A number of years ago, my dear friend LH came over to visit for a few days. This was before the pandemic when casual overnight visits were a Normal Thing. At one point, between our usual hilarious exchanges, she mentioned the ghost in the guest room.
Ah, a ghost?
Yes, he said. And went on to explain the appearance of this ghost. She was young, though not a child. White. Agitated but not violent. And, LH added, from a long time ago, probably someone who lived about one hundred years back. Do you know, she asked, who it might be?
No, I did not know who she might be. No, we did not question at all the possibility of a ghost in the house, either. Firstly, because LH is an amazing witch and I believed her. And secondly, because we’d kind of sensed it. That corner of the house has–let’s say–a different kind of vibe. It’s not as sunny. It always feels a little “hollow.” The other people in my household shy away from the room. Because I really LIKE ghosts, I regularly write in that room.
Just a normal breakfast conversation at our house. The conversation segued. The visit went on. Many jokes were told. Good meals were had. Hugs exchanged.
After LH left, I began researching the previous inhabitants of this house, of which in its one hundred-year history, I am the fourth owner. I met the third owners (of course, during the sale). And the neighbors like to talk about the house’s second owners–to such an extent that I feel like I’ve met them, too. The initial owners? That was more of a mystery.
We were handed a parcel of archival paperwork when we moved in. Some of these papers were on very thin vellum, typewritten, yellowed with age, the architect’s notes for the house. I took the brittle pages out from storage and thumbed through them, each page turn crackling like a spark, looking for the client’s name. And there it was: Maurice Ennis.
And thus began a casual research journey; research that happened on impulse throughout the years.
I learned that there were initially three children in this house, a girl and two twin boys, born in the early 1900s. I learned the name of the girl who grew up and attended Bryn Mawr, then returned to Northern California where she got busted for having a speakeasy in her barn and serving alcohol to minors in the 1950s. In some accounts, it was spun as if Carolyn merely threw a kegger for her children. And in others, I could read between the lines describing who it was she served: her eighteen-year-old son, underaged girls, and adult male acquaintances. Questionable. Notorious. That said, at death, she was described as a socialite. For reals, there was a debutante picture of her.
I forwarded a screenshot of Carolyn’s Bryn Mawr picture to LH.
That’s her! she said.
So the ghost now had a name. But why did she haunt this house in the form of her Bryn Mawr self?
And for years, I didn’t dig further.
We had made peace with the ghost. I wasn’t sure why she was here, only that she was. It seemed like a moot point to question the intentions of a ghost.
But one boring weekend, I thought about Carolyn’s twin brothers, Oliver and David. Who were they? And why didn’t they haunt the house? Why only Carolyn?
A google search told me David grew up to be an attorney and had a son he named after himself. That son, too, became an attorney. The trail ends.
Oliver, the other twin, married three times and managed an insurance brokerage. He had three children. One of his children was a daughter named Lisa.
And Lisa. Married Dick Carlson. And had a son. Named Tucker.
I screamed. Mostly in shock and horror.
Tucker Carlson’s mother and father divorced when he was young. Tucker’s mother, Lisa, abandoned six-year-old Tucker and his little brother Buckley to pursue a “bohemian life” in France, and subsequently created a great mother wound–which is a fancy psychology term that ensconces the trauma from neglectful parenting.
TUCKER CARLSON HAS BEEN REBELLING AGAINST HIS MOTHER ALL THIS TIME, YO.
Dick Carlson (who himself had been abandoned by a mother), was a single parent for several years to Tucker and Buckley. Carlson married a Swanson heiress and then Tucker was sent off to boarding school (like so many stepmoms threaten to do in black comedy but in his case, really happened). Tucker has gone on record that he wants nothing to do with his birth mother (though when his mother Lisa died leaving him $1 in her will, he suddenly did pay attention to her by suing the estate).
Damn, this house is kind of a busy intersection. Of what? A ghost. Past drama. Current drama. Family drama. And TUCKER CARLSON ENERGY. DAMMIT.
Also now I wonder if the woman haunting this house is Tucker Carlson’s mother, Lisa.
Meanwhile, my own ancestry has a much different vector than that of Tucker. My mother was born to wealthy landowners in Pyongyang, before the Korean War. Her family fled to Seoul after the Korean War began when it was clear that they would be persecuted. They went in two groups–the older children walked with my grandfather in the wintertime when the rivers were frozen and walkable. The younger children (my infant mother included), traveled by boat with my grandmother where they were all reunited in Seoul. My mother’s family had a decidedly different life after the war, but they made do. All the children were educated. And my mother, the youngest child, went to Seoul National University where she earned a nursing degree, with plans to study further in the United States.
My father was born in the countryside of what is now South Korea in Chungcheongnam-do. He was never rich. He was the second of five children who survived infancy. His older brother was in the Japanese Resistance; my father’s biggest memory about the end of the War was his brother coming back home after being released from political prison. But not for long; his brother, a well-known socialist and activist, defected to North Korea. And so my father’s family was persecuted under the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee. My father kept his head low, graduating with a very practical and not-political-at-all engineering degree from Seoul National University so as not to attract the attention of the KCIA, with the intention of continuing his studies in the United States. And the added benefit of avoiding KCIA surveillance.
Then my dad got a glimpse of my mom’s older sister. And asked her on a date. That sister, my third auntie, demurred and instead introduced him to my mother. Three months later, they were married. My mom to this day says, “If I had known what a leftist your dad was at the time, I would never have married him!”
They moved to New York City. Gave up on their studies after a few years and started a family instead. Had two children.
Yada yada yada I eventually came to live in Berkeley. Married a man of Israeli descent I met in college. Bought this house.
When I first stepped into the place I now call home, I knew it had never known anyone like me. I was certainly the first BIPOC in the neighborhood. It took five years for the neighbors to say hello to me. I’d been so hazed by my prior neighborhood that I didn’t mind the cold shoulder; I preferred it to the active complaints and bullying I’d experienced for three straight years.
Before leaving, LH told me a little about how to improve relationships with ghosts. The ghost, said my friend, needed to be acknowledged. My daughter and I addressed Carolyn, left flowers in the room, beautified the surroundings. Carolyn calmed. In my research too, I’ve been acknowledging the history of this house. It is a long-delayed meet-and-greet. And I hope it will in return, accept me. (That is a life theme for me for sure).
I thought, mistakenly, that I would be met with silence by an inanimate object. My partner who came to live with me a number of years ago has always said this house is never silent. It’s constantly creaking and sighing, he told me. This is, he said, an ACTIVE house.
Every time I throw out a question, I get an answer. It just isn’t the answer to the question I ask.
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