sign of the times, the housing crisis of our generation that other generations will read about in history textbooks to come. I’m kind of stoked about it in some weird way, knowing these abandoned, beaten-up, unloved homes are making history as we speak.
The people in the neighborhood are mostly blue-collar workers, many commuting from as far as Portage, Indiana, or Hobart, to earn a paycheck and pay their bills. They work mainly in the manufacturing industry, if they’re not working retail for some shop in town. Money is harder to come by here than it is for others, and yet we’re better off than those in the slummy apartments off Emery Road, the subsidized housing units, low-income apartments paid for in part by the US government.
But regardless of how many scourged homes there are on the block or in town, this is the house everyone always talks about: that school-bus-yellow, minimal traditional home with its aluminum siding and its busted roof, right across the street from mine.
That house wasn’t always a blot on the landscape. Though I’ve never seen it as anything but a blight with my own two eyes, I’ve heard this from neighbors who stand on their front lawns from time to time, arms crossed, frowning at what it’s become over the years. It wasn’t always such an eyesore, they tell me. A damn shame, they say. There was a time when the house was actually lived in and nice. Neighbors want it demolished, but the bank that owns the property doesn’t want to pay for that. That costs money. And so they leave it be. The house is a pockmark now, though it’s always been this way, since I was a little thing myself. Like the rest of the world I wish someone would level it to the ground and take it out of its misery.
And then of course there are the stories of the ghost of Genevieve.
Kids (gutsy, stupid or otherwise) have been known to creep to the windows and peer in, spying her wraith through the panes of glass. But it isn’t just the kids. No, adults claim they see her, too, a tiny apparition in white drifting from room to room, lost and alone, calling for her mommy.
In middle school, it’s a rite of passage, being dared to spend the night inside the haunted house. I did it myself when I was twelve. Sort of. We made it a couple hours, at best. Half the battle was getting out of your own house without your mom or pop taking notice, though my pop was so ripped he didn’t know whether I was here or there or anywhere. But the other guys had to lie to their folks, saying they were sleeping somewhere else, or climb out their bedroom windows long after they were supposed to be asleep.
But it was an initiation of sorts, being recruited from the nerd herd to the in-crowd, all by spending the night with a spook.
And so we did. Or tried to at least. A bunch of buddies and I packed bags full of flashlights, lockback knives, binoculars and food, and double dog dared one another to spend the night there, in that yellow house with a ghost. Why? Don’t ask me why. We just did.
We had a disposable camera with us, too, to take pictures to show off the next day at school. Proof that we did it. We spent the night with a spook and we survived. Some guy tagged along with night-vision, another with a camcorder. Another with something he claimed was a thermal imager (it wasn’t). We climbed in through a busted window—me scratching my shin on a shard of glass—and set up camp in what was one day the living room of a happy family, with sleeping bags, pillows and all. We snapped photos, the guys and I—beside the cobwebbed fireplace, sitting on an old sunken-in sofa that seethed with bugs, crossing the threshold to her room. Her room.
Genevieve’s room.
From the stories I’ve heard over the years, Genevieve was a naughty little girl. In the five years before her death, she was caught more than once upsetting bird nests, and pulling the legs one by one off the thorax of ensnared bugs. It’s the kind of thing people remember about Genevieve, little Genevieve climbing a tree to jettison robin fledglings to the ground, whereby she scampered down the tree and stepped on them, while mama robin watched on, defenseless, unable to do a thing to save her babies. The kids in the neighborhood at the time, adults now, long gone—though their parents remain—recall the way their children didn’t want to play with Genevieve. Genevieve was cruel. Genevieve was mean. She pulled their kids’ hair; she called them names. She made them cry and fake stomachaches, saying they didn’t want to go to school, because once there Genevieve would punch them in the gut and kick their shins. She had a temper, a nasty temper, or so I’ve heard, and not just the typical pouting, crying, whining behavior of a usual five-year-old child, but a five-year-old who could’ve used a straitjacket or, at the very least, some mood stabilizing drugs.
No wonder half the town is certain she came back as a ghost, to haunt them even in death.
The guys and I made it in that old house a few hours at best before figuring out we weren’t the only ones there, and we ran. It had nothing at all to do with a ghost. It was the rats that did us in. The damn rats. Roof rats. We didn’t make it past 11:00 p.m., when they came out in search of food.
Even these days, all these years later, there are allegations of strange noises at night. A child singing lullabies, a child’s cry.
Me? I’m pretty sure it’s just the wind.
But others aren’t so sure. Some people are superstitious enough not to walk past the house, and so they cross the street to my side instead. Others hold their breath the whole darn way, like passing a cemetery and holding your breath to make sure you don’t breathe in the spirit of the dead. They tuck their thumbs inside their fists, too, but I don’t know why. I just know that they do. Death superstitions are the norm around here.
If your shadow is headless, you will die.
An owl sighting during the day means death is coming.
A bird crashing into a window also means death is near.
Death comes in threes.
And corpses should always be removed from a home feetfirst. Always.
I don’t buy any of it. I’m far too skeptical for that.
Funny thing is, she didn’t even die in that house. That’s where she lived, sure, where Genevieve lived, but that’s not where she died. So how could her spirit be there?
But maybe that’s just me being overly pragmatic.
The night comes and goes but Esther doesn’t come home. The next day I can hardly drag myself out the front door and on to work, for what I want to do most is sit at home and wait for Esther. Forty-eight to seventy-two hours the 311 operator assured me, and Esther has only been gone for twenty-four. Seventy percent of missing people leave of their own free will; she told me that, too. I also know that Esther is on the lookout for a new roommate—one to replace me—and so I connect the dots in my head and easily surmise that Esther’s leaving has something to do with me and my laxity. I’m a lousy roommate; I get that. But still, whether or not it is my fault, it doesn’t make me feel any better. It feels like a kick in the teeth to me, the fact that Esther wants me out.
But I can’t sit home for the next two days and wait for Esther to magically appear. I have to work, and hope that if and when she does return, we can talk this out.
Monday morning I’m riding the 22 into the Loop in a short skirt for some ungodly reason. At every single bus stop—at every single intersection—the doors burst open and the nippy, November air rushes in to assault my bare legs. I have panty hose on, don’t get me wrong, but sheer hosiery does nothing to fend off the merciless wind in the Windy City. There are pumps in my bag, a pair of gym shoes on my feet:
