The Victorian
Faye Stuart wanted to believe in ghosts. She wanted to believe so badly that she found herself staring desperately into the dark corners of her new apartment, waiting for a ghastly face to appear. But where others felt the icy cold feeling of eyes staring at them in an empty room, Faye felt something even more terrifying: no one, not even a spirit, looking her way.
It’s something she never thought about back home. She was a casual non-believer. Friends would tell ghost stories and she’d play along, as if she believed. She would wonder if they themselves really did, either. Before her own grandmother had passed, she’d tell stories of the haunted house she grew up in. Faye believed her as a kid, but as she got older, her grandmother’s childhood recountings felt more like fables; stories to scare the kids.
It wasn’t until she made the big move to San Francisco after finishing four years at Fresno State that she truly considered the possibility of belief in the afterlife where a soul remains in, and continues to present itself in, the physical world.
She began to contemplate this when she found out that her apartment was over one hundred and fourteen years old. She was renting just one room of a beautiful Victorian home in the Lower Haight district of the city which, as she found out upon moving in, had withstood the famous 1906 earthquake that rattled the city and killed over three thousand people.
Cracks in the ornate crown molding and side-paneled hallways proved her assumption. She could feel and smell the age of the building. Light leaking in through the giant bay windows in the front of the living room felt timeless, like it were the same sunbeams that poured in twenty-five, fifty, one hundred years ago. Who else had enjoyed this home?
She imagined the folks who had lived there back then: who they were, what they looked like, and what they did for work. Did they have families with them? she pondered. Or were they living alone, like me?
Did any of them die in the earthquake? she thought. The idea was startling since she had lived her life up until this point in a home built in 1992 by her own father. A death had never occurred there, at least that she knew of .
Even if no one had died during the earthquake or died in her new home at all, Faye came to the conclusion that most, if not all, of the original inhabitants were likely dead. And given such a beautiful location, wouldn’t they hang around if they could? That notion brought her to her next, most troubling thought: What if ghosts really are real?
All of those times her friends spoke of seeing, hearing, feeling, or even speaking to ghosts came rushing back to her. Could they have not been lying? Could that have actually happened? Did her grandmother’s childhood home really contain all the lost spirits that she used to claim?
A feeling of disappointed exclusion washed over her. It was as if she had been missing out on some of the coolest of life’s experiences, in which the dead came back to touch the living, except for Faye Stuart.
To allow herself to believe in ghosts also meant she would be welcoming in the idea that she herself, one day, could walk the halls of her Fresno childhood home for eternity. That thought sent chills down her spine. She had been eager to get out of Fresno for about five years, and now that she had finally managed to secure a paid research internship in the city and leave, the thought of being trapped there forever as a sad, translucent apparition made her stomach sink.
But maybe she could choose where she wanted to haunt. Haunting San Francisco would probably be really fun, although there were probably a lot of angry ghosts upset about the gentrification. Still, that would be better than eternity in Fresno.
Faye spent most of her time unpacking boxes thinking about the afterlife. It was a nice distraction from the confusing homesickness that was beginning to set in. For every belonging that she removed and placed in her room, she imagined where it would go when she died.
A ceramic ballet dancer, gifted to her by some distant relative for a past birthday, made her feel particularly melancholy. She hoped it would end up in the hands of someone who appreciated its beauty the way she did, but there was no way to be certain. She pictured it being tossed carelessly in the trash after her funeral, its delicate glass legs snapping on its way to the landfill. It would decay in a pile of trash for hundreds of years, lonely and forgotten. She would surely haunt whoever was responsible.
If ghosts were real.
Which, she thought as she placed the ballet dancer on a bookshelf, they probably aren’t. Her room was mostly unpacked, so she decided to head out and make small talk with one of her housemates who she could smell was cooking some potent Indian food in the kitchen.
“Hey! The food smells so good!” Faye said, turning the corner into the kitchen.
“I didn’t make enough for you,” her new roommate, Elouise, said with an uncomfortable grimace. “Sorry.”
“Oh, no I–I wasn’t saying I wanted–it’s totally fine,” Faye stumbled.
“I’ll be done in like ten minutes if you want the stove, though,” Elouise said, stirring the fragrant food in a pan.
“Ok, thanks,” Faye said, leaving the kitchen. She concluded that Elouise was probably not the small talk type. She went back to her room and waited to go back out and cook.
She scrolled through her phone while lying on her frameless mattress on the old wooden floor. Photos of her and her mother sent a pang of sadness through her stomach. She missed the comfort of her home, despite all of the reasons that drove her to leave. In the cold lonely apartment, with this weird housemate, her life at home seemed like it was already a thousand years in the past.
