My Mother's House

My mother passed away at the beginning of 2019 after a long illness. We lived on opposite sides of the country. After the funeral I stayed alone in her house for a few days before returning home. It wasn't actually a house but a very large three bedroom apartment. Not wide but very long. I live in a small one bedroom flat so I was unused to living in such a large space. In a space where I couldn't actually see what was happening at the other end. Especially at night. At night it felt creepy. Not because mum had died there. Like most people these days she'd passed away in a hospital where my siblings and I used to visit her every day in the weeks leading up to her ultimate departure from this earth.

No what made the place creepy other than the fact that I was unused to living in a space of that size and those dimensions was what was in the apartment. Mum loved antique furniture or any furniture that looked antique (when I went to try and sell the furniture much later I discovered that most of the furniture fell into the second category). It was old looking, dark, sombre and heavy. Brooding even. Victorian not Swedish. Not IKEA type stuff. In addition the place was always kept extra dark with heavy drapes on the windows. I can't remember if Mum had always liked the windows covered this way or if this was just something she'd adopted in the last decade of her life. 

You know you sometimes see obituaries of celebrities in the news that refer to so and so passing "after a long battle with cancer." That phrase "long battle with cancer" sounds active, maybe even dramatic. But in reality it's actually dreadfully prosaic. It's just the day to day plodding through existence that all of us must endure with the added burden of illness, chemo, drug side effects and the ever hovering presence of death. 

So it's hard to maintain joie de vivre when you're in that condition. You're sick. You shut yourself in and the rest of the world out. It adds to the depression that you're already feeling. That atmosphere seemed to pervade the apartment like a long long sadness that had occupied it for a decade, surviving its now departed resident.

In all of the bedrooms and in the lounge and along the hallway of the apartment large, tall four and five shelf cabinets made of heavy dark wood lined the walls, even blocking the already well blocked windows. All the cabinets had glass doors so you could easily see what was inside. In each and every one of them, staring out at you in serried ranks, were the plastic and wooden faces of row upon row of dolls. 

Yes my mother besides being an avid collector of mostly faux antiques was also an enthusiastic collector of children's' dolls as well as the accessories that went with them such as clothing. At the height of her collectors passion she'd possessed literally thousands of them. Far more than she could store at home, so she'd also rented a few storage sheds to keep them in. Once she became ill the contents of these sheds had to be abandoned and dispersed. She now had a new passion: survival. The contents of the apartment, like the ruins of lost civilisations or fallen empires, were a pale a remnant of a once mighty collection. Yet the remnant was still impressive enough. But like lost ruins they were majestic yet stagnant, sad and sterile reflections of former glory.

On the day Mum passed and I returned to her apartment I closed the door to her bedroom. I didn't want to go in there or see in there. The doorless living room connected to a long corridor lined with the heavy dark cabinets ending in the blackness of Mum's bedroom doorway at night. I felt uneasy looking down that corridor and into that blackness so I needed to shut it out of view. I went to sleep in one of the other bedrooms that night. I'd been living alone there for well over a month and stayed in that room many times over the years but that night, the night of Mum's passing, the dolls, their lifeless peering stares, made me feel uneasy. In the night I woke suddenly hearing my name being called. I thought it sounded like Mum's voice but perhaps that was just because she'd just passed and she was obviously on my mind. And sceptics will say, not unreasonably (the "reasonableness" of sceptics is always very annoying), that the emotional effect of Mum's just passing was probably the cause of the "illusion". Perhaps. Perhaps not. It certainly seemed very real.

The funeral was a few days later. I flew out shortly after returning home on the opposite side of the country with the intention of coming back a few months later to clean up and sell the apartment. I was not to come back there for over two years. Circumstances intervened, including the Covid pandemic, that made travel difficult to impossible. So the heavy wooden cabinets with their wide eyed denizens staring into the unoccupied blackness remained gathering dust for two years undisturbed.

It's said that long unoccupied homes can gather "energies". Ok let's be explicit. They become "haunted". The spaces abandoned by once living humans become home to humans long dead or even to things that never were and aren't human. 

The figurines, the barbies, the fashion dolls, the action dolls, the rag dolls, the wooden dolls, the porcelain dolls, the marionettes, the cabbage patch dolls, the cuddly teddies and the uncool golliwogs, the Asian and African and white dolls were all left in solitude for over two years. Staring blankly in solitude. Well maybe not in solitude precisely. They all had each other. And maybe someone else. Something else.

