The road to the house is still there. If you drive it in the fall, it looks like any other back road in that part of the state: stone walls half-buried in fallen leaves, sugar maples turning the color of old copper, the smell of a wet river running somewhere out of sight. Barns tilt slightly downhill. The paint has gone chalky.

The doors are chained shut with locks that were old before the war. About two miles in, the road narrows and drops into a hollow with a ditch on the left and a wall of hemlocks on the right, and the sun never reaches the ground there, even at noon. If you walk that stretch and feel the temperature fall, you are close. The neighbors will point you toward the place if you ask.

They will not walk you to it. In that part of the country there is a difference between telling a stranger where something is and taking him there, and that distinction is older than the house itself. The land was cleared in the eighteenth century. The first house on the site burned in 1831, and it might be worth explaining what burned in it before this story is done.

The house that matters was built on the same foundation in 1836 by a family whose name I have promised not to repeat. I gave that promise to an old woman in Providence in 1994, and it is what she told me that makes this story worth telling at all. In the summer of 1949, a man named Meritt Vandrisliss bought the farm. He was forty-one, a foreman at a wool mill in Woonsocket, tall and thin, with a long face and the kind of hands you only see on men who have worked with them since childhood: large knuckles, precise movements.

His wedding ring had faded the way old brass does from being worn every day for years without ever being taken off and polished. He had grown up on a pig farm in western Massachusetts. He knew early rising, cracked hooves, the smell of a barn in January. He had spent most of his working life in a mill that smelled of none of those things, and I think he had been waiting nearly twenty years for a reason to leave it.

His wife’s name was Ondine. She was thirty-eight, a seamstress, a small woman with dark hair, quiet in the way some quiet people are: she noticed everything and rarely spoke of it. She grew up in New Bedford, the daughter of a Portuguese fisherman and a woman who took in laundry. She learned to read late and to sew early.

Her hands were always moving even when she sat still, and on the ring finger of her left hand there was a faint pale line across the second knuckle where a needle had gone in wrong when she was twenty-two and the wound had never quite healed. They had been married fourteen years. They had wanted a farm for most of that time. When Meritt’s older brother died of an infection in the spring of 1949 and left him a small amount of money, they used it, along with a second mortgage on the mill house, to buy the place at the end of the dirt road: eight acres, an old barn, a pond that froze early in October, and a house that had been standing there for 113 years.

The realtor was a man from Providence with a bad cough he blamed on the road. He told them the price was low because the last three owners had not stayed long. Meritt asked why. The realtor said something about the previous man’s wife being sick, and the man before that losing his job, and the woman before them wanting to be closer to her daughter in Fall River.

Ondine noticed that he never said the word he was keeping to himself. She said nothing until they were back in the car and driving away. Then she said, “That man is afraid of the farm. ” Meritt laughed.

She did not. They moved in on the fourteenth of August, 1949. The house was two storeys with an attic, wide board floors worn flat in the middle, low ceilings, and a stone hearth that took up nearly the whole east wall of the front room. There was a summer kitchen in back that had been closed for years, and a root cellar with a door that would not stay shut.

At some point someone had mounted a small brass hook on the frame, and someone had carved a groove into the stone threshold to let the hook sit level. It was old work, the kind of small patient task a person does when he decides to close a door for good. Meritt noticed it and mentioned it at dinner that night. Ondine said, “Whoever put that hook there had a reason.

” Meritt said, “Probably a raccoon. ” She said, “Probably. ” That was the end of it. The first week was honest exhausting work.

They cleaned the barn, repaired part of the pasture fence, and Meritt drove into town to see about buying a milk cow. Ondine started cleaning the kitchen. She said the walls smelled bad, an old smell, not exactly damp, closer to a wool coat folded in a chest for a long time. She washed the walls with vinegar water and opened all the windows.

That was Friday. Saturday the smell was back. She washed them again. Sunday morning it was stronger, and she asked Meritt to put his face close to the plaster and tell her what he thought.

He did. He said, “That’s not damp. ” She said, “No, it isn’t. ” She washed the walls a third time.

On Monday she stopped washing them. The sounds began in the second week. Light at first: one knock on the pantry door in the afternoon, a creak on the stairs when they were both downstairs. One night, the sound of a chair being dragged slowly across the floor of the room directly above the bedroom.

Meritt went up to look. The chair had not moved. Nothing had moved. He said so when he came down.

