by Steve Szilagyi
The year was 1960. Kennedy, U-2, the Twist. Our family now included two parents and nine children. The house was too small for us. Our father searched the inner-ring suburbs for something bigger. He got a deal on an enormous house nobody else seemed to want. The seller was an Italian-American grocery magnate. He was willing to let it go for a handful of cash.
The Neighborhood
The surrounding neighborhood was as suburban fantasy land , built in the 1910s and ’20s for wealthy urbanites with literary tastes—Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen. Cotswold cottages, Tudor manors, and Georgian palaces lined the streets, nestled among mature trees and manicured lawns. Our new house, though, was no Austen idyll. It was pure Charles Addams: dark, brooding, with lancet arches and steep gabled roofs. Heavy chimneys loomed over a dour brick façade. An earthen bridge spanned a ravine with a shallow creek (pronounced “crick” in our part of the world) to reach the front door. Unlike some haunted houses, 2910 Berkeley Boulevard did not have a deceptively benign presentation. It laid its dark, heavy essence on you at first glance.
Exploration
Deed in hand, my father piled us into the station wagon to let us explore our new home. We tumbled out of the tailgate and swarmed over the property: a child’s paradise. Woods to explore; a creek to splash in; and a salamander under every rock. Inside, we raced up and down the grand staircase. Tested the banister for slide-ability (too wobbly). And fought over who would get what bedroom. Further upstairs, we found the old servants’ quarters. More bedrooms. A ballroom lined with benches. And an ominous closet.
The Shrine in the Cellar
With no carpets or furniture to constrain us, we rampaged through the living room, dining room, and kitchen until someone called out from the basement. Narrow wooden steps descended into a utilitarian underworld presided over by a growling furnace. We briefly poked our noses bare larders and laundry rooms, but just as we prepared to retreat upstairs, someone noticed a room we’d overlooked—dark and doorless. An older brother stepped inside and yanked the light cord.
The bare bulb swung over a garish religious tableau. Crucifixes, medals, holy cards, and scapulars adorned every wall. Framed pictures of Jesus, Mary, and various saints tilted at odd angles beside them. On the floor, statues of the Assumption and the Infant of Prague bristled with ropes of medals and glittering rosaries. A faint odor of incense lingered in the stagnant air.
Cheap Horror Trope
We were Catholic. We attended Catholic school. We knew the paraphernalia of devotion intimately. But this exceeded all bounds of reasonable piety. I backed out of that room and bounded upstairs, grateful for air and light. Today we’d recognize the cheap horror trope, but this was long before The Exorcist, so we puzzled over the sacred display with genuine bewilderment. Why had someone sealed this obscure basement room with religious kitsch?
A Sad History
Over subsequent decades, we gradually pieced together the story of 2910 from neighbors’ recollections, newspaper archives, and eventually the internet. The house had been built in 1925 by a successful bank executive as an anniversary surprise for his wife, complete with a mother-in-law suite. But the wife never warmed to the place, adding tension to an already shaky marriage. Nonetheless, the trio moved in, and 1920s newspapers recorded the society events, benefits, and card parties held in the house’s grand social spaces.
When the mother-in-law died upstairs in her suite, her coffin was placed in the living room for the funeral service. Then came the Depression. The bank failed. The owner lost everything, including his wife, who left him. One day, he descended those wooden steps into the basement of the house and killed himself in that little room.
What Lingered
We are not certain who went on to pile that room with sacred bric-a-brac. But we could guess why. My father (commercial artist-advertising) made short work of the pious display. He was a modern Catholic – Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton – with no patience for the folkloric side of the faith. He turned the suicide room into a darkroom where he could develop film and get away from his noisy kids. However, removing the shrine did not quieten the house. Some might say it loosed whatever had been contained in that room. Or had been lying dormant in our little heads.
Attic Noises
My younger brother and I claimed a bedroom in the attic, adjacent to the ballroom. I was a chronic insomniac, reading deep into the night’s dark watches. Sometimes, when the house settled into silence, I heard noises from the ballroom through our shared wall—sounds that frightened me precisely because I couldn’t identify their source.