The thing about leaving everyone you seemingly can’t stand behind is that you will still create a void. Faye had left her family to escape near constant arguments, to avoid her parents’ crushing expectations, to not have to sit by and watch her mother face her father’s abusive tirades. As terrible as all of that was, Faye hadn’t expected to feel such sorrow once she finally broke free. There was now a gap to fill in her life. What would she do now that she didn’t have family nearby to please? Who would she speak to about her budding career? They wrought havoc on her mind, but at the very least, they were people who cared about her.
She continued to scroll for a while, before hearing a creak in the floor outside her room. It sounded like her roommate was standing outside the door. Faye got up off her mattress and opened the door to inspect, but no one was out there.
“Elouise?” she said softly. No reply. She could hear the faint sounds of Elouise eating in the dining room.
She recessed back into her room, slowly closing the door.
Did she imagine it? Or could it have been…
It’s not a ghost, Faye. Get over yourself. Faye had studied psychology in school, and knew that it was more likely to notice things that may support your existing beliefs. As in, she was looking for signs and evidence. She wouldn’t let herself fall prey to delusion.
Creeaaak.
The floor creaked again. Faye’s heart started to race. She jolted up and swung the door open. Nothing.
She started towards the dining room.
“Elouise, did you hear something walking outside my bedroom?”
Elouise stared at her for a moment before blowing the steam off a bite of food on her fork and eating it. Mouth full, she responded, “the house is like a million years old. It creaks all the time.”
“Oh, okay. Sorry,” Faye mumbled, turning around to head back to her room.
“But I do think this house is haunted,” Elouise said matter-of-factly.
Faye stopped dead in her tracks.
“You do?” she said, turning back around.
“Mmm-hm,” Elouise hummed, nodding with another mouthful of food, “it’s some old man, I think. I have dreams about him.”
“Really?” Faye felt her fearful excitement growing.
“Sometimes he’s just talking about random things, and I’m like, what the fuck is this old guy doing in my dreams? But other times, he talks about how he died, and like how the city was his home, and about his dead wife… it’s honestly boring sometimes but I listen cause I don’t want him to, like, kill me in my sleep, or whatever,” Elouise went on, stirring her steaming food.
“So you think he’s… dangerous?” Faye asked.
“God, don’t look so scared! I don’t actually believe in ghosts. I think it’s just my brain playing tricks on me, preying on my fears or something,” Elouise laughed.
“Oh, yeah, me too. You’re probably right,” Faye shrugged.
Faye went to bed that night, only her sixth night in the city, unable to shake the image of the old man with the dead wife haunting her housemate in her dreams. She stared out the window, from which the only view was the siding of the next house over, while listening to every pop and creak in the structure. While pondering the history of the house, she imagined the world of the early 1900s. A certain song popped into her head, a slow swinging jazz song recorded on a phonograph, of which she didn’t know the name. She had heard it somewhere in a movie. She pictured the old man and his wife, dancing to that song in her room. It was sweet. She hoped that if he really were a ghost, he and his wife were reunited to spend forever together.
But, she thought, they probably just died. Her whimsical imaginations were extinguished by the part of her mind that led her to the field of psychology. The part of her that thought rationally. It told her that if she, at twenty-three years old, had not already seen a ghost, then statistically, they do not exist. But, she wasn’t satisfied. She couldn’t accept that answer. Faye spent the rest of the night tossing and turning and keeping one eye open, just in case.
Finally the sleepless night came to an end with the ringing of her alarm. Faye quickly got ready, brushing her short brown hair and sloppily applying some mascara around her tired eyes. She rushed out the door, determined not to be late to her new job. She made it a few blocks down the street before realizing she wasn’t exactly sure where the bus stop was. She knew it was close by, but it was nowhere in sight.
She reached into her pocket to look it up on her phone, but it was empty. She swung her backpack over her shoulder and frantically unzipped it. After rummaging through with no success, she started back to the house for her phone. She ran up the slightly inclined street, which had her winded by the time she got back to her block.
Because all the Victorians looked roughly the same to her, and due to her exhaustion from the night before, she couldn’t exactly remember which house was hers. She stepped back to look for her address on the sides of the houses. 1241…1242…1243! There it is.
She looked at the big white house, her eyes glancing up to the big bay windows up above. Through the bright reflection on the glass of the foggy gray sky above, she saw something.
She saw the face of a sad old man staring back down at her.