Haunting Enchantment: History in the Home

During my senior year of college, I lived in the Catholic seminary at the edge of the campus of the University of Notre Dame. I had just entered the postulancy program, which meant that I was officially discerning the priesthood, even if I was still finishing my undergraduate degree. What all this meant in practice was that I was often up late at night, sometimes after an evening out with friends, writing papers or doing course readings. (A resident priest once passed my room and, seeing me with a copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter in hand, shook his head and kept walking.) I wasn’t really sure if I belonged in the formation program, though the decent job market relieved some of the pressure of figuring out one’s path in life. These were the years before the Great Recession, the years before the forever wars, the bailouts, the digitalization and commodification of every inch of culture and thought. In those late nights, my imagination had an expanse to roam, a horizon to contemplate, that I now fear no longer exists.

Those late nights were my dreamspace. Strange things can happen in these liminal places. On occasion, usually when I was deciding whether to push onward with my reading or call it a night, I would hear a low rumble coming from the elevator shaft next to my room. Built in the 1950s, the seminary was designed in the kind of optimistic, forward-looking style that quickly becomes dated. The hallways, an eighth-of-a-mile of muted carpet and painted cinder block, follow a slight arc such that lines of sight are always partially obscured. It would be strange, perhaps, to hear such noises in any place, but here one was almost encouraged to be spooked. After the rumble I would hear the elevator start to move. Sometimes, it would stop on my floor. The doors would open. Silence. Then they would close. Silence.

There was certainly some reasonable explanation for these strange occurrences, I assumed. There is always a reasonable explanation. Still, the speed by which I came to reassure myself made me ponder how our abiding faith in science and reason sanitizes experience and domesticates what is strange. “Disenchantment” is the word usually associated with this insight, and I felt the need to protect this bit of mystery, to hold it close while also not to let my mind run wild. In the stillness of those nights, I would sometimes light a candle — an attempt at giving my otherwise institutional living space the sense of a hearth and the warmth of a home, and also to keep the darkness at bay.

One elemental experience calls up another. A home is defined by its four walls and a sense of security. At the same time, the mystery of the unknown sharpens this desire for protection — the two play off each other. “House and space are not merely two juxtaposed elements of space,” writes Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. “In the reign of the imagination, they awaken daydreams in each other, that are opposed.” At that boundary between security and danger, inside and outside, home and not-home, something curious happens to the imagination. Disenchantment loses its hold.

Now that twenty years have passed, and having become a priest and an anthropologist, I teach a class on the anthropology of the house. The multiple dimensions of the house have always fascinated me, but this spiritual aspect — the kind that I’m circling around here — is the hardest to capture and to teach. It doesn’t help that domestic space (if once is to judge trends on HGTV) is increasingly defined by open floor plans and the monotone simplicity of the modern farmhouse style. Like athleisure clothing or protein shakes, our understanding of interior space has merged aesthetics with function, leaving little room for the minor excesses and idiosyncrasies where a sense of poetry and spirit might thrive. Yet despite this trend — or perhaps because of it — the idea of enchanted space has funneled into the darker corners of our psyche.

Hauntings, my students want to know: Are they real or just in the mind? Stories of haunted houses have a tendency of leaving this question unanswered, since the question itself is less interesting than the problem of distinguishing a person from the house he or she inhabits (and with haunted houses, the person experiencing the hauntings is often a woman). Who is really haunted, the house or the person? In our everyday lives, we keep these two subjects apart. Our domestic space, with our appliances and possessions, might reflect our personalities. But we would never confuse person with house — at least until the question of hauntings arises.

If you scale out beyond the world of twenty-first century America, however, you can see how houses don’t just provide shelter but seemingly mirror the thought patterns of those who live in them. In my class, I have students look at examples of houses in Oceania, North Africa, and Amazonia. In each of these places, you might say, the house appears as a reflection of the broader society. Among the Kabyle people in Algeria, to reference a famous study, the house is structured around a central axis whose two parts — a forked pillar in the center and the beam it supports — symbolize the procreative union of husband and wife, a merging of opposites that spirals into a numerous other associations ascribed in the architecture of the house: fire and water, cooked and raw, day and night, culture and nature. In this abode, the function of a household item, be it a storage container or a door, is never detached from this symbolic order. The house, in other words, is pregnant with meaning, with something as simple as the merger of pillar and beam reflecting ideas as fundamental as human procreation and even the meeting of land and sky.

