We Live Inside Your Eyes

by Kealan Patrick Burke

  In the new millennium, secrets became harder to keep.

  The house was about to go viral.

  BY THE MID-2000S, THE neighborhood was a poor sketch of its former self. Like many of its kind, in the half a century since its development as a place for young married couples, it had fallen to ruin. The asphalt was cracked. Trash gathered in the gutters. The streetlights were broken, and illicit activities conducted in the shadows.

  In 2008, Arthur Windale started a blog entitled The Things We Cannot Know. He wrote about his various encounters and theories, including his visit to Abigail House. For reasons unknown, the post was picked up by news outlets and went viral. Social media exploded and for a week straight #TheAbigailPortal—the name of Windale’s post—was among the top trending hashtags. Windale yet again found himself in high demand, and unsurprisingly, embraced it. He did the talk show circuit, announced he was in the process of putting together another book, and even began taking small groups of acolytes to the neighborhood, something the local police were less than happy about, but as it was more life than the neighborhood had seen in years, and seemed harmless enough, they relented. In his element, Windale held court on the street outside Number 56, ebulliently reiterating all the most soundbite-friendly parts of his blog post, to the delight of his rapt audience. The local news was there, covering the whole thing, though they must have found it all a little silly. Still, news was news.

  Already buoyed by the renewed interest in his work, Windale could not have anticipated just how famous that night would make him. The ABC-affiliate’s footage of the incident had, last time I looked, over 15 million views on Youtube.

  Despite being made aware that he wouldn’t, Windale’s crowd were nevertheless disappointed that he didn’t make an exception to his rule and give them a tour of the house, because from the outside, it looked no different than a hundred other abandoned homes in the suburbs. At least places like Amityville and the Winchester House had some sense of architectural grandeur about them. Abigail House just looked sad and defeated. Perhaps the interior might prove more interesting? But on this, Windale was immovable. He had studied the house enough to know that there truly was something off-kilter there. He believed everything he had read about the disappearances and had no doubt the house, or something inside it at least, had spirited those people away. He had no intention of putting his audience at risk to satisfy their curiosity.

  As it turned out, he didn’t need to give the people a tour, because that night, while he spoke on the street, a light began to pulse in the window behind him. It was initially dismissed as reflected glare from the television cameras or the audience’s cell phones, all of which were raised in the air, but gradually people started to realize that it was coming from inside the house and that it had a pattern. Following the curious looks of the audience, who he’d noticed had ceased paying him much attention, Windale followed their gazes to the house in time to see the boards fall away from the front door as if pried off by invisible hands.

  With a juddering moan, the door swung open and an old woman stepped out into the harsh white glow of the affiliate’s cameras. “What have we here?” Windale is heard muttering on the video, and the excitement in his voice is clear. He has already realized the significance of the event. He couldn’t take the people inside. In truth, he’s afraid of the house, but by letting something out, it has given him a gift that will see him live out the rest of his years in prosperity.

  If you watch the video, the woman’s eyes are such a brilliant ethereal blue they penetrate even the lowest of resolutions. Her skin is dark brown, aged by the sun. She has a pair of small moles above her upper lip. Her head is shaved, and the dome of her skull patterned with intricate loops and swirls of dark ink. She wears wristlets of what appear to be fur, a necklace made of animal bones, and a smock made of tattered leather. It reaches to her knees. Her feet are bare and dirty. From the stoop, she looks around as if she’s just woken up. Her searing blue eyes scan the crowd and Internet memes and viral videos are born of the moment in which she smiles. It is such a genuine, warm, and loving expression of pure joy it brings tears to the eyes of everyone who bears witness to it, even to this day. Like a figure from a dream, she fixes on Windale and walks across the dead lawn to him. Nobody on the street moves. They couldn’t if they’d wanted to. They are in thrall to this woman now. That smile has possessed them, and they would rather die than not stay to see what happens next.

  What happens is she stops before Arthur and takes his hand. Perplexed, fascinated, but unafraid, he watches as she places something into the palm of his hand and nods, her eyes moist. She closes his fingers and shakes his clenched fist up and down a few times, a silent acknowledgment of some kind. “What is this?” Windale asks, but she turns, casts the warmth of her gaze across the crowd one more time, and then walks away down the street until she is swallowed by the dark beneath the broken streetlights. The television crew attempts to follow, but somehow, in all the confusion, they lose her.

  It was an interesting moment that would have faded quickly from the consciousness of all who saw it because in the end, as magnetic as she proved to be, the woman who came out of the house was still just some old woman, probably homeless, and therefore unconnected to the supernatural mystery which had drawn so much interest. There were even accusations that Windale had staged the whole thing.

  In a follow-up video three days later, he silenced his critics and escalated the drama of the whole thing by holding two items up before the camera. One was the object the old woman had given him, a seashell no bigger than a plum, but unlike any shell seen on this earth. It was coal-black and striated with wavy lines of what one would assume to be silver. Depending on which way the shell is held, it gives out a soft sigh that sounds like the heaving of the sea. The genesis of that shell, initially suspected to be handmade, continues to elude modern science, because it’s a composite of materials that, even on a molecular level, are alien. In his other hand, the somber-faced Windale held a large black and white photograph of a blonde woman, much younger than the one who appeared at the door of Number 56 on the night of the tour. Circled in red are the twin moles on her upper lip. They indeed appear to be the same person, separated by thirty years—Sandy Radcliffe.

