READ TO THE BOTTOM FOR AN EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENT!

This week’s question comes to us from Betsy Streeter:

Do you think houses can be haunted?

Yes.

On my recent trip to Portugal my cousin Irina and I walked to my grandmother’s house. My grandmother lived in a small town, which is now a bigger town, and her house—which is actually an apartment—was much closer to the center of town when she was alive. When she died, the town grew in the opposite direction. Almost as if she’d been a source of gravity that kept the town pulled close to where she needed it. Which she kind of did. So my grandmother’s house is now close to the outskirts of town, in a neighborhood that is slowly falling into disrepair.

Also, it was always “grandma’s house.” Despite numerous people also having been raised there, and my grandfather having outlived her by a few years, we never referred to it as anything but “grandma’s house.” Grandpa lived in grandma’s house. We all lived in grandma’s house. And we all followed grandma’s rules.

My grandmother raised three children (possibly four) in that house. (Our family is short on facts, long on mythology, and ever-shifting depending on who is best served by the telling.) Only one of those children, my father, was her biological child. (She was the first woman he destroyed.) All of them called her mother. And all of them followed her rules. She also helped to raise a handful of grandchildren, her influence gradually fading along with her memory. But Irina is my Aunt’s oldest, and I am (was) my father’s oldest, so we got pretty close to the full-strength grandma experience. We both have her tattooed on our body. (That’s not an allegory. I’m talking about actual tattoos. I have my grandmother’s name on my arm. Irina went the visual route and has a portrait of both my grandmother and my aunt on hers.) That was all a very long way of saying that both of us miss her very much.

As we walked towards her house, a walk I hadn’t taken in over ten years, I was shocked by how much disrepair the old neighborhood had fallen into but also amazed that my body remembered exactly where I was. This is where the sidewalk gets too narrow to walk side-by-side. There’s a loose cobblestone here. This gate doesn’t lock. There’s a tile mural here. Don’t lean on this fence, it’s loose. All of this from having walked this street a thousand times, what felt like a million years and a few lifetimes ago.

We passed the old firehouse, and I remembered not just the fire fighters who worked their but also the German Shepherd that terrified me as a kid. We pass the butcher store and I remember my grandmother complaining the the butcher about the price of meat. We pass the grocery store and I am asking my grandmother if I can get a candy bar. She’s saying yes. We pass a house where one of her friends lived, and her friend is in the window waiting for my grandmother to pass by for a good gossip session. (Yes, I realize it sounds like my grandmother lived in Richard Scarry’s Busytown. But she kind of did?) All of these people are gone, and all of these places have long since closed, or moved. (The firehouse is now on the other side of town.)

Except they’re not gone. Because I can feel them. They’re real. My body still feels them. My eyes remember them. I can see them. I can see this neighborhood as it was when my grandmother and I walked it. I can hear it. I can smell it. This neighborhood exists exactly as I remember it. Maybe not to look at it. Maybe not to the naked eye. But it exists somewhere. In some time. In some memory. Which is more real than what we are currently walking through.

As we turn the corner into my grandmother’s little street, my cousin and I both stop. We are both looking up at my grandmother’s bedroom window. We are waiting for her. Anytime she sent us out on an errand, she would be up in her second floor window as we rounded the corner. Sometimes to scream out something she’d forgotten to tell us she needed from the grocery store. (This was a time before cell phones. This was a time when you could get a message across town screaming at the closest person on the street and watching a small town create a human message chain until the message arrived at its destination. Somewhat confused, like the actual game of telephone.)

We both stood there waiting for my grandmother to come to her window. Sure that she eventually would. Not saying a word to one another, but knowing that we were both standing in the same spot, at the same time, with the same-sized hole in our heart, looking for the same ghost.

A thing that could not be mended.

Our grandmother died twenty years ago. But she’d already left us long before that. Her memories long gone to a brutal disease that destroys time itself. What was left of her was a ghost. A brutal memory of a person we could no longer reach. Someone who we waited for at the window but could no longer come out to greet us.

My cousin and I eventually crossed the street and walked right up to the door, as we’d done thousands of times before. We didn’t have a key. But we didn’t need one. We knew where the mirror was at the bottom of the stairs, the mirror that our grandma used to check her face every time she went out. We knew the staircase. We knew the number of steps. We knew the number of rooms in the apartment. We knew where we’d find our grandmother, depending on what time of day it was. Either in the kitchen making lunch, or in the living room watching her Brazilian soap operas in the afternoon. We knew our grandpa would be on the back porch, shirt off, suspenders on, feeding his canaries. We knew we would run to grandma first, for a hug, before running out to tease grandpa. We knew we’d both avoid going to the attic, which was haunted even then. We knew we’d eventually settle down somewhere to read comic books. We knew all of this was still real, even as we stared at a door that we could no longer open. It was still all up there.

I’ve since found out that my grandmother’s house has been abandoned since my grandfather died. Their landlord tried renting it out, but with the entire town moving in the other direction, there weren’t any takers for an old apartment in a neighborhood on the wrong side of town. And from the looks of it, that appears to be the story of every house in that neighborhood. Eventually, the pendulum will swing back. Someone will finish what time’s already started. The land will be sold. Bulldozers will come in. New buildings will go up. Maybe one will have a butcher store. Someone will argue with the butcher about the price of meat as their grandkid stands mesmerized by the cow tongue in the meat case.

To answer your question, yes, houses can be haunted. But not all haunting is bad. Sometimes houses are haunted by the smell of caldo verde, and the laughter of a grandmother as she tickles her granddaughter, the smiles of a couple of idiot kids as she asks them if they want a treat, the memory of a grandmother waiting at a window.

Or the image of two grandkids, now roughly the same age as that grandmother when they first met her, standing across the street, wanting her desperately to come to the window so they can tell her how much they miss her.

📖 🚨 📖 🚨 📖 🚨 📖 🚨 📖 🚨 📖 🚨 📖 🚨 📖 🚨 📖 🚨 📖 🚨

Ok… IMPORTANT LITERARY ANNOUNCEMENT!

TL;DR: click the picture!

On April 2, 2024 I sent out a newsletter saying “What I need from you is questions. You ask a question. I answer it.” That was almost two years ago. I promised to do this on a weekly basis, and except for a week here and there, I managed to stick to that. Late last year, I decided I had enough stories to put them all together in a book. So I rung up my friend Kio Start, who’s a great editor, and she did the work of compiling the best stores, putting them in a nice order, and then editing the bejesus out of them. My friend Kate Bingaman-Burt, who did the illustration of me at the top of this newsletter, was nice enough to do an illustration for the book and it’s magnificent.

The book is called How to die (and other stories), it’s a handsome hardback, an intimate 5×8 inches, which feels nice in your hand.

You can get it a few ways: order it directly from me (and I’ll toss in a secret extra story, personalize it, sign it, and toss in whatever stickers I have laying around), you can get it from your favorite online retailer that isn’t Amazon (which might be the best way for our international friends because shipping sucks). It’s slowly making it's way to all those places. Or, you can walk into your local bookstore and say “Hey, can you order me a copy of Mike Monteiro’s How to die? It’s in the Ingram database.” (They’ll know.)

Anyway, buy my book. We made it together.

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