Ghost House
I have been renting a room on the second floor of the three-floor, ten-person home on 115-117 Governor Street in Providence, RI for the past year. As this is my senior year at Brown University, living off campus is supposedly some rite of passage into the young adult world. I think it has something to do with having to clean our own bathroom, remembering to take the garbage to the curb on Sundays, and opting to wearing an extra pair of socks instead of turning the heat up in a house that was built before proper insulation existed. All these seem like good life lessons to learn, except that as hard as I have been trying to feel at home in this house, it has been trying to get me to leave.
First, there was the carbon monoxide incident.
I came home late one night from the library, with only the skin surrounding my eyes exposed to the freezing winter temperatures. (If you haven’t spent time in the Northeast, then you don’t know that winter nights can drop easily below freezing. It’s the kind of cold that drops damp blocks of icy air into your lungs. Tonight was one of those nights.) I opened the back door to my house while peeling off my many woolly layers. My dripping nose prickled at a smell that met it: gas. Or what I thought was the smell of gas, an odor identified through my memories of trying to get the grill to catch on summer nights back home. I called my dad.
“Hey dad, I don’t mean to alarm you, but the back staircase of my house smells like gas. I think it’s coming from the basement? Should I call someone?” I was still sweating in my layers from the temperature shift from the cold winter outside to the radiator-heated inside, now standing in the middle of my second floor bedroom with my boots still on.
For a little background, my dad is a pretty cool cucumber. Any injury, illness, or life trauma in my life had been met with his calm composure, stating that the problem at hand would probably go away on its own. Most of the time, it did. My sprained ankle would heal, my teenage angst would hormonally balance, and I’d get over whatever cold was weighing me down. He never used a sense of urgency.
This time, he spoke quickly, his words punching through the speakerphone, “Open all of the windows and call National Grid immediately. Better yet, leave the house if you can. And find a place to sleep tonight. That stuff can kill you.”
Mr. Cool Cucumber was not so cool, which sent his not-so-even-keeled daughter (me)into a bit of a frenzy. I entered the living room off of my bedroom, notifying my housemates of the emergency. They had been watching a new season of Survivor behind the closed door to our floor of the house, unknowingly awaiting their noxious doom.
“Did you guys smell gas in the staircase when you came home today?” We frantically let the night in as we opened the large, poorly insulated windows and got the fans going. Soon, the National Grid officer arrived. (Is this his official title? Probably not, but he was in uniform and helping with a state of emergency, so I’m knighting him with this position anyways.) He showed me his hand-held ghostbuster reader, which was red and flashing with deadly levels of CO in the air.
As it turns out, the hot water heater in our basement was playing with poison. The part of the system that converts gas to electric (or electric to gas, or gas to hot air, one of those kinds of things) decided to quit its day job and spew carbon monoxide into the basement instead. For those not so up on their gas leak knowledge, heart converters know when they are doing this, and to send up a reed flare, they mix the colorless, odorless, lethal carbon monoxide (which sounds a lot like paranormal activity of you ask me) with the odor of natural gas so that unsuspecting house goers don’t keel over in their sleep.
The National Grid officer disconnected the heat converter, showing me that his ghostbuster reader had gone back down to normal levels. I sign off that he had effectively eliminated the danger, which read a lot like a liability waiver.(You pick.) The house was put at bay, but with the windows open to air out the staircase, living rooms, and bedrooms, the residual colorless, odorless gas still lingering, and the harsh Providence winds whipping through our house on the hill, it was going to be a cold night’s sleep.
I wasn’t going to let Ghost House win this one, and I slept on a friend’s couch instead.
-
I know what you’re going to say. The supernatural attack on the well-being of the house’s inhabitants was just a faulty heating system. No ghosts necessarily needed to be involved. I might agree with you, except that we had been calling 117 Gov Ghost House long before this happened. The place was creepy to begin with.
Up until 2004 (when it was bought up by one of the college lease bosses of Providence), the first floor of our house was the office of local plastic surgeon, Dr. Harvey M. Baumann. While most of his clients went under the knife for aesthetic reasons (read: nose job, boob job, boob reduction, botox), Dr. Baumann also assisted in the facial reconstruction of a number of pit bull attacks in the 80s. For one article following up with a seven-year-olds’ attack, its headline reads, “Now the little boy wakes screaming less often.” You just can’t make this shit up.
What remains of Dr. Baumann’s practice are track lighting on the ceiling, sinks in two of the three bedrooms, and a physician’s chair stuffed behind a curtain in one of the utility closets. There are standing procedure lamps and full-length mirrors stacked in the laundry room of the basement, where the light switch refuses to turn on. Instead, any jumpy nighttime chore-goer (for example, me)gets a solid spook by their own reflective figure shining back at them with a phone flashlight for navigation.
