Ghosts of Holidays Past
About a year, two apartments, and one ex-boyfriend ago, I started watching a Netflix series about ghosts. More specifically, the ghosts that haunted a house and the Crane family for a summer and then decades to come.
If you haven’t seen The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix, I’d recommend it. The show cuts back and forth between a decades-past haunted summer the family spent renovating the mysterious mansion, and the present day where tragedy forces the family to revisit Hill House and reconcile with their demons. It’s filled with suspense and creeper scares and of course more-than-mortifying family conflicts to bring the horror experience full circle. It’s a fun way to passively traumatize your self-conscious while getting into the Halloween spirit.
And speaking of spirits, I found myself particularly drawn to Theo’s character, a Crane sibling who regularly experienced paranormal sensations. As a child, Theo knows immediately that there’s something off about the house her parents are trying to renovate. She’s constantly cold in the house in the middle of summer, and bundles herself in heavy sweaters. In her adult life, Theo wears long gloves, all the time, regardless of the season. Theo uses her layers of clothes to keep herself from feeling The Beyond. We’re introduced to the extent of her character’s gift when she correctly solves a child abuse case where a foster father was abusing his daughter. She doesn’t do this with good detective work, but rather by taking off her long, mysterious black gloves and feeling around the basement of the house where the foster child lives. She lays on the basement couch and starts crying and begging, feeling the energy of abuse left behind by the abuser and the child. On her way out, she conscientiously shakes the father’s hand, and a look of knowing flashes in her eyes. Cut to the next scene, where the foster father is being arrested by the police.
For the sake of the series, I think perhaps those writing Theo’s part and adapting her role from Shirley Jackson’s mystery novel of the same name were attempting to portray Theo as some kind of psychic, with (unwanted) access to the spirit realm and possibly the occult. But Theo isn’t a psychic.
Theo is an empath.
For the uninitiated, empaths are people that feel others’ emotions very strongly, sometimes as if those feelings were their own. Empaths may not always actively practice empathy, or putting themselves in another’s shoes, but rather they are sensitive and (sometimes) unknowingly open to other people’s emotional energy. (Imagine being forced into another person’s shoes and feeling that they’re yours now.)
While these abilities make Theo a great social worker, they also come with a cost. She spends her time the night following her abuse case drowning her sorrows in alcohol, hooking up with a stranger, and basically trying to forget the feelings of her client, trapped in the basement, knowing what’s coming next but being unable to stop her foster father from imposing his will on her.
Like Theo, I am an empath as well. I am not claiming to be able to root out child molesters based on my “extra-sensory” abilities, but I am good at feeling people’s motives, intentions, and emotional states on a level that’s more than just using social cues.
For instance, more often than not, I can tell if someone is testing me. I can tell if they’re making loaded comments to gauge my reaction, to see what I know, to distract me from a bigger issue. I can tell if someone is projecting their insecurities onto me, or yelling at me while really being upset about something else, or coping with grief in unhealthy ways. I have been able to tell since I was a little girl.
Alternatively, I can also tell if someone is interested in having sex with me.
This isn’t to sound conceited or self-centered. And their interest often has less to do with being attracted to someone’s physical appearance and more to do with opportunity and loneliness and horniness than you might think. Really, the interested person is missing something, and you’re probably not it, but you seem like fun filler in the meantime. But I can tell, and, if I’m also interested and available, I can make known to both of us what the other person is so often trying to hide.
If I’m not interested, that’s another story altogether.
…
I’m at my then-boyfriend’s uncle’s house, and like most introverts I’ve drifted to outskirts of the social space. My hiding place of choice tonight is the wine table at the edge of the dining room, which has the added bonus of providing me with social lubricant. I’m a couple glasses in when my partner’s uncle approaches me.
He’s friendly and engages me in rich people chatter that makes me uncomfortable. I don’t know anything about nice wine, or home renovations, or extensive travel, or summer homes. My current position as an AmeriCorps service member has me on food stamps, and my parents, God bless ’em, are counting on that to keep me fed. I didn’t pay for my flight here and couldn’t pay for my flight home if my boyfriend’s dad didn’t offer to book our flights. But his uncle doesn’t know that, and treats me as if I belong in this space, this beautifully refurbished historic home he and his wife have worked on for years.
“So you teach gardening and nutrition education? That’s so fascinating.” It’s not, really. I cut off part of my finger cutting potatoes the week before. I can’t find a pen or pencil or extra office supply to save my life, my schools are so under-resourced. And I can’t afford to buy extras of those myself. Whatever this guy says, he has other motives.
“Yeah, it’s definitely an interesting job,” I say, reaching for a bottle of wine to refill my glass. Have we been talking a long time? I wonder. Should I go find my boyfriend?
“Do you like reds?” He asks. “This is the one you want.” He pours me a glass of some label I suspect I’ll never have the money to try again. Stay here, his actions invite. Tell me more about what it’s like to be young and 23 and vulnerable all the time.
He’s looking at me intently, but out of the corner of my eye I see his daughter, older than me, look over at us and begin to make strides to the wine table.
“Is my dad telling you ghost stories about the house?” She quips, reaching between us for a glass of the same red wine. “This place isn’t haunted, don’t let him fool you. The basement is especially cold in the winter, but that doesn’t mean anyone died there, right dad?”
Our circle of two has expanded, and quietly, I’m grateful. I’m not sure if she’s trying to protect her dad or her mom, but I doubt her intervention was for my benefit. I can feel waves of subtle hostility wisping through the air like she blew cigarette smoke in my face. You got too drunk, Kaitlyn. You forgot yourself. We invite you into our home and you spend the first half hour flirting with my dad? What is wrong with you.
It doesn’t matter that he approached me. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t actually make a move. All that matters is how it looks, and somehow it was my responsibility to make it look differently. All this plays in the back of my head as I attempt small talk, drunk, with my boyfriend’s family in a house of restored antiques, fancy wines, extra rooms. Eventually I find a pause in the conversation where I can excuse myself to make a cocktail.
Maybe another drink will quiet the ghosts in my head, the ghosts of those around me, so for a moment I can hear my own thoughts.