Haunted House
Written by Kate Dinsmore
I have always been drawn to the gothic and the dark. This painting was no exception. I had been going to the Art Institute regularly for several months now, but I’d never seen this painting before. They rotate some of the pieces, so you’ll be walking around and then suddenly see a flash of something new. Sometimes I can’t even remember what painting was there before. What did that ghost look like?
This painting is in a room. There’s a fireplace. Some paintings on the walls. An empty chair. A table. It’s a New England home. On the right side of the painting, there’s a dark human figure. But it’s not a shadow—it’s almost like a human-shaped portal. There are all of these houses inside of it. On the left side of the painting, there’s a door opening. But it’s not a normal door, it’s another portal. Inside the door, you see more houses and a street lamp illuminating the houses. Like the inside and outside are melting together. The bottom part of the painting has a similar affect—the outside is blending into the house. It doesn’t seem like they’ll ever fully merge. They’re windows to each other. Contrasts.
These portals don’t feel like they’re showing us a sinister reality or a darker dimension. It doesn’t evoke fear. It evokes dread. The painting is titled, “Haunted House.” Morris Kantor, the painter, notes that the old room “turned [his] imagination to the past, to the people who had lived there and gone.” He was looking at ghosts.
In 2023, Gary Simmons had an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He has taken his exhibition, “Public Enemy,” to different art museums across the country. What is so unique about Simmons’ work is that some of his art is painted on the museum’s walls. In a video, Simmons states his work focuses on ghosts:
“The wall drawings have a relationship to the architecture like no other part of my work. A site visit is key. The space almost talks to me and tells me what is going to happen. . . That feeling of ghosts moving through space. I want it to feel as if those bodies are there for the viewer.”
I felt the ghosts in the room when I saw that painting. He used red paint as the background for his wall paintings in Chicago. On top of the red paint, he painted these white smeared chandeliers. They danced along the walls. The art grounds you in the present because you know that this is something you can only experience here and now. It is not permanent, fixed art. In a few months it will be gone. Painted over. Another exhibition will take its place. It’s already gone.The person who I was seeing at the time, who eventually became my partner, who eventually became my ex, I told about this exhibit. I thought they would really like it. I expressed that this was an exhibit that would be up for a couple months, and then it would be gone. This was their chance to see it.
They never did.
Now I am always seeing ghosts. A song will come on or I’ll see something that reminds me of them, and I’m haunted again. So many memories, experiences, and places all have ghosts now. They walk among me.
When my partner and I moved in together, we knew we had not found a forever home. The plan was to live here for a few years, and then find something more permanent. It didn’t make it any less special. It was a beginning. Our first apartment! It took time, but we built it up. We bought furniture. I put up frames. We slowly settled into the beginning. A little less than a year in, it started to look like ours. It was home.
When things started to come undone, I would look around our house and think, I can start over if I have to. I can do this. I would look around, and I was looking at that wall painting again—I was looking at a ghost. But I didn’t want to be haunted. I wanted to be with them. That was the whole point. That’s why we had moved here. It was only the beginning! But slowly it had stopped feeling that way. Dread had replaced it. The shadows were creeping in and the future was starting to blend into my vision. I was going to be alone again.
When it finally ended, my ex left me alone in the house. We were still figuring things out, and I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to my home. This ending would mean so many more endings for me. We had planned some of our wedding and our joint bachelorette parties. We had talked about future trips. Our next place. It was slipping so quickly from me. Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! When I had agreed to move in with my ex, I had made it clear that this was serious for me. I didn’t just move in with people. This was a forever thing for me. They assured me that it was that way for them, too. That they would always love me. That this was forever. When they left, I couldn’t stop thinking about Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. She felt like a kindred spirit. I too had been jilted out of a forever. I understand why she wore her wedding dress every day. It’s easier to wear a dress than it is to move on. Staying in the past among the ghosts is intoxicating. Let it haunt me.
But after the door shut and they left, it wasn’t our house anymore. It wasn’t even mine. It was something already in the past. I was living inside of a ghost. That night I decided I would move out on Sunday. That gave me two days to pack up my whole life. I was fueled by pure dread. Being in that house felt like I was suffocating. I had to get the dress off. I had to get out of here. There were too many memories and things I couldn’t escape. Every place I looked, everything hurt. I couldn’t stay in that house. Everywhere was haunted.
But that weekend as I was packing, I found myself grieving in an unfinished way. Saying goodbye to this house would mean saying goodbye to the last thing that linked us. And I didn’t want to say goodbye to that—to them. Even though it was incredibly painful, being in that house made me feel like I still had my whole life—that I still had everything I was about to lose. After I would move out, I would lose my cat, my friends being a 10-minute drive away, friends that were hers, my independence, my city, and her. I would gain some of these parts of my life back, slowly and surely. Eventually, I would become solid again. But when I left that house, I was a ghost of my old life. I was see-through.
Every space you walk into is haunted. Everything has a memory. A song. A person. An experience. It might not belong to you, but the space has lived just the same. It’s all there, all the time. We don’t always see it. Sometimes we see it in glimpses or flashes. But it exists all the same. We’re not the first ones who have lived here.
I still feel haunted sometimes. A memory will resurface. Someone will play that song. I’ll smell their cologne in passing. And then it’s there. A ghost is standing right in front of me. But I’m not scared of them anymore. You see them enough, and they start to lose their power. They become see-through. Now, I look at them in the eyes, and I say, “Boo!”