Haunted Houses and How They Inspire a Novel
Sarah Strohmeyer
Several years ago, kind of by accident, my husband ended up purchasing at tax sale a 3,200-square-foot log cabin on eleven secluded, wooded acres in Vermont for a mere $13,673.67. It’s currently worth, very conservatively, $400,000. You’d love it. Everyone does.
Now that we’ve removed the rotting carcasses.
Our cabin happens to be the spitting image of the glowing one on the cover of my newest suspense novel, We Love to Entertain, complete with six-foot windows looking out to mountain views, cross-country ski trails and total silence aside from whispering pines and the occasional owl hoot.
It makes sense that the property was my inspiration for We Love to Entertain because, lemme tell you, this bargain-basement deal wasn’t so much a dream come true as a big, smelly, damp, cold and mysterious house of horrors.
That’s before we even get to the ghost. Of course there’s a ghost. She occupies the upper bedroom where I wrote the manuscript, flicking the lights and running her icy cold fingers up the back of my neck as I typed various drafts, my feet planted on the floor I’d painted “haint blue” to keep her at bay. As if.
I know who she is. Her death certificate is in the vault of Middlesex Town Hall where for ten years I’ve been the elected clerk. Which, in part, is how we got the house. More on that later.
She’s not the only one to haunt this creaking cabin; there were the other dead. A dead dog and dead chickens and heaps of dead flies. We cleaned them out along with eight tons of trash, assorted rusted vehicles, a boat with a tree growing out of it, snakes, spiders, mice, bags and bags of old dirty diapers, white maggots wiggling in kitchen drawers, rain pouring into the vestibule and a bedroom plastered floor to ceiling with hardened canine feces.
Plastered.
And, yet, despite having to install a new heating system, a new standing-seam roof and replacing a bathroom, which my husband did, along with the countless hours of sweat he invested in turning this sow’s ear into a silk purse, the overwhelming feeling we have about our mountain getaway is a mixture of giddy gratitude and mortifying guilt.
Guilt at having profited from the prior owner’s misfortune.
In We Love to Entertain, there are no such ethical concerns for the dynamic, Instagram-ready Holly and Robert. Robert calls himself “The Robber Barron,” a self-proclaimed, bargain-basement real-estate investor who happily, gleefully, scoops up homes lost to foreclosures and tax sales. The only local Holly cares about is local color, the fantasy Currier-and-Ives version of Vermont to fit her rustic decorating theme. In their cutthroat world, another’s loss is their gain. They’re invincible…
… until they go missing.
Our experience purchasing the cabin, in contrast, was far from intentional. When the property finally came up for tax sale, we had no intention of participating. I’d sat through a tax sale before and expected the same group of frugal Vermonters would place bids guaranteed to deliver them a decent chunk of property for a rock-bottom price or a 12% annual return on their investment.
But, then, the unthinkable happened.
No one showed.
The delinquent tax collector waited. The lawyer handling the tax sale waited. I waited. The clock ticked.
We couldn’t figure it out. This wasn’t a decrepit mobile home in a flood zone. What gives? The town lawyer asked what we wanted to do. I suggested the delinquent tax collector buy it for taxes owed. She wasn’t interested. You buy it, she said.
I called my husband and made a pitch. It was a no-brainer. There was a mortgage which meant the bank wouldn’t let this asset disappear. They’d pay the taxes and turn around and foreclose. We were guaranteed to earn 1% per month on our investment provided the bank or the owner redeemed within a year. And surely the bank would because, if they didn’t, like all liens on the property, the $150,000 mortgage would be wiped off the books forever.
The bank didn’t. Supposedly, someone didn’t get the memo. The anniversary of the sale came and went and, with no redemption, my husband was handed a Tax Collector’s Deed – along with a big bill for two more years of unpaid taxes and the task of having to evict a recalcitrant owner who had no intention of leaving, despite our offers to pay him thousands to relocate.
This so-called no-brainer investment was beginning to take the shape of a big white elephant.
Thankfully, along with being a skilled carpenter, my husband’s a skilled lawyer who followed the eviction process. Also, thankfully, the owner’s family had split long ago so there were no children to turn out. Still, I was glad not to be present when the sheriff came with the locksmith to execute the court order.
Whatever bad karma lingered soon dissipated when shortly thereafter a family of eight lost their home to a fire. Hardy sorts, they lived happily in the cabin for eighteen months. A few months later, another family in town lost their house to a fire. This time, we moved out of our lovely, heated, insulated, house so they could move in and my husband and I moved into the cabin. That was last winter when temperatures dipped into negative territory and my husband spent nights feeding the wood stove, our only source of heat, the pipes having been drained so as not to burst.
That was the winter I wrote We Love to Entertain, drawing inspiration from the tragic stories of those, like the cabin’s prior owner, who through wrong turns and painful missteps lose their tentative grasp on their last chance at the American dream.
Like I said, the ghost isn’t the only one who haunts this place. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow understood this, too, which is why I used as an epigraph in We Love to Entertain, the opening lines of his poem Haunted Houses:
All houses wherein men have lived and died.
Are haunted houses.