When I was a child, my two younger brothers and I stayed with my Grandma and Aunt Donna quite often, in their old brick house in North Quincy, MA. The house was the childhood home of my mother, aunts, and uncle. It sat surrounded by a chainlink fence on a tree-lined street, with a little garage and back yard that wasn’t quite big enough for three boys to entertain themselves. We would explore the neighborhood, the ice cream shop way down the road, the convenience store, et cetera. If we were bored there was always Matlock, The Golden Girls, or Falcon Crest on tv it seemed. Mostly I just remember my brother Adam and I running around the neighborhood. Chris was still pretty young, but he tagged along sometimes, especially for the ice cream. It was more of a city neighborhood than the “Hide and Go Seek” suburbs we called home, and the traffic and noise were exciting for us.
I remember the house well. The knickknacks, the potpourri, the endless Christmas decorations that Donna conscripted us to march down from the attic every year. The sea-foam green padded toilet seats, the sea-foam green or mauve everything in the bathrooms. The creepy basement stairs and the rotary telephone. The clowns and porcelain dolls everywhere.
Yes, the clowns and porcelain dolls were everywhere. If you have ever watched a paranormal show or horror movie and there is a room of dolls, and thought something like “Who would ever have a room like that?”, the answer is my relatives. There were a few places to sleep in the house, and generally Adam and I stayed together in one and Chris was alone. There was the “Doll Room”, yellow-walled with cabinets of dolls staring blankly out from behind glass and framed portraits of sad clowns on the wall. We usually made Chris sleep there. Adam and I chose the larger room, which still had dolls (sometimes of clowns), and perhaps pictures of clowns and/or of floral arrangements, but not nearly the nightmare fuel of the other room. I’m pretty sure there was a least a Blessed Virgin or two around for protection.
Not sure what horrors Chris went through in the “Doll Room”, but many nights I would lay awake at night in the other room and stare upwards as faces manifested out of the ceiling plaster. I don’t mean that I saw faces in the plaster, I mean multiple faces manifested out of the plaster, took ectoplasmic form like something from a Theosophist seance, and proceeded to float down towards my brother and I while we lay there helpless. I vaguely remember him awake through it, and that we both saw them, but we never said anything to each other.
Years later, at a wedding, Adam and I were having a sneaky underaged beer or gin and tonic, and we started talking about the old house. I’m not sure what brought the subject up, but he mentioned something about not being able to sleep there. I told him I had the same issue, and that it creeped me out because I saw faces descending from the ceiling and watching us. He nearly spit out his drink and said “blue faces?!”, and then I nearly spit out my drink. The faces had been blue, like a light sky blue against the white plaster in the dark room.
In retrospect, maybe we should have taken the “Doll Room”..
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