For the past twenty years, I have lived in New York’s Hudson Valley—a place famous for its many hauntings. The character of Ichabod Crane is said to be based on a school teacher from nearby Tannersville, a short ride up the mountain from where I am now. In nearby Leeds, New York, a stretch of road crossing the old stone bridge is said to be haunted by both the ghost of Anna Maria Zwart who for centuries has been said to flag down riders, coaches, and motorsits late at night to ask for a ride to her home, only to disappear before the journey is completed. That same road is said to be haunted by a ghostly white cow, and most oddly, by a giant white hog. In nearby Athens, Murderer’s Creek forms the northern boundary of the town, and carries with it a number of stories of crimes. The Rip van Winkle Bridge, not a mile from my house with its sweeping views of the Hudson, is also a sought-out destination for the suicidal.
My own house is is approximately three hundred years old, though the exact date of its construction is unknown. The main house is made of mixed local fieldstone, and is two and a half stories high. It is distinguished by two quarter fanlight windows in the upper gable end of the house that, when lit at night, looks like a pair of slightly sinister eyes. The glass in these windows is original and is thin, bubbled, fragile, and as I discovered, easily broken. Built by a Dutch family and lived in for several generations, numerous Van Bergens and Persens lived, and one can assume died inside these walls, leaving their psychical imprints on the memory of the place.
When I bought the house in 2003, the house was practically a ruin. The previous owner had fallen into a state of bankrupt and drunken despair, and as his own life unraveled, so did the fate of the house he owned. At the time of the sale, the pipes had frozen and burst. Raccoons, snakes and squirrels had taken up residence. A hole in the roof was letting water pour in, and termites had eaten through most of the beams supporting the kitchen. Windows were broken, the garage had fallen off its foundation, and the small barn at the back of the property was near collapse. The realtor I was working with refused to show me the house, so appalled was she by the derelict property. On seeing it, I knew at once I would buy the house.
Or rather we would buy the house—my former partner James and I. We had both dreamt of owning an old house, fixing it up together, and we would spend the next seven years doing just that. Every extra dollar was put back into the house, after we began the herculean job of gutting and cleaning before tackling the painstaking job of putting it all back together. We filled dumpsters full of paneling, linoleum, rotten wood as we stripped away the years to reveal whatever original elements remained.
It turns out there weren’t many of those original details left, though there were some. We found pungent cow hair insulation stuffed into the cracks of walls, newspapers from the nineteenth century, hand-cut nails, and bits of wood with their original milk-paint color which was a poisonous yellow-green. Mostly we found trash and walnut hulls from squirrel nests, papery snake skins, hundreds of empty beer cans.
As the house began to wake up, people began to invite themselves in for a better look. One Saturday as I was attempting to tame the overgrown brush that was once the front lawn, a car came down the drive. A man and a woman got out of the car, and at first I assumed they were Jehovah’s Witnesses, or canvassers. The man approached me, and once he was in earshot, he said, “You know this place is haunted.”
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