We Live Inside Your Eyes

by Kealan Patrick Burke

  In that time, only two unusual incidents occurred, and those would not be uncovered until an author named Jay Anson wrote a book about an apparent haunting that made another house synonymous with the supernatural. The house was, of course, Amityville, and once Anson’s book hit the bestseller lists in 1977, haunted places were suddenly a phenomenon worthy of global attention. By the time the movie adaptation scared the living hell out of audiences in 1979, armed with all manner of pseudoscientific equipment, self-proclaimed paranormal investigators and demonologists actively sought out alleged hauntings and made a respectable (and often absurd) living from books and articles written about their findings, few of which were ever independently verified, most likely because it was all fabricated. But nobody cared. Hauntings were big business. Hollywood ached to replicate the box office success of The Amityville Horror. Publishers wanted more bestselling books about bad places. And with Elvis Presley still fresh in the ground and Three-Mile Island serving as a reminder that any of us could wink out of existence at any minute, ghosts were in fashion.

  Thus, when an article about the house on Abigail Lane appeared in Odd Things, a short-lived paranormal newsletter out of Bangor, Maine, one of the more prominent teams of paranormal investigators (if prominent is the proper word for ascendance in a field that relies almost entirely on not finding anything) took note.

  Despite notable omissions and inaccuracies, the article in Odd Things was the first piece in print outlining the history of the house, from Elmore Washington to Sandy Radcliffe, and concluding with the two most recent events.

  The first was neighbor Maggie Sundersen’s claim that for four days straight, she could hear music coming from inside the house, a single song repeating on an endless loop, a song, she added, she used to love but now would never be able to hear again without feeling sick. It was “Dream a Little Dream of Me” by The Mamas and the Papas. After two sleepless nights, she reported it to the police, who arrived at the scene to absolute silence, only for the music to start up again once they were gone. Frustrated, Maggie asked her husband if he heard anything, but each time she brought it to someone’s attention (the police, twice, three neighbors, and the mailman), the song stopped. Convinced someone was messing with her, she went to the door, but when she tried to knock, her fist plunged, not through wood, but some kind of gelid amber, honey-like substance. At the same time the music grew so loud (“Say nighty-night and kiss me”), Mary’s ears began to bleed, and with all the strength she could muster, she yanked her hand free and ran screaming back to her house. The next day she sought out a doctor, who diagnosed her with tinnitus and advised her to avoid loud sounds, music especially, for the next few months. He didn’t refer her to a psychiatrist, because he didn’t believe a word of what she’d told him.

  Jim Dancy the mailman, who’d been unable to corroborate Maggie’s claims, had an experience of his own two months later.

  “Three-thirty on a Friday,” he said. “I never thought anything funny about the place. Never heard nothing, never saw nothing. I knew about those people going astray, but that happens, don’t it? I don’t believe in nothing but god himself and I ain’t never seen no aliens or bigfeet or ghosts, just so you know I’m not some loon. And it was probably just somebody playing a trick on me. I don’t know who’d do that. I know everyone on that street, even the kids, and I can’t figure who might think it funny, but you know kids. They get strange notions. What I’d like to know is how they did it.”

  The “trick” to which he refers was the figure in the living room window looking out at him while he was placing a flyer for the new Korean restaurant The Jade Pearl into the mailbox. “Peeking at me through the curtains,” he said. “Kid with a face like a stained and half-torn piece of yellow paper. He were dressed in a funeral suit, too. Upside-down he was, like he were standing on the damn ceiling. Now you tell me how someone, how a kid, could pull that off.” It was probably for the best that Jim forgot that no curtains had hung in that window, or in any of the others at Number 56, for years. Jim continued, “I walked away, as you do when you’re not sure what the hell you’ve just seen, but I looked back. I wish I hadn’t, because there was another boy, or the same one, looking at me from the small window above the kitchen at the side of the house. I beat feet after that, because my momma didn’t raise no fools, but I couldn’t keep from thinking later that if I’d looked, I’d have seen the same thing in every one of those windows. But like I say, I guess it was just a prank, but I don’t know why they’d want to scare an old man like that.”

