This is a place that once was and never will be again, where people once screamed and laughed and cried and ate, and made love in perfumed shadows, played with fire, looked out windows, daydreamed, sighed, wiped sweat off their foreheads with the back of their hands, whistled softly to no one in particular. Where windows used to not be broken and floors were covered in brightly covered carpets that yielded easily to the touch of bare feet. Where rust was a paint color and walls knew their role and didn’t collapse into heaps of fragmented debris. What is it about abandoned houses that is so fascinating? The abandoned house in Ohio, abandoned but far from empty, filled, in fact, with piles and piles of junk: books, dolls, kitchen appliances, old posters, water everywhere, glass everywhere. we found a diary. it was a woman writing about her daily food intake. in her final entry she was worried about herself and going to the doctor. this was real life, how it ends. the things you can’t take with you.
there are ghosts in these houses, but not the ghosts we imagine in our minds: floating, emotionless white apparitions. her diary was a ghost, a piece of her that stayed alive in that house, that haunted everyone who read it. it wasn’t that it was particularly scary or sad. it was that it became those things because it wasn’t.