Ondine did not answer. She was lying on her side facing the wall, and he thought she was asleep. She was not. He knew that.

He got into bed and lay awake a long time listening for the chair again. It did not come that night. It came the next night at about the same hour. He noted the time: 2:12.

By the end of the second week they were both suffering from sleeplessness, not fear exactly, but hyper-attentiveness, the way you cannot sleep in a house you have not yet learned. They had lived in the mill house eleven years and knew every sound in it: the beams settling in the cold, the ticking of the pipes, the front door knocking against its frame on windy nights. This house had a whole vocabulary of sounds they did not know. Something sounded in the west wall around 3 a.

m. , and Meritt tried four different ways to find its source without success. There was a muffled thump in the attic that Ondine felt in her chest before she heard it in her ears. Meritt began keeping notes in a small black notebook, the kind mill foremen carried in their breast pockets in the forties.

Coffee stains on the front cover, a boot print on the back. He was left-handed and wrote in a small slanted hand that got smaller and tighter as time went on. The first entry, August 15, was a list of what he needed from the hardware store. The last dated entry was December 3, 1949, and it contained only: “We left last night.

” Below that, in handwriting so small he had to hold the page under a lamp to read it, he wrote: “I don’t know how many of us we brought with us. ” That was the last thing he ever wrote in the notebook. He kept it in a kitchen drawer in New Bedford for the next thirty-seven years and never opened it again. In the first week of September, Meritt met Uriah Wexler.

Wexler was sixty-six, a dairy farmer, the nearest neighbor to the west, half a mile up the road, thin and broad-shouldered, wearing a felt hat so old it had gone soft at the crown. He had grown up on the neighboring farm. He came over with a jug of cider and did not knock. He stood at the edge of the yard until Meritt came out to him.

“Welcome,” he said. “You’ll have questions,” he said. “About the farm,” Meritt said. “About the house,” Wexler said.

That was the first sign Meritt had that he had bought something with a history older than the last three owners. Wexler refused to come inside. He never did, not once, in all the time Meritt lived there. They stood in the yard, and Wexler told him what he could.

The first house on that spot had been built by a family named Ash, who came from Newport in the 1790s and lived respectably for two generations. The Ashes moved out in the 1820s, the house sat empty for several winters, and then it burned in 1831, and nobody in the county could determine why. The family that rebuilt it in 1836 was new to the area, and the man of the house was a lay preacher of the kind most churches would not call a preacher. His name was Elvidge Halloran, and he preached to people in their homes, in their yards, along their walls, about things most preachers did not preach about.

He died young in 1840 of a fever that no one else in the valley caught, leaving the house to his wife. Her name was Sepia. Wexler said it quietly, the way you lower your voice for a word you do not want the wind to carry. “My grandmother knew people who knew her,” Wexler said.

“She told me things her mother told her, and her mother heard them from a woman who did laundry at that house when she was young. So I have nothing firsthand. But I’ll tell you what I have. Sepia Halloran was not right.

Not physically sick. Sick in the mind. She kept animals in the house, which most women don’t do. She wrote letters to people no one else could see and left them on the kitchen table in the morning in a hand nobody in the county recognized.

She stood in the kitchen for whole afternoons without moving. When someone came in and spoke to her, she would turn her head and look at him as if she had never seen a person before. Then after a moment she would answer his question correctly, using the words he would have said next. ”

Wexler paused.

“My grandmother told me that. I don’t know if it’s true. But I do know Sue Sepia Halloran was found dead in the root cellar in the fall of 1842, and the constable who came to collect her did not record what he saw when he opened the door. He wrote in his report that the deceased had been dead about three days.

He wrote it in a hand my grandmother said was trembling so badly the letters leaned the wrong way. ” That record still exists in the Providence County archives. I have seen it myself, and so has half the town at one time or another. It is there.

Meritt listened without interrupting. When Wexler finished, he asked, “Why didn’t anyone tell me any of this before I bought the place? ” Wexler said, “Because the man who sold it to you doesn’t live here, and the man he bought it from didn’t live here either, and the woman before them left in a hurry. And because most of what I’ve told you is just a story, and stories don’t close sales.

” Then he said something Meritt would remember for the rest of his life: “I don’t know if the house is bad. I know it keeps everything you put in it. If you put in good and you’re careful and you don’t put your ear too close to the walls at night, it might keep that. If you put in bad, it keeps that too.

