Ghost houses

I recently read an old post from this blog:

I had a discussion on Facebook yesterday with an old friend who was part of our gang of teenagers around 1995. We had spent a summer drinking countless beers in a park near the church, playing soccer with the local alcoholics, hanging out and smoking cigarettes in the oddly derelict buildings of the city at that time – 19th century mansions, abandoned swimming pools, unfinished buildings – which today have all disappeared.

I want to develop a little on that subject.

 

Our band leader was a big kid named Jerome, with whom I had become friend and who introduced me to hard rock – the Guns, Iron Maiden.

He had, and it was crazy luxury at that time and in the social environment where I was evolving, an IBM computer, and I spent lots of afternoons watching him play Ishar and other video games – Blade Runner, Ultima 7, maybe a demo of Daggerfall.

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I had introduced him to pen and paper RPG's. My mother had bought me by mistake, believing that it was a CYOA, the first volume of the game system Dragon Warriors (called Terres de Légende in France). Having never even heard of role-playing, I had spent some time reading this book, wondering where the adventure was after the rules, before realizing that the idea was to write scenarios by myself, and make them play to my friends. It influenced the rest of my life more than my schooling or many other things.

We played a little bit of everything, Cyberpunk 2020, The Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun, all the games I bought after I had read the reviews in Casus Belli, a magazine I had quickly subscribed to. These sessions were mainly used to make me angry, because Jerome like the few other comrades of the college that I invited to play my scenerios were generally terrible players that despaired me.

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We played in particular during his birthday parties. We had, one day, imagined a false session of spiritism. Jerome was the one we wanted to fool; two friends had built a mechanism that allowed them, at a distance, to turn on the hi-fi system whenever they wanted, and during the session, while we were pretending to summon the spirits, a track of Dead Can Dance (The host of Seraphim if my memory is good) started screaming at full volume. Two minutes later, Jerome was sitting back to the wall of his building, a safe distance from the cabin, trembling and stammering. We had a good laugh. But I confess to ask myself today if it really exists, a false session of spiritism. If we were not all the victims of a cosmic farce, very real, which exceeded us completely.

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The last summer before entering Highschool, we rented a small bungalow on the edge of a pond. I got absolutely drunk during a red moon night; it seemed to occupy half the sky. Jerome and I had found, I do not know where, white sheets, and we strolled as ghosts in the paths of the campsite and the waterfront.

Jerome died the following summer.

This degenerate little house

I remember playing The Call of Cthulhu with Jerome and another friend, in the ruins of an open-air pool, with bad warm beer. Wa had started (before fleeing!) in what we called "SESA" – an old mansion, typical of post-1871 German architecture, which faced our school and belonged to the same complex, with the adjacent factories, all being the property, therefore, of that SESA company.

It was very dilapidated and surrounded by a park that had become a real jungle over the years, a jungle with a sickly appearance and where there was a perpetual twilight. The crossing to the house had been enough to make me more than uncomfortable. I can only rely on my memories, but I know that I don't invent or "embellish" things over the years: the house scared the crap out of me, the house gave off something bad; the house seemed to be part of another dimension, behind its gates and its jungle.

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That house occupies a central place in my intimate and dreamlike cartography of my hometown. Dreamlike, because I have been dreaming of it regularly for years and years. Each time, it looks different – a one-room house open to the winds, a terraced house on the corner of the street, a factory in ruins, a huge mansion, a rotting farmhouse – but every time I know that it is THAT house, I recognize it immediately from a distance, to the amount of evil that it radiates.

Some examples :

 1) I am in an abandoned house with Xavier. I know it has something evil about it. I don't know why we came here. But after a few minutes the world starts shaking like a jelly, twisting like an image in a distorting mirror; at least it's a visual impression that overlaps with the normal world, and I understand that it's the house that does that. I also see, or I feel, that the walls are getting tighter; the house wants to swallow us, to absorb us, it is an unavoidable mechanism as soon as we enter it.