  The Seekers were Julian and Julia Corman, an affable brother and sister team from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Like many of the paranormal investigators who came before and after them, they used real science to distance themselves from the charlatanism so prevalent in the field. Here there were no crystal balls or Ouija boards or seances, only thermometers, VHS cameras equipped with jury-rigged thermal sensors, Geiger counters, and tape recorders. Neither of them would be standing in lightless rooms demanding the spooks show themselves, because the Cormans didn’t believe the house was haunted, or at least, not by ghosts.

  In her fascinating book, Notes from the Other Side, Julia writes: “I knew from the available facts that we weren’t going to be facing restless ghosts or vengeful demons, or anything so outrageous. The house on Abigail Lane was not built upon an ancient burial ground or possessed by the spirits of the dead. One must always assume the dead have better things to do than exist just to pacify our fear of death. Everything we knew suggested a metaphysical aberration. We stepped over the threshold of an ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood and over the threshold of modern knowledge. It is not a place steeped in old evil. It’s a calamity of physics. There’s a fissure, a gaping cosmic wound, a door to places we can’t begin to fathom. Somehow, something we weren’t meant to see is there in plain view, but only sometimes, and it’s my theory that the door which opens at the top of the stairs was there before they built the house. It’s probably been there longer than the earth. It was just dormant when they constructed the house around it, and now that house is like the building around an elevator, only we don’t know which floor it will open onto at any given time, or what conditions it needs to do so.”

  Unlike many in their field, the Cormans were not out to exploit anyone for fame or personal gain. They were, like all the best scientists, curious, and wanted to try to understand how and why so many people had disappeared from the same place. The not-knowing maddened them, as did the lack of prior investigation, and they resolved to uncover the truth once and for all. They didn’t, of course, not completely anyway, and it’s unlikely anyone ever will, but along with the speculations of Arthur Windale and Patricia Burr, they ultimately contributed a great deal to our understanding of the Abigail House phenomenon.

  “I’d like to think,” Julia says in her book, “that the world into which my brother stepped that night was one in which he was welcome. On good days, when I recall the pair of crimson suns blazing above that field of sunflowers, I tell myself it was, but those days are rare, especially when I remember the tremor that shook us both, as of a colossal footfall, and then Julian’s face when he turned to look at me. It was not the excitement that had been there a moment before, when the air at the top of the stairs seemed to pucker and then bow outward like a bubble, nor was it awe. It was horror, and then he was gone in the dark that rushed back in to seal the rift, a single incisor tumbling down the stairs behind him the only testimony that he’d been there at all. On my worst days, I think some manner of god stepped down from the sky into that field, but I can’t bear to think of what it might have done to him. I pray I am wrong, or I pray it was quick. And to you, dear observer, I pray you don’t judge me too harshly for what must sound like the diary of a madwoman. I grieve and thus cannot restrain my honesty. My whole life, my interest in all things has been scientific, but I find it difficult, in this instance, when reason is needed most, to apply it to what I’ve seen.”

  Julia C
orman’s book is not, as the title might suggest, about her experience with the paranormal, and only tangentially invokes the metaphysical. It’s about mental health, specifically her battle with depression in the years following Julian’s disappearance.

  “I still wake up some nights and see him standing at the foot of my bed. I can’t see his eyes, only his mouth. He is smiling at me in a way he never would, in a way I’d never have let him. What’s worse is that I look too much like him to ever be able to escape the accusation I see in the mirror.”

  Julia’s book went on to become a New York Times bestseller, lauded for its openness about un- and misdiagnosed medical disorders, grief, PTSD, and the stigma surrounding depression. In it, Julia admits to misleading the police when asked about the night’s events not just because she knew the truth was too farfetched, but because she worried her mother would have her institutionalized, given Julia’s history with bipolar disorder and her mother’s tendency to either ignore or punish her for it. Meredith Corman held that mental illness was a convenient and overused excuse for weakness of character. Until her death from breast cancer in 2008, Julia worked tirelessly as a mental health advocate and women’s rights activist. Director Mike Howard intended to feature a clip from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno from 2001 in which she discusses Abigail House, but his efforts were successfully blocked by her mother’s attorney, who did not want to endure the embarrassment of having that old nonsense trotted out again.

