Three young girls dressed in school uniforms standing in their front doorway
The author and her sisters. Photo courtesy of Sarah Waldron

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Identity

What It's Like to Grow Up in a Haunted House

My siblings and I always loved scaring each other, but that all changed when my sister started seeing the Boy in Blue.

The unreliable narrator in has been a conceit in literature for hundreds of years, but real-life unreliable narrators have been around forever. We're all unreliable; despite our best efforts and noble intentions, we remember our lives the wrong way. We brag, we play, we hallucinate. As children, our immaturity either prevents us from interpreting events correctly—or maybe it enables us to see things as they really are. Bear that in mind when you read the following.

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I grew up in a haunted house, I think.

My hometown is called Tralee, a town nestled in a jagged bay on the south-westernmost point of Ireland. Because of an unfortunate combination of atmospheric pressure fronts, valleys, and mountains, it is cloudy and rainy about 70 percent of the year. It is probably best known for its annual beauty pageant, The Rose of Tralee. Aside from that, it's just us and the Atlantic Ocean. Tralee has existed as a settlement for 600 years, in which parts or all of it were levelled several times, with the result that the oldest buildings are rarely over 200 years old. It was into one of those comparatively old buildings, a, three-floor, five bedroom terraced building painted in daffodil yellow, that my family moved into when I was seven, and my two younger sisters, Mary and Iseult, were five and three years old.

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Our old house was tiny. We shared a room the size of a wardrobe, with a small aisle dividing a set of bunk beds from a crib, and the close quarters meant we had an unusually symbiotic relationship even for siblings. We knew everything about each other: Mary, a textbook showboat and motormouth; Iseult, solid and fearless—she rarely cried; me, precocious and hyper-sensitive. Though, personality-wise, we were like comparing apples and oranges, we had one collective goal: mutually assured destruction.

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We would sit on comforters at the top of the stairs and take turns pulling each other down, slide down banisters, hang on door frames, jump on mattresses with increasingly sagging springs—so often that part of the ceiling once fell in, spraying a freshly made up double bed with flecks of decades-old paint, plaster fragments and shattered bits of moulding. From Mary's room on the top floor, we would throw each other's school shoes out of the window, sometimes landing in the gutters of the house next door, and never tell our parents where they went. Odd shoes grew into a pile beside her wardrobe because we never threw pairs.

But then I started digging child-sized graves in the back garden. Unexplainable noises would puncture the late-night silence.

We would pummel and scratch each other, scream and scream and scream into the once-empty void we now filled.

Even though we now had our own spaces, we often slept in the same room. Sometimes our grandmother Maureen would babysit, and she would tell us about portents of death; the banshee whose singing would mark the loss of a family member. Or the death knocks—open the door to three loud taps and no-one there, and that meant someone's demise was imminent. My nan was a special women. She knew how to keep three obnoxious children under 10 from getting out of bed at night, and that was through scaring them stiff. Maureen was a devout Catholic, and her belief in an afterlife and the supernatural powers of the saints informed her storytelling. Through her, we were almost predisposed to believe in ghosts.

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We decided that the house was haunted. Normally, this would involve ghost stories, doorknob rattling, and waiting around corners to jump out at each other. But then I started digging child-sized graves in the back garden. Unexplainable noises would puncture the late-night silence. Things started moving. And then Mary saw the Boy in Blue.

Before we moved in, the house had been occupied by one man. His name is still carved into the red brick wall that borders our front garden and the street. We were told—or we told ourselves—tales of this man's phantom siblings, some of whom had died there. The old structure of the house was still intact at that time. It was creaky and infested with woodworm, with dusty corners and wobbly floorboards. The ground floor had a sitting room, a narrow passage leading to a pantry and a kitchen with an inbuilt stove. The pantry had a hatch that lead to the dining room, which was filled with the previous owner's ancient junk: Photos, newspapers, dusty pieces of nondescript parlor art. Over the kitchen door was a series of bells that once rang when a long-dead lady of the house needed attention. The mechanisms had been taken out; now they no longer rang. Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I could see them move silently.

Looking back, our willingness to scare and be scared in such a fertile environment was a powerful intoxicant that became increasingly morbid. Our back garden was overgrown. Apple and pear trees were being choked by every kind of weed imaginable: Hogweed, ragweed, and virulent knotweed, which looks like bamboo but is nowhere near as pleasant. I would thrash my way through them to a small sheltered space at the very back, where a rash of bluebells grew. Buoyed by our ghost stories and probably due in no small part to a healthy dose of the Catholic curriculum, I made gravestones—place markers for the dead children who needed, I thought, to be at peace. When the garden was leveled and a swingset put in, I became upset. I thought the ghosts would be disturbed. (If you're thinking at this stage that I was the designated weird kid at school, you would be correct.)

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Eventually, the house was renovated. The ground floor was gutted and changed completely, the pantry disappeared and the bells were thrown in the trash. This was when the noises started. If we were in the kitchen, we would hear people running up and down the stairs. Muffled conversations would take place over our heads. When I was alone, doors would open and close by themselves. The passage leading to the kitchen became so cold that you could see your breath, even when the rest of the house was heated. Two friends had tandem panic attacks during a sleepover. Afterwards, they both described identical feelings of dread, like their ribcages were being compressed.

I opened the door to the bathroom and saw, for a split second, a little blond boy in pyjamas peering up at me.

When Mary was ten, she saw a small, blond boy in blue pyjamas looking over her shoulder through the reflection in her Game Boy. It was the Boy in Blue, and he had come to creep on her Super Mario score. She ran downstairs, hysterical. My mother assured her that it was a trick of the light. Another time, she woke up to see a fine mist materializing over her bed. After that, it was the floating head of a man in military uniform. We stopped playing in her room. My grandmother was consulted, and a priest was dispatched to bless the house. I don't remember this, but my mother claims I shouted, "That's the end of the ghosts, then!" as he was leaving, a bottle of holy water in hand.

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Psychologists posit that manifestations of this kind are group delusions that manifest themselves through wishful thinking and convenient memory lapses. This, and the notion of a collective female hysteria (from the Greek, hystera means 'uterus'), has been used to handily explain everything from poltergeist activity to the Salem Witch Trials. But people who know nothing about our history report similar experiences while visiting. A string of freaked out ex-boyfriends can testify to that—doors creaking open during makeout sessions and phantoms beating on the bathroom door when they were trying to piss in peace.

Memoirist Mary Karr says that, in writing about oneself, that, "… most morally ominous: from the second you choose one event over another, you're shaping that past's meaning." And in writing this, I chose many events over others in an attempt to shape a definitive family myth: That my grandmother believed in the death knocks, and my mother saw her react with terror when, one night, she answered the door and no-one was there to greet her. That my mother was so unperturbed not necessarily because she didn't believe us, but that because she has her own set of assumptions that lead her to believe that our home was always a happy place. That we all remember everything differently. That Iseult doesn't remember anything at all.

That, nearly two decades after the Boy in Blue appeared to Mary, I opened the door to the bathroom and saw, for a split second, a little blond boy in pyjamas peering up at me.

As we grew up and moved away (me to London, Mary to Dublin, Iseult to Melbourne), as my faith in God waned and disappeared, even as I accepted that ghosts just couldn't be real, things continued to happen. As a teenager and eventually as an adult, I got used to it, justifying it as part of living in an old house. Some homes have uneven floors and leaky pipes, and others make you question your sanity and reliability. It happens.

And it happens still, sometimes, when I visit my home and am alone in the kitchen making tea. Someone stirs above me.