And it does not like to give things up. ” He tipped his hat and walked back up the road. Meritt stood in the yard a long time after that and did not go inside until after dark. That week Meritt drove to Providence and spent the afternoon in the county archives.

He asked the clerk for anything concerning the property between 1830 and 1845. When he gave her the address, she paused. She looked at him, then at her register of withdrawn records, and said, “Yes, we keep those files, but we don’t lend them out overnight, and I’d prefer you read them here, at that table by the window. ” Meritt said that was fine.

She brought him a box. Inside were three account books, a bundle of loose letters tied with brown string, and a constable’s report from 1842. He read for four hours. He took no notes in the archive.

When he got home, he wrote down from memory in his notebook, in that small careful hand, that the constable’s report for November 3, 1842, consisted of three lines. The first named the property. The second named the deceased. The third read only: “Contents of the cellar unfit to record.

” It was signed by Constable Bathurst, who was thirty-eight in 1842. According to a later record, Bathurst resigned in January 1843 and moved his family to Ohio. He never worked in law enforcement again. There was more in the record, but Meritt could not get it all down.

He remembered a note about a claim filed by a woman named Burley Combs, who lived near the Halloran house in the 1840s. In 1841, Burley Combs claimed that a red thread and a lock of her hair, cut while she slept, had been taken from her bedroom at night. She blamed Sepia Halloran. The constable dismissed the claim, noting in a hand Meritt described as ordinary and steady that Miss Combs was known to be nervous and had a history of losing things.

Meritt underlined “red thread. ” He would know, in September, why he had underlined it. He would know in November. He drew two lines under that in his notebook.

He did not underline much. He also transcribed, from memory, three lines from a letter in the bundle. The letter was undated, written in a woman’s hand on a folded scrap of butcher paper, unsigned. The three lines were: “I know he speaks to you through the wall.

I have heard him do it. Please do not answer him. ”

Meritt sat at his kitchen table that night and read those three lines aloud to Ondine. She went very still.

After a moment she asked, “Whose handwriting? ” Meritt said he did not know. “Was it Sepia? ” she asked.

He said he did not know; Sepia had been dead by then. “That letter is from before,” Ondine said. “It was written for her, about her husband. So it’s worse than what Wexler told us.

” She got up and washed the two coffee cups and said nothing else for the rest of the evening. Fall came cold that year. The pond froze in the last week of September, which Wexler said was the earliest he had ever seen it. The milk cow they had bought in August, an old Guernsey Meritt had named Adelaide after his mother, went dry in the last week of October.

The veterinarian came from the next town and examined her and said she was not sick, she was frightened. Her heart rate was far too fast for a cow standing in a pasture. He asked Meritt if there was a problem on the farm. Meritt said no.

The vet did not press and said Adelaide would come back into milk when whatever was frightening her went away. Meritt asked what usually frightened a cow like that. The vet said, “Dogs, mostly. Coyotes.

A person she doesn’t know. ” He added, “This cow isn’t afraid of any of those. ” He got in his truck and left. Adelaide never gave milk again.

The sounds in the house changed with the season. What had been faint became regular. At three in the morning, exactly, the west wall settled. Between three and three-thirty, without exception, Meritt woke to find Ondine awake beside him, staring at the ceiling without moving.

She never woke him. He never asked how long she had been awake. They lay together in the dark and listened. After a while the sound stopped, and one of them would say, “Well,” and roll over to try to sleep again.

In October, Ondine drove to the small town at the crossroads without telling Meritt and spent the afternoon at the historical society: two rooms at the back of the library, run by a woman named Fairly Prosper, seventy years old, who had known Wexler’s mother when they were girls. Ondine did not tell her exactly why she was asking. She only said she had bought a house on the road to Wexler’s place and wanted to know more about the family that built it. Mrs.

Prosper did not need to hear more. She got up, went to a cabinet in the back room, and pulled out a thin brown file tied with string. “Sit down,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I can.

” She told Ondine that Sepia Halloran had come to the valley in 1836 with Elvidge, and no one knew where either of them had come from before that. Elvidge built the house himself with the help of two men from Fall River, who quit before it was finished and walked back to Fall River in a single day and never worked for anyone in that part of the state again. When Elvidge died in 1840, he died alone in the front room, and Sepia did not call anyone for three days after his death. She sat with him for three days.

When the minister from the neighboring parish finally came on the fourth day, Sepia opened the door as if nothing were wrong and told him Elvidge was resting. The minister went in and found Elvidge on the floor by the hearth, and asked Sepia when she thought he had died. She said, “This morning. ” The minister did not correct her.

