan and Trevor had to stay.
Well, fine. So be it. I would let them live in my house if it meant my Hannah could stay.
I soon understood why everything strange was blamed on Hannah. She would go out to the garden in the middle of the night and return with bundles of dandelions, which she scattered around the house. My favourite place to skulk during the day was the basement, which the humans used for storage and so didn’t bother me. Hannah made sure to leave a couple dandelions on the basement steps for me.
I got them a little glass of water. My heart was as warm as their bright yellow colour.
The years that passed after my home became Hannah’s home were the happiest I’d spent since my death. We laughed together, and my anger with the world faded. I lost my ability to throw plates even if I wanted to.
I did not want to.
But good things never last for long.
Meghan’s pregnancy test was positive, and she and Trevor set up a nursery in the room next to theirs as Meghan’s belly grew big. Hannah was so excited. All she could talk about was the baby, and she left flowers all over the house. Meghan laughed and tucked them behind her ear. “See?” she’d say. “Hannah’s happy too!”
Then the baby came, and with it sleepless nights for Trevor and Meghan. With them up in the middle of the night, Hannah and I couldn’t talk the way we used to. Although Meghan and Trevor knew she moved, she didn’t like them to see her do it.
“Of course not! What if they make me do chores?” she demanded the one time I asked if she had considered it.
Trevor and Meghan had been among the most quiet of intruders, but the child was not. And little Damien’s volume grew with his body.
He was afraid of me.
If he saw me in his room while I searched for Hannah, he would scream and scream until his parents came running. When he was very small he could not tell them what was wrong, but he soon learned to talk and he told them about the monster. I never hurt him. I had never harmed a child, though I did sometimes frighten them on purpose. But children were more sensitive than adults and were often first to pick up on my presence.
It was no different with Damien.
“I know they said the house is haunted, but I thought it would be like with Auntie Hannah,” Meghan told Trevor one night, her voice troubled.
Trevor put his arm around her. “I know. We took a chance because the house was so cheap. And it’s worked out! Nothing bad’s happened to us.”
“But Trevor, Damien keeps talking about a monster. What if its hurting him when we’re not in the room?” Meghan would have fought a bear for her baby, I thought as I hovered in a corner of the kitchen. A monster was not much different.
I had not hurt Damien. But Meghan became convinced.
They brought home boxes.
I knew what that meant.
“Stay,” I begged Hannah. “Please, Hannah, stay. Don’t leave me.”
It was night. Everyone was asleep. I knew Trevor and Meghan planned to leave. I didn’t want them to take my beloved, beautiful Hannah.
“You could hide until they’re gone. We could stay together.”
Hannah kicked her feet against the couch. “And what if the new owners throw me away? No. Meghan is my family. I don’t want to leave you. But I know where I belong.”
I knew she was right. I knew. The thought of the next tenants finding her ugly and throwing her away filled me with rage. It was unthinkable. Meghan took good care of her. But if Hannah had to go, I wanted to go with her.
In the days that lead up to moving day, I tried to stick just my hand out the front door. I tried and tried and tried. It was like pushing against glass. I could not do it.
I could not leave.
They left without me.
Hannah was gone.
This house was my home. That had been enough, before Hannah. It never seemed so cold and hostile as it did after she was gone. I never wanted to leave before, but now I did.
Grief and rage grew within me. I could throw plates again. I did. The new owners didn’t even last a week before they moved out and put the house up for rent.
This house was mine. I had never hurt it before.
But that didn’t matter anymore.
I ripped cupboard doors off their hinges and flung them across the room. I gouged the walls. I ripped down the curtains and threw books through windows until the carpets sparkled with shattered glass. I screamed Hannah’s name over and over. No one stayed. No one new moved in. And still, I raged.
My power grew. But I lost myself. The house wasn’t mine.
The house wasn’t mine, so I could leave.
For the first time since my death, I stepped out the front door. I didn’t know where to look, but I would. I would search and search until I found my Hannah again.
Hopefully Damien would have outgrown his fear. Maybe he would even see that I could be a friend, if he wanted. If not, he could be dealt with.
Children were fragile.