  Despite the immense intrigue generated by Sandy’s reappearance, like all pop-culture phenomena and irresistible mysteries, the popularity and madness both on the Internet and off eventually forced it to collapse under its own weight, and people moved on to obsess over other things. There were those, like Windale, who were reluctant to let the legend of the place die without adequate explanation, and in the two years since Sandy Radcliffe’s return, it’s estimated that over thirteen more teams of paranormal investigators explored the house. Unless it remains undocumented, they did so without incident. To most, it became a footnote in the state’s haunted history, a point of mild interest on the road to better attractions. The Discovery Channel announced a documentary about the house that never aired.

  Windale continued to write his book, but perhaps fearing it might not be quite the literary juggernaut he’d once thought, decided to violate his own rule and enter the house in, he said, “the interest of more authentic coverage.”

  “Tomorrow,” he wrote on his blog, “I’ll be going alone into the belly of the beast in the hope that it will reveal itself to me. Stay tuned, my fine friends, for a tantalizing report as soon as I have one.”

  True to his word, he went inside Abigail House armed with only his cell phone, which he used only to record audio.

  It was the last time anyone ever saw him.

  The phone was found on the stairs. Following some terse descriptions of the interior, which he clearly meant to expound upon in his book (“squalid” “gloomy” “stinking of cat urine” “shameful symbol, fragility of the American dream”) there comes a sound like a rusty metal door being forced or dragged open. Even on the recording, it’s deafening. It’s followed by a low roar, like a furnace, and when, t
hree and a half minutes later, Windale speaks again, his voice is strained with amazement and fear.

  “I asked for this. My God, I asked for it, didn’t I? The answer? I don’t know what I’m looking at. There’s a warm draft though. It smells like smoke. And...I don’t want to go up there. I don’t want to, but I must, mustn’t I?” His breathing is ragged, animalistic. There’s the clomping sound of his boots on the stairs. One, two, three. Then he stops. “May as well be the face of God, and still they won’t believe it. I’m not sure I believe it either and I’m looking at it. It’s...it’s a wall, black obsidian. I can’t see where it starts or ends, but one edge of it is in view. There’s...daylight, I think. Gray daylight. Or perhaps...I don’t know...I don’t know...impossible, look at it. There’s a sound. Do you hear it? Like a flag fluttering in the breeze...Lord save me. It’s enormous.” Clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp. “Yes, a tower. A black tower, I think, leaning away at...at an angle...from...is that the sun or a fire...I can’t tell. My God, it’s so tall, and I’m up so high...The sound again.” It indeed sounds like a flag snapping in the wind, but a moment later, Windale sees the source. “No, no. My God. My God. Not a flag at all. It’s their wings. It’s a host of—” Muffled thumps as the phone tumbles down the stairs and Windale is gone.

  Those of a Christian bent have surmised that Windale was ferried to his maker on the wings of angels. There is no way to know that they are wrong. I’m an atheist and I prefer their version rather than think of that poor old man being sundered by devils in some hellish otherworld.

  IX

  Mike Howard had several short, critically acclaimed documentaries under his belt by the time he came upon the DON’T LOOK message board in August of 2015. As cyclical as the whims of the house, ghosts and grisly things were once again a hot commodity in Hollywood, and even those who specialized in nonfiction narratives were seeking to get in on it. It was Howard’s agent Kassie Loomis who put him onto the message board, which she thought might be fertile ground for ideas. And she was right. Howard spent hours poring over the dozens of sub threads about Abigail House. He’d been eager to make something longer, a feature-length documentary, and even supposing a fraction of what he’d read on the message board had any basis in fact, he’d need that running time, or better yet, a series, in which to tell the story.

  For eight months, he researched the house, bookmarking and printing off articles about the disappearances, the animal gatherings, the sleepwalkers, the sounds and the strange sights people had reported over the years. He made a list of the names involved and then checked to see if they were first, still alive, and second, willing to talk. He connected with Jeb Foreman’s widow Martha, retired policeman and author Miles Dietrich, Alison Wilson, Sharon Grey’s older brother Donald, Patricia Burr, Doug Lowell’s daughter, Serena, author and clinical psychiatrist Karun Venkatesh, Sandy Radcliffe’s brother George (contrary to her fears, he sought out the help he needed and ended up opening a successful hardware store in their home town), Cynthia Grant Stiles, former editor of Odd Things, Deputy Carson Sanders, Ohio State Police, neighbors Maggie Sunderson and John Boone, mailmen Jim Dancy and Bertrand Weems, OSU researcher Shannon Hayes, and dozens more.