He asked if he could arrange the burial. She said no. Elvidge would stay in the house; that was what he wanted. The minister went back to his congregation and wrote to the constable in Providence, and the constable arrived three days later, by which time Elvidge had been buried in a corner of the yard in a hole Sepia had dug herself.

Sepia could not mark the corner precisely. Mrs. Prosper closed the file. “That’s what’s on record,” she said.

Ondine asked when Sepia died. “Two years later,” Mrs. Prosper said. “Was she buried in the same yard?

” “No. She was buried in the pauper’s cemetery behind the old church, at the minister’s request, over the constable’s objection. ” Ondine asked why over the constable’s objection. Mrs.

Prosper looked at her a long time. “I don’t think you want to know the answer to that, dear. And I don’t think I want to give it. ”

Ondine came home in the last of the daylight.

She did not tell Meritt about the visit for a long time. She told me in 1993 that she was afraid, if she told him then, that he would look for the corner of the yard where Elvidge was buried, and she did not want him to find it. But Meritt was already looking. He had been walking the property line every Sunday since mid-September, in the last hour of daylight, carrying a stick in one hand and his notebook in the other.

He had marked in his notebook four places in the yard where the grass was shorter than the grass around it, where the ground gave slightly underfoot as if it had been dug once and settled over the years but not completely. He dug none of them. He wrote “four soft places” and drew a small map. The map is still in the notebook.

He told none of this to Ondine. He did not tell Wexler. He told me once, in 1982, and then asked me to turn off the tape recorder. I did.

In the second week of October, Ondine began to hear a woman speaking in the summer kitchen. The summer kitchen was cut off from the main house by a heavy door and a timber wall. There was no woodstove, no hanging lamp, no reason for anyone to be in there. The first time, Ondine was standing at the sink washing dishes, and she heard through the wall a woman’s low, patient voice saying something she could not make out.

She thought at first she had left the radio on. She had not. She turned off the tap and stood perfectly still. The voice went on for a few seconds and stopped.

She did not open the door. She went and sat in the front room with her hands folded in her lap for a while. When Meritt came in from the barn, she told him. He went into the summer kitchen with a lantern.

There was nothing there. There had been nothing there for years: a broken loom, a box of old flowerpots, a chain hanging from a beam that neither of them had ever touched. The voice returned three days later. This time Ondine was in the pantry.

This time she opened the summer kitchen door, lantern in hand, and stood on the threshold. The voice was still speaking when she opened the door, continued for a moment, and stopped. She wrote down what she thought she had heard, later, on a scrap of paper that Meritt found in her sewing basket the following spring: “Put the hook back on the door. It says put the hook back on the door.

”

Meritt read that paper more than once. He had a habit, when he was thinking, of setting his hand flat on the table and tapping with three fingers, ring, middle, index, ring, middle, index. He tapped at the kitchen table all afternoon the day he found the paper. Then he went out and walked slowly around the house in the cold.

When he came back, he did not tell Ondine what he had done. He went to check the root cellar. The small brass hook, which someone had gone to the trouble of carving a groove into the stone for, was still there, mounted on the frame just below elbow level. It was hanging open, of course.

It had hung open since they moved in. That night, before he went to bed, he went back to the root cellar and closed the hook. He did not tell Ondine he had done that either. The house was quiet for eleven days.

I have those eleven days from Meritt’s notebook. He wrote nothing in it for all of them, which was not his habit. Later, in the margin of that empty page, he wrote, in smaller writing than his usual hand, “The eleven quiet days. ” And below that: “Then it began again.

”

What began was small at first. Ondine came out of the bathroom one morning and said there was someone in there with her. “In the bathroom? ” Meritt asked.

“No,” she said, “in the wall of the bathroom. There’s someone listening in the wall. ” Meritt tore the plaster off that wall the following weekend. There was no one in the wall.

But in the space between the studs there was a small folded square of what looked like sailcloth, and inside it a lock of dark hair tied with red thread. It was not Ondine’s hair. It was too coarse, too dark. He held it up to the light, and it did not shine the way hair shines.

It absorbed light the way old velvet does. He did not show it to Ondine. He put it in a jar in the barn and replaced the plaster. He wrote in his notebook only: “Patched with plaster.

” He did not describe the jar. Two nights later, the chair moved. This time it actually moved. The chair had been by the front-room window.