Beyond that, this house is just old. And that makes it archetypically creepy. A quick Google search led to Zillow says it was built in 1900. For reference, that’s twenty-eight years before sliced bread was invented. The people who have lived here have been gone ten times over, or the ghosts could be the left overs of augmented body parts, or maybe they are pit bulls let loose from another realm just as they had in this one. Or perhaps the house itself is cranky in its old age having to put up with college kids and their crazy late-night partying.
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The carbon monoxide incident was quick, if ultimately dangerous for everyone in the house. Unfortunately, the next incident the Ghost House inflicted was directly pointed at me.
The tagline of this part of the saga is that I have had three different Ikea mattresses in the past 30 days. You’d think that’s some sort of record, as if I would get a gold Ikea shopping card that discounts on full size Morgedal Ikea mattresses. Or at least a coupon for a free cinnamon bun. Again, let me explain.
While at my shift at the on-campus coffee shop (shameless plug for The Underground), one of my housemates from the first floor (the surgeon’s office floor) called me. We aren’t really on a calling-to-chat basis, so I decided to pick up.
Hey, I’m really sorry but there was a leak on the third floor, and well, it was right above your room. It looks like almost everything is fine, but that’s because your bed kind of acted like a sponge and soaked up all the water? I guess what I’m saying is your bed is dead.
AsI walked home to assess the damage, I recalled that a few weeks earlier, I had listened to a podcast about a woman who was awoken in her bed by liquid seeping through her quickly caving, leaky ceiling. When the fire department came to inspect the integrity of the building, they discovered her elderly upstairs neighbor had died in their sleep a week earlier. Nobody had noticed and the body was decaying through the floorboards. The old man’s body was the drip that had woke the woman up.
No matter how bad my ceiling leak was, at least it was not a decaying body dripping through the ceiling. I repeated this back to myself as a walked, finally climbing the stairs (the same that had been filled with carbon monoxide two months earlier) and reaching my room. Everything was in order, minus my bed, which had transformed into a giant yellow dish sponge, saturated with water (please, please don’t be bathroom water, I thought) and soaking into the floor. It weighed more than me or any of my roommates could lift, but had luckily contained the water(which turned out to be from a kitchen sink pipe that had rusted to the point of breaking in half.) The repair man tore apart my popcorn ceiling tiles and left the room smelling like a Marlboro factory, but at least the leak was fixed. After a trip to Stoughton, MA for a new mattress and the ten dollars in quarters it took to clean all of my bedding, I thought I was back in business.
Unfortunately, I was wrong. Flash forward three weeks and a Brown University Sailing Team spring break training trip later. I’m back in my room, this time nursing a sunburn, multiple bruises, and full body aches from four days of being out on the water in particularly windy conditions (a little crash course on competitive sailing:the windier it is, the more physically exhausting the sport becomes). All I want to do is flop face down into bed and sleep until the next morning or whenever the powers at be (different from the ghosts, mind you) decide that it’s time for me to be a functioning human being again. I drop my bag and prepare to sprawl out, but my comforter resists my attempt to tug it towards me. I look up, and a familiar drip falls from the ceiling, mocking me. This time I take a moment to cry like I’m in a dramatic movie montage about a small-town girl moving to a big city and getting way over her head with the fast-paced lifestyle.I wasn’t even the rowdiest member of the house. I used command hooks to hang my wall decorations as to not scratch the walls, I cleaned the bathroom regularly, and I generally didn’t strain the house in any way in which it might revolt against me. I had no idea why the House hated me so much specifically.
OnceI’ve collected myself, I go through the motions: call the landlord, have him yell at me about the bad news I’m delivering (uh, it’s your house, dude. Don’t shoot the messenger), collect my sheets into the laundry bin and head for routeI-95 to retrieve yet another new mattress. Luckily, my dad (Mr. Cool Cucumber, remember him?) is unrelatedly coming to visit and is already en route. Ed the chain-smoking repair man comes again, this time claiming there is nothing wrong with the upstairs sink and therefore the leak is a mystery. I start to think he and the Ghost House are in cahoots.
My dad takes a look at the bathroom, situated adjacent to the kitchen on the third floor. He notices that the grout in the shower has corroded away and pours a bucket of water down the blatant holes between the tiles. The ceiling leaks more, so we have our problem targeted. Ed the chain-smoking repairman fills in the holes, and that seems to have finally given the Ghost House what it wanted.
-
I have a month left until graduation, and there have not been any more altercations. I am hoping Ghost House and I have some sort of agreement worked out that I’m leaving soon, so there’s no need to do any more convincing. Next year’s lease holders came to visit their soon-to-be home last night, their excitement about the large windows and high ceilings bubbling up inside the space. We told them about the water leaks, the old creaky house vibes, and the tendency for the house to fall apart, but also about the movie nights, holiday brunches, and cozy snow days in. We had our time here, and it was their house now.