Ghoulies & Ghosties
How much do you really understand about your house? How much do you understand the systems and the materials? For example, did you know that Stachybotrys chartarum mold spores are too heavy to float around on air currents? The spores are imbedded in the gypsum board during the manufacturing process, the board is installed on the walls, and the spores lie dormant until the gypsum board gets wet. Then deadly black mold grows. (Rob Dunn does a spectacular job of mapping out many of these real, scary things in his non-fiction book called Never Home Alone.)
But nature is really patient which can make it difficult for a story teller to use the effects of the second law of thermodynamics to work as a killer weapon. The second law compels equilibrium - hot goes to cold, wet goes too dry, high pressure goes to low pressure. The temperature of a gin and tonic with ice cubes will reach room temperature given time. It is a challenge to use such long term, seemingly unpredictable forces to kill someone on cue.
So writers resort to conjuring up ghoulies and ghosties and long legged beasties to annoy, torture, and tantalize. But it’s not the physical components of the house itself that are doing the tormenting.
Many of the old family houses are grand mansions, meant to impress, with hundreds of rooms. (Some mysteriously have more space inside than outside.) Some of them are as simple as a London flat as in Jemma Wayne’s To Dare or the cottage in Billy O’Callaghan’s The Dead House. In Noel Vindry’s locked room novel, The House that Kills, the house of stones is definitely an innocent bystander that gets attacked by investigators with picks and shovels seeking a secret passage. (As a house investigator, I found it particularly telling that the investigators in this 1932 novel used a perfume as a tracer gas to find air currents.)
The only book I have found (until my own Death at the Edge of the Diamond) where the house is actually used as a weapon is 17 Church Row by James Carol. The concept of that story makes reading these words electronically truly scary.
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Things that Go BUMP in the House
Houses make a lot of noises. They creak in the wind, settle on their foundations, tick the pipes, ducts, and radiators, and bang loose shutters. Equipment cycles on and off: refrigerators, boilers, furnaces, AC systems, attic fans, and bathroom fans. It is a lot like the stomach of the beast rumbling when it’s hungry or just complaining. You get used to the sounds over time. You know when things are cycling and you can even miss the sound if it doesn’t happen when you expect it to.
There are times when a disconnect occurs between the occupant and the familiar household bumps and twangs. Just say you came home from a long weekend and the house is dark and cold. And you stand by the door listening and you hear a tap-tap-tap and you say, “Oh, that’s the whooseewhatsits.” And you pause and think, “But wait, the whooseewhatsits shouldn’t be running now! I know I turned it off before I left.” Now your anxiety has cranked up a notch and then you catch an unfamiliar smell. “Is that gas?” You think. You feel a draft, and a door swings open, and there seems to be an unfamiliar light in an upstairs hallway.
The house isn’t causing the problem. It’s you. It’s your anxieties that are turning the house into a villain – filling it with goblins and murderers lying in wait. It’s not the house. Honest. Houses can certainly seem to have spirits from all the lives and all the events that happened inside their walls. But sometimes the familiar can just disconnect. That’s why little kids or dolls or even clowns can change the pleasant to the unpleasant. It’s the surprise that is so scary. Dark houses can conjure up spirits in the mind. When you scare yourself, just keep in mind it's just thermodynamics. Honest. Nothing to be afraid of.
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