My wife, So-Eun, and I knew the house was haunted when we moved in. The previous owner was upfront about it. It was part of the reason the place was so cheap. Well, officially it was because his dog and daughter had died here, horribly.
“Just give them what they want and you’ll be okay,” he asked the realtor to tell us. She handed us the keys and smiled shaking her head. “Don’t worry about all of that, though. His psychosis is your gain! This place was a steal.”
It’s not like the ghosts can just come out and tell you what they want, but they definitely have their ways of communicating. Like the first night we got here, I left a moving box full of plates on top of one of the dining room chairs. We woke up in the middle of the night to hear it crashing down, the plates all shattered into a million pieces and scattered all over the floor. And that’s how we learned their first rule.
Lesson 1: Always leave the chairs empty for the ghosts.
Other rules would follow. We learned not to leave anything on the floor of the pantry after the ghosts wrote a nasty message in Cheerios all over the floor. We learned not to run the dryer at night after two fires (we weren’t sure if the first one was from the ghosts or just a lint buildup.)
So-Eun and I have tried to take these little acts of revenge in stride, cleaning up the Cheerio curse words with a smile, and joking with each other about our picky houseguests. For a while, it seemed like things would be just fine. We listed out the rules on a small whiteboard affixed to the refrigerator so that we could continue to cohabitate.
Lesson 5: No bananas in the house.
Lesson 6: The car should always be parked in the driveway, never the garage.
Lesson 7: No houseplants (maybe just no ferns? Worth investigating more?)
Lesson 8: Downstairs shades must be drawn down at night at ALL TIMES. No exceptions.
It became a bit of a game between us, each of us trying to remember all of the rules better than the other.
But then one night, So-Eun went to get a glass of water downstairs after midnight, and I heard a scream. I ran downstairs to find her grabbing her foot in agony. She said she’d tried to get ice and then heard a loud snap. She looked down to see her big toe bent away from her foot at an impossible angle.
“Okay,” I said. “No ice after midnight? No ice at all?” I took out a whiteboard marker. “What do we write.”
“I can’t live here anymore,” she said. “We have to go.”
“We’ll never be able to afford another place like this,” I told her. “Especially now that interest rates are up. It’s just ice, right?”
But she shook her head. I drove her to the ER in silence.
The next morning, So-Eun packed her things and drove off to her mother’s house.
Since then, I’ve been doing my best to keep playing by the rules, but it’s getting harder and harder.
Lesson 15: Don’t make ANY noise when descending the stairs.
Lesson 16: No hats inside.
Lesson 17: Do not enter the closet beneath the stairs, EVER!
And the final lesson has been the hardest to swallow. At night, I must leave So-Eun’s side of the bed empty, must not even stretch a leg onto it. As I close my eyes, I feel something cold and damp settle onto her side. It will not let me look at it.
My heart beats fast and my blood runs cold, but no matter how much I want to scream and sprint out of the house, I remind myself that if I just play by the rules, everything will be okay.