Haunted Houses: A Feeling for Space

Fixed water: dreams, Gothic spaces, wells

Maria Negroni defines the Gothic aesthetic as a ‘feeling for space’ and she writes that horror is often ‘confined to the architecture of homes’.

On the day I moved into my previous flat, I saw blood pooling in the corner of the lift. I ignored it.

Not long after that, I had my initial video interview with a senior psychoanalyst to determine if I was a good candidate to become an analysand. I lit candles to conjure warmth while the ceiling dripped green.

My interviewer was an imposing woman. Her suit was neat and expensive-looking. She sat upright in a chair in a room with a neutral backdrop.

I was living in organised chaos, the flat too small for our belongings, early tinsel draped over everything to inject some cheer.

I told her about a dream about a banquet: the hushed grandeur of the room, gold brocade on the table, rotten fruit drawing flies.

I thought it had gone badly. I thought she would tell me I was not cut out for this work.

In the second of the two interviews, I had to make the call, discreetly, from the spare room at my parents’ home. I considered cancelling. I had been evicted from my flat that week, given two hour’s notice to leave, and, after some terrified calls, one night’s emergency accommodation.

The eviction had been a final disaster in a short series of them. Two years earlier, I had been in a permanent, full-time job. Since then, I had been in part-time and temporary posts, moving cities twice again.

There had been arson in the building, I’d been grabbed on the stairwell by people who hung out smoking there. Security dogs roamed the perimeter at night. The lift was broken and we regularly carted groceries up to the sixth floor.

But this time, a fire inspection had decreed that if there was a fire everyone on our floor and above would be trapped. We had to get out while they tried to track down the building’s owners and convince them to pay for the work. Our landlord, a man who had never visited the city, was primarily concerned that we would stop paying rent.

In the midst of this, I continued to teach classes online, apply for a doomed funding grant, and argue with estate agents that we needed to be released from our contract to be able to find somewhere safer to live.

In January, I was assigned an analyst. In one of our early sessions, we wove together images from my dreams – dark rooms, dead bodies in suitcases, rats in the walls, wells dug beneath kitchens – and created a metaphor for the analysis: a haunted house.

You enter rooms and pick up objects, look at them from different angles. You feel a cold sensation or an electrical hum. You tune into the frequency over and over until you find the source.

When we returned to the flat it was like visiting a dream. The objects abandoned on the night we left were scattered around. I picked things up and put them down, unable to make sense of them.

The flat had been made temporarily safe by the presence of a waking watch. People who would alert us if there was a fire, who would help us to escape.

We were there for another few weeks, unable to break our contract, and in that time I continued to teach classes, pack things into boxes, and have nightmares about the pram that stood outside the flat opposite.

I saw, in my dreams, its soft pink blankets catching alight.