212 South Crouse Avenue

Some people swore that the house was haunted. But the sounds coming from within were not the voices of those afflicted by the torments of the afterlife nor were they the voices of those afflicted by the torments of their current lives. The house itself sighed during the darker moments of the day from the weight of age and old memories.

Built in 1899, it had seen and been home to many people, but until the day that she had come with her husband, a dentist, it hadn’t known joy. From the moment her foot touched the bottom step to its front porch, they had fallen in love. She, with its ornamental caramel-colored hand carved wood features and it with every aspect of her. From then on she spent hours decorating its walls and sweeping its floors, while it watched her every move, intoxicated by whiffs of her strawberry-scented perfume.

They had built a happy life together and for the first time since its construction, the house felt it had finally found its reason for being. Before then it endured years of being repeatedly inhabited and abandoned like a great wooden whore, until it learned to close itself off from each new invader becoming a hollow shell. Now she was there and it felt reborn as if it had just received its first fresh coat of paint.

However, sometimes the husband would take her away for as long as week to a place called “Florida” leaving it standing alone in the winter cold, howling out its sorrow. When she would return, and run up its walk with her arms full of souvenirs exclaiming, “It’s so good to be home,” the house would settle and sigh in satisfaction. They lived this way for years and the house came to accept these yearly “vacations,” mourning her loss and trumpeting her return. One year the husband suggested that they move to accommodate his growing practice, but happily the wife refused to be wrestled from her home, and it was decided that he commute instead and come home on the weekends when necessary.

The house began to hate the husband after that, and only tolerated his presence for her sake. When he eventually died, the house—indifferent to the dead man—overjoyed that she was finally exclusively its own, concocted ways to keep her content such as baiting her to follow the sounds of a rattling window or a thump in the attic. However, her grief lasted for some time, so it collected each of her teardrops that trickled to the floor as treasures.

Time passed and they grew old together spending hours quietly listening to musical recordings on the Victrola until the morning she didn’t wake up and everything from the root cellar to the rooftop died. After trying to clamp its doors shut and having them forced open, the house stood agape and alone when they’d taken her body away.

Others had come and gone since then. They called themselves “families,” but the house never accepted them and moaned its implicit discontent to each new resident. Now its new “family” left shards of broken glass on its floors amid the sounds of screams and sirens. Its only joy came from revisiting its former happiness and the woman it had loved. But she was forever removed from it and there was nothing to wait for except the inevitability of its own destruction. It revisited their last happy day together and the way the sun had caused her silver hair to shine. Nothing was ever the same again after that.