  Her legacy, however, extends far beyond the limits of this story.

  VII

  A few books were written about the house (among them Miles Dietrich’s Cursed House: My Encounter with Abigail, Ghost Town Books, 1987), most of them nonfiction, blatant efforts to cash in on the still lucrative haunted house subgenre. One of the fictional efforts, House of Death, by Scott Tiller (Zebra Books, 1985), is trashy fun if you can detach yourself from the awfulness of the tragedies on which said fun is based, and the inexplicable cover illustration of a skeleton in a prom dress. Tiller at least had the decency to dedicate the book to the real-life victims he was exploiting. It was later turned into a terrible NBC TV movie called Death House, which aired only once before being buried, though some Internet sleuths have turned up the commercials for the film, which you can see on YouTube, assuming NBC/Universal haven’t issued a takedown notice out of sheer embarrassment.

  On June 5th, 1986, all the grass died in the yard outside Number 56. It had been fine, if too long and unruly, the evening before. Within a week, it turned completely black, as if it had been burned in a fire. Some say the house knew what was coming, but those are the same people who persist in ascribing the house a consciousness.

  April 1987, and the new mailman, Bertrand Weems (Dancy retired a year after seeing the kid in the window), opens the mailbox at Number 56 to find it packed full of teeth, which rain down around his feet like ghoulish dice. They are later determined to be premolars from the mouths of horses. Weems did not bother to count them, but the police did. There were three hundred and sixty-seven of them. Like Jim Darcy before them, they deemed the incident a hoax, a morbid attempt to perpetuate the urban legends which had risen around Abigail House. They were summoned to the house again on Halloween night that same year, though this time the event was relatively normal. The neighbors had called them to report what appeared to be a coven of hooded figures encircling the house and chanting gibberish by candlelight. They fled at the sound of sirens, though three of them were apprehended. They claimed to be Satanists from The Church of Belial, their mission “to summon the demon from the hell beneath the house.” They were freed without charge, though they would not be the last of their ilk to visit the house, for as much as Satanic Panic had parents throwing their kids’ metal albums into the trash, there were those who saw catastrophic events like the murder of John Lennon, the advent of AIDS, the Challenger explosion, Chernobyl, and Black Monday, as signs of the impending apocalypse, and if God wasn’t listening, maybe the devil would. After all, it’s much easier to believe in Hell if you can already feel the flames.

  On the 5th of September 1988, someone set fire to Abigail House. Authorities were alerted at three in the morning but arrived to find the conflagration had already burned itself out or had been put out. Bafflingly, the house remained undamaged but for extensive smoke staining on the exterior walls. Even the windows were intact. The arsonist, assuming there ever was one, was never apprehended.

  February 1989. Researchers from OSU investigate the house at the request of the state. The investigation takes six weeks and is deemed “inconclusive”.

  In the footage from Mike Howard’s documentary, researcher Shannon Hayes claims some of their findings were repressed by the university for fear of ridicule. “A prestigious institution could not be seen to endorse the radical beliefs of a small segment of the population to whom the paranormal is a viable substitute for logic,” she explained. “We were there to disprove the claims of supernatural activity, not authenticate it.”

  When pressed by Howard to share some of what was removed from the report, Hayes is visibly uncomfortable.

  “We were measuring temperature fluctuations and Dan [Moorehead], for no reason we could explain then or now, went blind in his right eye. He was on the third step of the stairs when he freaked out. I went to him and he shoved me away. ‘Don’t come up here,” he said. ‘Stay the [bleep] away, the air is wrong.’ For eight months after that he claimed he saw things differently through that eye—other places, another way—and it made him happier than he had ever been in his life. But we examined him. There was a yellow cataract occluding his sight. There’s no way he could have seen anything through it. He was legally blind in one eye. But he insisted we were wrong. He even refused surgery, rejected the idea of an intraocular lens. He said he didn’t want to risk ‘poisoning the view.’ We were concerned it might be the result of a tumor, which would explain his inability to process the loss, but he seemed so [bleeping] happy, we quit trying to convince him he shouldn’t be. Now of course, I wish we’d tried a little harder.”