2) I am outside, at dusk, with my camera. I want to photograph the covered parking lot, which the light makes so special at this hour; a storm light that makes everything supernatural. I photograph the outside of the parking lot and then enter it. People come and go, some look at me intrigued or suspicious, vaguely hostile, others ignore me. I take people from afar, tight angles as with the telephoto lens, with behind them the stormy sky with clouds that stand out strangely, through the openings of the parking lot. When I leave, at another end of the building, I walk along a small street, and continue to photograph the parking lot from the most bizarre and aesthetic angles possible. Hundreds, even thousands of birds pass through the sky, as if something was going to happen. My camera has trouble focusing on them, but I can take a few shots. Then it's dark and I'm in narrow, winding alleys. I'm with Pierre and we're lost. We know that we absolutely must find our way. We try several routes, losing each other all the time. Then we find ourselves in a wider street, almost an avenue. The SESA house is there, plunged into darkness and silent – but like the rest of the streets. We can enter the house, I know it, to go out at another end. But it still scares me as much as ever. I enter, however – the door is open – and find myself in a sort of dark living room. There's a door at the end. I try to open it, but it is closed, the handle held by a kind of metal bar. Yet I know it's waiting for that, to be open. I'm too scared, and I'm hurrying out. We take the avenue to return. Everything is black and silent.

 3) I am at SESA once again, it is very dark, and I am with others. We go through rooms, rather wide halls with stairs, all of which reminds me of the school. I speak in voice-over as if I were commenting on a video for someone, and I say that I remember very little of the content of the real house (and in my dream the layout and decoration of the "real house", which I can remember in bits, has nothing to do with the real mansion that was facing the school). In fact, most of the rooms we pass through are almost empty of furniture, as if I couldn't "materialize" them. Everything is very clean, it doesn't look like the house has been abandoned for years. We arrive in a small room where there is a ladder, or a small staircase, leading to a door in the wall, high up, like an attic entrance. Some people want to enter it, and they do. I am terrified when I remember that we had already entered this final room, and that "something" horrible was waiting for us there, but I don't know what (a malicious woman? a spirit? a witch?) – I run down the stairs to escape but arrive in a hall, on the ground floor, extremely dark and where the only light is the one you can guess through the windows of the front doors; they are closed by grilles, I am trapped.

Only non-terrifying occurrence:

I'm moving in with Laurence, in my hometown. I feel something strong but difficult to formulate, the idea of coming home. Like a closed loop. We will live in an old bourgeois house with park, gates, trees, etc. Once inside – it is really old and messy – I realize that it is once again SESA, but for the first time I only feel a vague mistrust, not panic fear, not the usual horror. I say to myself that we have to be careful, but maybe after all it is possible to live there.

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Sometimes one memory hides another one; or an obsession another one. I became aware of this in February 2008 when I photographed and filmed my maternal grandmother's house before it was emptied and sold. It was actually a three-storey building, where she lived absolutely alone, in two rooms – the rest being, from floor to ceiling, filled with photos and souvenirs, books, trinkets, travel items, crockery and linen, furniture also filled to bursting point, a real Ali Baba's cave whose rooms had not changed and had not welcomed anyone except a cleaning lady since the 1960s or 1970s.

As a child, I loved this place, where there was always a radio station, still on Radio Télévision Luxembourg, and where several cats and a tamed pigeon wandered. But this time I wandered from room to room, seeing for the first time the house as it had been until then appeared only in a dream, under masks: black, silent, as cut off from the world as the inside a tomb. The half-open shutters showed the garden and the street outside, but the light had something strange and unhealthy, and the outside looked as tarnished, attenuated; it seemed as if an impassable membrane separated the house from without; it seemed like she was evolving in her own space-time. I understood that day, standing next to my grandmother's bed, that this house was the matrix, the fundamental image from which my obsession for dust and time, abandonment, ghosts. And that behind my recurring dreams about SESA, it was she who was hiding. Adolescents we believed that the SESA was haunted. I believed in it as much as others. But I was wrong: there are no haunted houses. Only haunted living beings; haunted by the houses of their past.