One night, I’d had enough. I crept from bed and entered the ballroom, feeling my way to the center of the darkness before pulling the light string. The noise emanated from the closet doors, where something seemed to be pushing gently from within, causing the latch to rattle. As I stood transfixed, the latch fell open, the doors parted, and a chill breeze swept past me.
Footsteps
My older sister had the room next to ours. She was also a late night reader. She told me about the footsteps. Someone going up and down the attic stairs. Right outside bedroom doors. “Don’t you hear them? Late at night?” she asked. “No,” I said. “I hear them all the time. Someone walking very slowly, one step at a time. Sometimes it runs.” “Did you go to see who it was?” “I did. But there was no one there.”
Kitchen Voices
One of our younger brothers who slept on the second floor says he was often wakened by voices downstairs in the kitchen or living room. He’d go down. But the lights would be out and nobody there. One night, he heard a full-out party going on, with shrieking laughter and clinking glasses. Getting out of bed, he went to the top of the stairs, where the sounds abruptly stopped. Below, our father’s aquarium bubbled in the dark foyer.
Visitors and Figures
This staircase and foyer might have served as the set for an English country house mystery. Bedroom doors opened onto an upper gallery beside a Gothic lantern chandelier, with banisters framing the space like a theater balcony. Strange figures were spotted on these stairs, usually by friends and visitors rather than family members. They’d venture to the kitchen for refreshments and return asking, “Who was that man I saw going upstairs?” or reporting, “I felt someone brush past me as I was coming down.”
Guests seeking the first-floor bathroom would glance up through the banister spindles and glimpse a solid-looking person in dated clothing. But before they could process what they’d seen, the figure would vanish.
One school day, my youngest brother was home sick – the only kid in the house. He was startled to hear someone come through the front door and thunder up the stairs. In a panic, he ran into the kitchen and alarmed my mother. She called the police, and they went outside to wait. The police car came over the driveway bridge. The officers got out and searched the house and found nothing. The oldest of the two cops gazed sadly down into the ravine. “I been to this house before,” he said. “Years ago. Creek flooded. Little boy drowned down there. I remember pulling him out.”
Brief Leap Ahead
With that officer’s comment in mind, let me jump forward a decade or so … To when the house had passed on to one of my younger brothers, who went on to raise his own boisterous family there. He’d often hear his preschool-age son talking aloud to someone when he was playing alone. “Imaginary playmate,” his father thought. One night, he (or his wife, I forget which) saw the boy having an animated conversation with someone while sitting in the toilet in the second floor bathroom. “Who are you talking to?” the parent asked. “The boy.” “What boy?” “That boy right there,” he said, with annoyance, pointing at the empty air.
Later in his years there, this brother was the only one of us to encounter a classic transparent specter. Alone in the house one afternoon, he was carrying a basket of laundry along the upper gallery, when he felt a great sense of unease. Turning, he saw a pale figure emerge from the far doorway. As he tells it, he dropped the laundry and fled down the stairs and out of the house in full cartoon panic. But to step back again, to when to when the house contained our whole family, along with our dogs and cats and crochets …
Uncle Fester’s Bed
My parents slept in separate rooms. My mother took the suite where the banker’s mother-in-law had died. It had a lovely stone fireplace and view of the woods next door. For years, my mother had been charitably supporting a distant relative who couldn’t hold a job. Let’s call him Uncle Fester. A capable carpenter, but moody and given to abrupt outbursts of anger. After he died, my mother decided she liked his bed. The carved wooden balusters. The bed he died in. She brought it to the house and placed it across from the fireplace in her bedroom.
One night she was awakened by a loud thump. “It sounded like a full garbage bag dropping to the floor.” Once. Twice. Three times. She sat up in bed. A low whistle sounded in the room. Coming closer. “I knew it was Uncle Fester,” she said later. “Go away, Fes,” she said in the direction of the whistle. There was silence. Then an ear-splitting scream from the pits of Gehenna. Inches away from her face. She told this story often, with plainness and precision. Like someone giving testimony in court. Uncle Fester never returned. But she kept the bed. Learning to cope with the swirl of muttering entities he left in his wake. “One night I just got out of bed, stood in the middle of the room and shouted, ‘Be quiet, all of you!'” Words we had all, at one time or another, longed to speak in that household.