How far back does this kind of symbolic house go in the history of humanity? It is impossible to know for sure, but it does seem like the appearance of the house once introduced profound questions for human societies. As a general rule of thumb, houses appear with the development of agriculture. If you’re not having to move in search of food, then it makes sense to build permanent structures. Yet once these buildings are made, then you are confronted with the question of how to deal with the dead. How does the household the living relate to those who had previously occupied this space? Examining the Neolithic evidence from Çatalhöyük (in modern-day Turkey) and Natufian sites in the Near East, the dead were deposited not far from the living. In Çatalhöyük, for instance, the dead of a particular household were sometimes placed underneath the floor near the hearth, as if to say that this center of domestic space belonged to people on both sides of the grave.

In fact, one could even push the analysis before the dawn of agriculture, back at a time when Europe was much colder, when Neanderthals died off and homo sapiens emerged as the dominant hominid. In these early millennia of human life, caves would have served as natural homes, or at least sites of refuge from the elements, and probably more. Some of these caves must have had ritual significance such that generation upon generation of humans would visit them, sometimes adding their mark. We now know these caves by the art that remains on their walls: the herd of bison in Altamira, the swimming stags of Lascaux, the mysterious shaman of Les Trois Frères. While it is easy to impose our own interpretations onto these paintings (how do we know that figure is a shaman?), it remains the case that these images represent animals that otherwise would not be present in this space. In other words, these painted figures conjure a world that is not immediately present: tableaux of imagined animals and places that could be encountered anew by experiencing these imagines in the candlelit interior of a cave hidden in the depths of the earth.

It would be a stretch to call these ancient spaces haunted. “Enchanted” is probably a better word. These caves and early houses were sites of coexistence and encounter between the living and the dead, the present and the absent, the world that is and the world that once was or shall become. I suspect this enchantment has been a constant theme in human households, at least up until the near present. What makes these distant ways of living and dwelling so foreign to our eyes, I suspect, is that the temporal bandwidths of our homes and possessions has been drastically reduced. Early humans interacted with cave art for thousands of years; only our most cherished possessions will stay with us a lifetime, and even fewer will be passed onto the next generation. Even our relationship to houses has been reduced, as the idea of a family homestead is something one is more likely to encounter in fiction than in real life. As Thomas Pynchon puts it in Gravity’s Rainbow, the text where the concept of “temporal bandwidth” appears, “the more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona.” In our present age, our persona has less depth.

What happens when our living space and persona flatten out? In a way, this is a question that the haunted house stories explore. In some of the early examples of the genre — such as novellas by Charles Dickens and Hillaire Belloc (with illustrations by G.K. Chesterton) — there is surprisingly little that is spooky about the haunted house. The haunting comes from the lingering presence of generations past, less through a bump in the night and more through photographs and heirlooms: the kind of presence that was receding from the experience of the people who were drawn to these stories. It is almost as if the haunted house was not originally intended to scare but rather to serve as a cautionary tale.

As the genre of the haunted house develops, the haunting turns scary, with bodies in the wall and specters in the hallways. Despite this turn toward horror, a curious character emerges, one who is terrorized by the haunting yet is also drawn toward it — a character, again, caught in liminal space. The classic example in this regard is Eleanor, the young woman who stands at the center of Shirley Jackson’s acclaimed 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House. The fact that Eleanor experiences the worst that Hill House has to offer and yet also falls under its trance is the aspect the novel my students puzzle most over. It is a good question, and it is one those of us who enjoy these kinds of stories might ask of ourselves. Why come to such tales only to be frightened?

I suspect that variations of the horror genre, like haunted houses, have the appeal of introducing enchantment in a world that has gone flat. In the same way, I suspect that many people will look back on an earlier time in their lives and long for the time they had to dream and to ponder. For most of us, this space to wonder and to dream is probably not the house. But we still need a place to recover this wonder, which will always carry with it a touch of fear and a desire for protection. What would this space look like in our chaotic, screen-filled lives? What might this enchanted house be? For some, myself included, a church can fill this role. Churches, like haunted houses, are enchanted spaces, albeit filled with a different kind of spirit. Whatever it would be, such a place would still need a human face — a place that shelters but also embraces.