  Dan Moorehead was found dead in his apartment in Hilliard on April 9th, 1989. He’d gouged out both his eyes with a meat fork and bled to death on the kitchen floor. Next to an uneaten breakfast of sausage, eggs, and bacon, was a note. It was one line, written in his own blood:

  ALL HAIL THE SUNFLOWER GOD

  It was declared another tragic suicide and Moorehead’s name was omitted from the Abigail House report, before both were buried.

  On May 12th, 1989, the doors and windows of the house were boarded up and NO TRESSPASSING signs were staked in the fallow yard. After thirty years of mystery, Abigail House was finally condemned.

  That same night, a peculiar sound emerged from inside the house. It woke the neighbors and set dogs to howling. It didn’t last long, but all who heard it recognized it for what it was. It was the sound of trees being felled in a dense wood.

  Inside Number 56.

  VIII

  Arthur Windale noted that the 1990s represents the longest period of inactivity for the house, almost as if it was sulking, yet another example of people’s tendency to anthropomorphize the place. But the house was never truly dormant. It would go weeks, even years without causing someone to blink out of existence, but that didn’t mean other more innocuous things weren’t happening, most of which probably went unnoticed by most, even as they were happening in plain view.

  John Boone, who lived directly across the street from the house (much to his regret) woke one morning to the sound of incessant knocking and looked out the window. There was a man in a worn brown suit slamming a fist on the boards of the condemned house. “Let me in, you little peckerwood,” he cried, over and over again. When this continued for the better part of an hour, John, who had tried and failed to keep to himself in a neighborhood gone to hell, got dressed and crossed the street to talk to the man.

  “Hey, mister,” he said. “Can I help you with something?”

  The man spun aroun
d and was somehow still facing the door, still knocking, as if his whole body had rotated around inside itself only to return to its original position. John stopped dead at the curb, unsure of what he’d seen. The man continued to hammer on the boards. “LET. ME. IN.”

  “Hey. Hey, man,” John said again, a queasy feeling in his stomach. The air felt heavy and thin, and everything was somehow wrong.

  Again, that bizarre optical illusion in which the man seemed to spin around to face him but didn’t really move. It was as if there were two versions of the man and only one of them had turned to look while the other stayed facing the door. John felt sick and decided, whatever this was, it could be someone else’s problem. “I’LL WRING YOUR GODDAMN NECK FOR FOULING UP MY PRECIOUS BABY. OH, YOU BETTER BET I WILL!” the man screamed then, and with one more knock, which sounded like a shotgun blast, he flickered from the door to John like a giant moth, and disappeared into a haze of yellow sparks and black dust.

  John leaned over and retched onto the street.

  He put his house on the market two days later.

  ON SEPTEMBER 11th, 2001, when the Twin Towers fell, nobody came outside. Those who’d gone to work watched the horror on TV before being sent home.

  The house had nothing to say.

  BY THIS TIME, THOSE who believed there was something wrong with Number 56, who’d paid attention to the stories and verified them for themselves, also put their houses up for sale. Even if they thought it all so much blarney, they were tired of the frequent police visits, the media attention, the spook hunters and devil worshippers, the tourists and gawkers, the writers and would-be filmmakers. Their good neighborhood had gone bad. Others were simply annoyed at having a derelict house with a dead lawn bringing down the property values, and either complained incessantly to the housing authority, or started looking for someplace else to live. By 2004, of the twenty-three houses in the neighborhood, only fourteen were still occupied. The value of the remaining homes decreased by 40%, but by then, the happy couples who’d bought them in 1956 were too old and entrenched to move. Despite the economic growth under President Bush, Abigail Lane was dying. Whatever problems the residents had to that point, and there were many, they would soon grow worse as the Internet rose in popularity and people discovered that they could share their thoughts on anything with the whole world. Thus, while it sat there rotting, the mythos of Number 56 continued to build. It was a new era, one that would see the house become famous in a way it never had before. Obsession with the paranormal had never waned, but now ghost hunters had an unprecedented means of finding information and like-minded souls, and of organizing.