What was the history of these figures? Some looked quite new. Maybe thirty or so years old. Many appeared much older. Their former owners, many of them children, had become too old or adults and had had to give up their toys. It can be traumatic. I speak from personal experience. In other cases the youthful owners had passed before, in some long before, they reached the age at which childish things must be set aside. What greater misery can there be than a terminally ill child prematurely cut off.

This coagulation of long long passed children's joy and sadness imbued into the fibre of these figures, many of which seemed like children themselves. For ten years they lay in the dark home of a dying, depressed, lonely woman, for in confronting death we are all ultimately alone, and the pervading pall of deep despair lay with them. And finally for two long years in darkness, unseen and untouched by living hands, something joined them. At least that is what I believe. Something that feeds and thrives, if death can be said to "thrive", on human abandonment and misery.

After two years I returned. All was as I'd left it. The pantry was full of tinned and jarred food. All long expired. The fridge, which was still on (I'd continued to pay the electricity) still had frozen dinners in the freezer. It was quite dusty but less than you'd have thought after two years and three months. I did some cleaning. I wasn't in a hurry to get it fixed up or to clear out the contents. I'd collected enough money over the past few years to allow me to survive without working for a while.

I lived there. Alone. I've always been a loner anyway and have few friends. I'd left this town long ago just after graduating from high school so the few friends from those days I no longer kept in touch with. For all I knew they might all be dead. Every one of them. My siblings didn't live nearby and in any case we were never close. They had their own lives. Strangely they'd not pressured for the place to be sold to get their hands on the money, although the expectation was that it would be sold eventually.

So living alone in a "strange" place, knowing virtually no one, and not working, I became a "shut in", venturing out only when necessary.

I first noticed something strange a few days after moving in. I'd be sitting in the lounge reading, or looking at my phone or watching TV and I'd notice something moving at the corner of my eye. It appeared to come from within the cabinets. I'd look directly at the glass and it would be gone. I hadn't noticed this when I'd lived there previously. It kept happening, a few times per day and night. But not all the time. Also after I'd gone to bed I'd sometimes hear the quiet pitter patter of steps out in the corridor on the other side of the bedroom door. It sounded similar to Mum's footsteps when she used to sometimes get up to go to the bathroom in the night. I'd occasionally summon up the gumption to open my bedroom door, after first turning on the light, to investigate but there was never anything there.

Well this went on like this for some weeks whilst I took my time getting stuff fixed up. I got some quotes from real estate agents on selling or renting the place. The women in particular seemed intensely uncomfortable sitting in the lounge room with the silent spectators staring down at them from behind their glass cages.

I felt like the butler in Wuthering Heights. And they looked at me as if I mustn't be quite right in the head to be living there. Amidst those things. Those dead, still faces that mimicked, even parodied, living faces. And maybe they sensed something. Perhaps after living there I actually wasn't quite right in the head. Or maybe the fact that I'd lived there so long (a few months) was evidence that I'd never been quite normal from the get go.

I contacted an auctioneer about the items in the apartment. He asked me to send photos of what I had. I took photos of all the cabinets and their contents. That night I was going through the photos on my phone when I suddenly stopped. My heart sank when I saw it. In one of the photos reflected in the glass directly behind me was the image of a woman in a short white dress. She appeared from her slim body to be young and she had short blonde hair. And her face was missing! I looked again a few times. Many times. It was unmistakable. Just then I thought I saw something out of corner of my eye. I looked again in the direction of one of the cabinets. Nothing. 

I decided that I needed to get a larger view of the image by transferring it to my laptop. As I opened the image I held my breath. The JPEG popped up onto the screen. The woman wasn't there! Did I have the right image? I checked though a few more. Nothing. I went back to my phone and tried to find the image again. Nothing. Had it been deleted? Or altered. Had it been a trick of the light? But I'd checked it over a dozen times on my phone and she'd still been there, standing right behind me! Almost touching me!

That night I was awakened by what sounded like the soft pitter patter of bare feet along the corridor. I didn't get up to investigate. After a while it stopped.

A few days later the auction house got back to me to say they'd take the cabinets and their contents. We agreed on a day and time for their truck to come and collect the stuff. It would be early. Seven AM. I was instructed to empty the cabinets and box their contents ready for collection. The day before they were due to arrive I spent all day boxing the figures. After beginning at 7 that morning I finally finished at 10pm that night. I was exhausted.