  Howard’s intent was to create the most comprehensive record of the house’s history to date, and in that, he succeeded. Much of what we know is due to his diligent efforts and painstaking research. He consulted with noted astrophysicists about magnetic fields, dark matter, and ‘empty space’. In the film, he comes across as abrasive, argumentative. It’s clear he isn’t there to simply make the case that there was, from the beginning, something amiss with Abigail House. He wants to know why, and his tone demands the subjects, and the world, provide him with the answer. One of the more amusing segments in the documentary is his discussion with field geologist Irwin Cordwell about the land atop which the house was built. If Howard’s hope was that Cordwell would reveal that the site was cursed, he was disappointed. Instead, the geologist told him a local news item from 1918 in which a farmer decries the ongoing theft of his livestock. The field from which the animals were snatched would, thirty-six years later, end up in the hands of Diamond & Halliwell Construction, who used it as the foundation for some of the houses in Abigail Lane, among them, Number 56.

  Howard found the history of the house credible enough to be wary, but that didn’t keep him from finding a way to keep an eye on it. Working alone so as not to put others at risk, he cordoned off the stairs and installed in the house three closed circuit cameras, one of which was angled to monitor the inside of the front door. The second was affixed to the living room ceiling and directed toward the stairs. The third was mounted as close to the stairwell as he dared get. “I’ll do almost anything for my art except vanish into another dimension,” he says with a smirk. “Unless the critics are kinder over there.” Because there was no power in the house, he had to rely on battery packs, which required swapping out every few days, but they enabled him to view the house remotely, ensuring not only his own safety but that of everyone on his team. Every day for fourteen months, his crew worked in shifts so that someone was always watching the house from the monitors in Howard’s apartment, but other than periods of distortion and specks of dancing light, they saw nothing of note.

  The lack of a compelling result frustrated Howard. He knew it had been a long shot given the number of dormant periods in the house’s recorded history, but he’d banked on seeing something. It was how he’d planned to end the film. The big shock at the end that would jolt viewers out of their disbelief.

  His disappointment made him a tyrant. Three of his four team members quit, tired of his outbursts and ego. Only his girlfriend Therese stayed on board. She believed in him, and his film, and told him so in the hope of talking him down, but it was too late. Howard was already doomed. His anger and ambition made him incautious, and on the night of September 16th, 2018, he went back to the house either to retrieve or reposition the cameras, while Therese watched from home.

  From her interview with The Hollywood Reporter:

  “I didn’t believe in the paranormal, or whatever Mike thought was going on. I’m a realist. I don’t believe houses can erase people, or eat them, or whatever. But Mike did and I knew whatever the reason was for what people thought happened in that house, he would wring an amazing film out of it. It was just what he did, okay? He lived to find the truth behind things, to expose the dark holes in the world. And I didn’t tell him not to go back to that house that night for a couple of reasons. Like, he’d been there dozens of times already and nothing had happened to him, so why would I try to stop him? All these people online calling me all sorts of names, blaming me for not being a better girlfriend, telling me I could have saved him. They don’t know. I get harassed every day. Somebody even posted my address, okay, and I had to move. But it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t. I didn’t see the house the way he did. I just saw the film. And he wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. Don’t get me wrong. He listened to me all the time, just not when he needed to do something for the film, and I thought he should take a different approach. With his work, it was his way or no way at all, and I think instead of harassing me, people should respect his position and the position it put me in.”

  The interviewer asks what Therese saw on the monitors that night.

  “I saw him enter the house. It was dark and the picture kept bowing in and out like it was struggling to focus or something. Right away I knew something was wrong, because I’d watched him do this dozens of times before. It was always the same process. He never hung around longer than he needed to because he didn’t trust the place. He’d just go inside, take a quick look toward the stairs, swap out the batteries and then get the hell out of there. That night though, he stared at the stairs for so long, I checked to make sure the picture hadn’t frozen, but I could see dust moving past the lens. And still Mike kept looking. At one point he shook his head like he was answering a question or something, and then he turned and looked up at me. He
looked like a ghost. I knew he was looking at me, the only other person there with him. He looked up and he mouthed something. We know what he said now of course, but at the time, I found myself shaking my head and raising my hands as if he could see me. Then he pointed toward the stairs.

  “I didn’t understand what I was seeing, but for the first time I wondered if this was part of his plan, if he’d pulled the wool over all our eyes, because it looked like he’d installed a big video screen at the top of the stairs. How else to explain what I was seeing? All those images. All those people and places.”

  The interviewer asks her to detail some of those images.

  “I saw a field crowded with sunflowers, so bright and pretty until something enormous moved in front of the sun and then the image changed, and I saw a lighthouse sweeping its beam over the sea. And then I saw a swimming pool full of fish, a small dusty room with a creepy clown snapping his claws at the audience, who laughed like he was the funniest thing they’d ever seen, a black rock or sharp mountain poking up at a sky full of huge birds; a field full of blind, grazing cows, a movie theater full of mannequins all facing us and not the screen, a big garage filled with cars that looked like they were made of metal, meat, and bone, a river of red roses, a bunch of kids looking out windows. It went on and on and on, a hundred scenes, maybe more, but instead of watching them all, I looked at Mike for explanation. He mouthed the same thing up at me again, desperation in his eyes, and again I shook my head. Eerily, he did the same, then smiled, and this time I did make out his words, though they were not the same ones as before: I love you.