On Memory

Haunted Houses

Part Two of a Four Part Series on Memory

For a portion of my life, I lived around the corner from a haunted house. I could walk to it, but I preferred to ride my bike. You had to go down an alley which contained a very satisfying hill. The hill itself was an alley that ran for two full blocks, crossing the street we lived on and continuing past the backyards of the homes. Weeds grew through the cracked concrete. Everything was cracked. It was a steel town in the 1980’s. It was all entropy, rusting factories, abandoned homes, broken windows, cobblestone pounded into pebbles. We climbed to the tops of mounds of dirt, rode our bikes through the crumbling asphalt. We found porn magazines in the grass, broken wine bottles in the mud. We understood the world as a place of dilapidation.

My best friend was a chubby kid with a mischievous smile and big sloppy afro that he doused in curl juice once every couple of weeks. He laughed a lot and seemed to have no fears, at least compared to me. He was the one who told me about the haunted house, which was on his block, abandoned. He claimed it was haunted because he could hear a ghostly moan coming from it when he was on his front porch. He thought we should go in and investigate. I wasn’t sure that I believed him, it seemed awfully convenient that it only happened when no one else was around to hear it, but it also seemed to me that he didn’t want to be alone in his experience of this abandoned building that glowered from across his street. I now realize…