That night I hit the sack heavily just before midnight. 

I was awoken by a loud crashing sound in the night. I looked at my phone. It was 2.35 in the morning. It was silent. Deathly silent. A cold chill crept over me. Fearfully, gingerly I rose from my bed. My hand was on the door handle of the bedroom. I could hear my own breathing. I pulled down the handle and held it firmly and quickly opened the door. With gritted teeth I looked down the hallway towards the living room where the sound had come from. Nothing. But wait. I thought I saw something. A silhouette that I could barely make out in the darkness. Was it one of the boxes in which I'd stored the dolls? I turned on the light switch in my bedroom. It provided some illumination but not enough. I started to go down the hallway towards hallway light switch, when I stopped. The silhouette had moved. Or had it? Yes it had. It was a person? Yes. Sort of. At least in outline.

THUMP!!

What was that?

THUMP!!

It was moving. Still in the lounge room. It was moving. But slowly.

THUMP!!

I didn't know what to do.

THUMP!!

Slowly. In my direction.

THUMP!!

It hadn't yet reached the long hallway leading to the closed door of mum's bedroom but was close. I stood outside my open bedroom door which was just next to it. I momentarily looked across the hallway towards the front entrance. Next to the front door was the other hall light switch that would allow me to illuminate the hallway to see what was coming up that corridor. I couldn't bring myself to turn it on.

THUMP!

The dark silhouette was now at the head of the corridor.

THUMP!

The heavy tread of the thuds seemed to reverberate along the timber floor but the thing, whatever it was, didn't seem that big. Maybe about five feet.

THUMP!

It was still at the end of the long corridor but the light from my bedroom ought to have provided some illumination so I could see more than I was seeing but I could still see nothing.

THUMP!

I was frozen in horror. I felt a deep pit in my chest. My skin was raised on edge.

THUMP!

I saw something! Almost imperceptible. Two bright red pin pricks in the head of the black silhouette where its eyes would have been! That roused me from the state of frozen horror to panicked action. Thinking of nothing except that I had to get out of there and fast I headed to the front door in just my shorts and T shirt that I slept in.

THUMP!

I opened it.

THUMP!

And fled through the private courtyard onto the open air landing. I didn't bother to lock the front door although I did close it, hoping that might stop the thing. The apartment was on the third floor. I didn't want to use the elevator so I headed to the fire exit doors. The stairs led down to the exit on the street below. I moved down those wide steps as fast as I safely could. They were illuminated with bright fluorescent lights activated by sensors that came on the moment I'd entered. At the bottom of the stairs I stopped and slowly opened the door onto the street. I held it open for a moment as I heard a door upstairs slam. I'm not sure if it had come from level two or level three. It sounded too far to be level one. Footsteps were moving at a steady pace down the stairs. I let go of the door and went out into the side street which was totally quiet and deserted at that time of the morning. Although it was summer the night was cool. I shivered dressed only in shorts and a T shirt. I walked over to an open covered parking area belonging to a neighbouring building where I'd be concealed but could still view the fire exit door. I waited to see who would come out. After five minutes, nothing. Perhaps it was someone who lived in the building travelling between floors. Perhaps. But at that time of the morning?

I went to a nearby park and tried to get some sleep but it was so cold and my nerves were so overwrought that I couldn't. I'd gone to bed forgetting as usual to remove my digital watch. At 6.30 AM I returned to the building. I got a neighbour to let me in. The apartment front door was unlocked. I intrepidly opened it. It was still quite dark inside even though it was light out. I very quickly turned on the hallway light as well as ALL the other lights throughout the house. The place looked exactly as I had left it before I'd gone to bed. The removal truck arrived shortly after and took almost everything away.

I slept in that house for two more months. Nothing else creepy occurred and certainly nothing terrifying. But although nothing more happened I still sensed something in there. One of my sisters used to say after Mum had passed that she could still "smell Mum" which I found pretty creepy in itself. My olfactory senses were never that good. Well I've read that women in general have a higher developed sense of smell. Perhaps my psychic senses were of the same order. Something was different about the place and not just that it was now empty. Like whatever was or had been here was now gone but it had left its indelible traces. And maybe it now lay dormant in one of Mum's dolls. Waiting ....