The House Is Left Behind
The fate of 2910 Berkeley Boulevard after it left our family is mysterious in its own way. The house was purchased in 2000 by a successful entrepreneur and his executive wife. They lived there less than a year before relocating to Delaware. A quarter of a century later, they are still the owners of record. Paying taxes and having someone come by occasionally to do basic maintenance. But no one’s ever seen them there. They have never rented the place. And never put it up for sale, though they could get twice what they paid for it today. My young nieces once snuck back and peeked through the windows. The furniture is covered with dust. Yellowing newspapers lay on the arms of chairs. The remains of a meal can be seen in the breakfast nook – seemingly hastily abandoned.
What Qualifies a Haunting?
And there it stands to this day. Holding its secrets fast. I don’t believe in ghosts myself. But let’s suppose they are a thing. How does a house like that qualify for a haunting? Does it have to accumulate a set amount of death, sorrow and disappointed hopes? Is there a kind of spiritual thermostat in walls that senses a critical mass of despair, flips a switch, and then … boo?
Comparison
Look at the statistics of our old house. We know that it hosted at least three deaths: one of natural causes, one suicide, and one drowning – and whatever hitched a ride with Uncle Fester’s bed. Each incident was grievous for everyone involved. But was their collective gravity sufficient to stir the veil between worlds? My question is based on a strong point of comparison: I worked in a 100-year-old hospital for most of my adult life. Many thousands of people passed from life to death in that place. In all states of mind. From all causes. Including accident and suicide. Not to mention the drawers full of cadavers in the basement. You’d think those buildings would be swarming with the supernatural. Yet I’ve walked the hospital’s most drear corridors alone, at all times of the day and night, without feeling any sense of dread or spiritual tingle. Why does death stick to the walls of one place and dissolve in another?
A house with a handful of tragedies gives you the willies. But a hospital that has hosted death for a century bustles along, serving humanity with the impersonal efficiency of a train station. “There are no haunted houses,” as the saying goes. “Only haunted people.” What went on at 2910 was obviously about the domestic drama. Parents and children were externalizing the considerable strains of being part of a large family. Later, the ghost stories went on to serve a purpose. Whenever we got together as adults, they were a shortcut back to the shared intimacy of childhood. In any case, it’s all far behind us now. My brothers and sisters are passing with me into old age. And death has begun to shrink our number.
Epilogue
Ghost stories are corny. I apologize for boring you. But something happened recently – an astounding coincidence – that compelled to to write this. It happened in the parking lot of my local Apple Store, one grey day last October. As I pulled in, the parking lot was nearly full. Only two spaces were left, directly adjacent to one another. Mine and another car pulled into the two spots, from opposite directions, at exactly the same moment. As I opened the door and got out, the other driver emerged. I was delighted to see that it was an old friend whom I hadn’t spoken to in years. We greeted each other warmly and remarked on the coincidence. She seemed more taken aback than I was and I soon discovered the reason.
“You’re not going to believe this,” she said, “but I was thinking about you only this morning.” “Why might that be?” I asked. As we walked toward the Apple Store, she told me that she and her husband were having their kitchen remodeled (they lived across town). A couple of plumbers had come in that morning to put in the faucet and sink. The plumbers were old-timers, experienced and well-recommended. “My office is right next to the kitchen,” she said, “and I could hear them talking about working in old houses. Then about how spooky some of them were. Both of them agreed that the spookiest of all was that big old place on Berkeley Boulevard – wasn’t that where your family lived?” “Yes.” “They remembered how they felt like they were watched, even when no one was home. Footsteps. They’d turn around and no one would be there. Sounds of furniture being moved, creaking on the stairs – the whole haunted house thing. Oh, and one of them said he was working in the third floor bathroom, and he heard someone saying, ‘hello? hello?’ in a frightened voice. He’d stand up and look around and still hear it – ‘hello? hello?’ – like it was in the room with him.” My friend had gone in and asked the plumbers some details and confirmed that it was indeed 2910 – and that the plumbers knew nothing of its history or who lived there.
As we stepped into the clean brightness of the Apple Store, she asked, “What do you make of it all?” I had no answer then, and I have no answer now. Just glad to be surrounded by glass, brushed-metal laptops, and the even glow of overhead lights—all of it reassuringly solid, logical, and present-tense.
(Some details have been fudged to avoid doxxing the house.)
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