In the morning it was three feet from where it had been, turned to face the corner of the room. No one had gone into the front room in the night. The doors were bolted. The windows were shut.

Meritt walked around the chair twice. Then he went to the barn, took the jar with the cloth in it, buried it under a stone at the back of the barn, and never spoke of it. In his notebook he wrote: “The chair moved. ” He did not write about the jar.

He never wrote about it at all. I know about the jar because in 1982 he sat in a chair in his kitchen in New Bedford and told me. Then he asked if I would refrain from mentioning it in anything I published while he was alive. I did.

He died in 1987. The following week, Ondine began sleeping with the light on. Meritt did not comment. He would come to bed and find her sitting propped against the headboard, lamp low, an open book on her lap.

She was not reading. She held the book and watched the doorway. Once, when he asked her what she was watching for, she said, “I don’t know yet. I’ll know when I see it.

” After that he did not sleep well. He tried. He lay on his side with his back to her, eyes closed, and heard the faint turn of a page now and then, which meant she was still watching. After a while he would give up and lie on his back beside her.

They did not speak. The house breathed around them. The milkman stopped delivering to the house in mid-November. His name was Alden Purcell, and he had worked the route for nineteen years.

He told Wexler, and Wexler told Meritt three weeks later, that on the second Tuesday of November he arrived at the usual time, 6:10 a. m. , got out of his truck, walked to the porch to set down the bottles, and looked up at the front window to see a woman standing there watching him. He raised his hand to wave, thinking it was Ondine.

The woman did not move. He set the bottles down, turned, got back in the truck, and as he was about to pull away he looked at the window again. There was no woman. There was no light on in the house.

And the bottles he had just set on the porch were inside, on the front window sill, upright, still full. He drove back up the road at forty miles an hour, which Wexler said was the fastest Alden Purcell had ever driven in his life. He spoke to his supervisor at the dairy that morning and asked to be taken off the route. The supervisor asked why.

Alden Purcell said, simply, “I don’t want to stop there again. ” The supervisor did not ask for an explanation. On the night of November 18, Meritt came into the bedroom carrying a cup of milk for Ondine and stopped in the doorway. Ondine was sitting up as usual, lamp low, book open in her lap, and she was looking at the mirror above the dresser.

The mirror was tilted slightly downward, the way such mirrors are, so from her place she could see the doorway behind her. Meritt was standing in the doorway. He could see himself in the mirror. And he could see someone else.

He saw it for perhaps a second and a half: a shape beyond his right shoulder, at the doorway, about his height. Not a face. A shape. It was gone before he could draw breath.

Ondine saw it too. He knew because she did not scream, and she did not take her eyes off the mirror. She looked at him in the glass and said, very quietly, “Don’t turn around. ” So he did not.

He carried the cup of milk very slowly to the bed, set it on the nightstand, and got into bed on the far side of her. Only then did he look at the doorway. It was empty. It stayed empty.

Neither of them said another word about it that night or the next day. But he wrote it in the notebook in three words: “Mirror, back doorway. ”

In the third week of November, Uriah Wexler came back to the yard. He said he had heard that people in the country hear things without being told.

“Are you sleeping? ” he asked. “No,” Meritt said. “Is she sleeping?

” Wexler asked. “No,” Meritt said. “And I don’t know how much longer she’ll want to stay. ”

Wexler was silent a long time.

Then he said, “My grandmother told me something else about Sepia Halloran, and I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t want to burden you with it. But I think you need it now. ” He said, “She told me the woman who did the laundry at that house, while Sepia was still alive, told her once, when she was very old, something. She said that when Sepia Halloran wanted something from someone, she would ask for it aloud in an empty room and then wait.

And within a few days, she would have it. And the person she got it from would not remember having given it to her. ” Wexler said, “I don’t know what she took from people. I don’t know if any of it is true.

But I think if I were you, I wouldn’t stay long. I wouldn’t sleep another full night in that house. And I wouldn’t let your wife go into the summer kitchen alone. ”

Meritt asked, “Then why did you tell me now and not before?

” Wexler answered, “Because you wouldn’t have listened before, and I don’t know that you’ll listen now. But she’s thinner than she was in August, and so are you. And in October I saw her come out the back door and stand in the yard for twenty minutes in her nightgown in the cold at three in the morning. When I called to her from the road, she didn’t turn.

She went back inside as if she’d never come out. I didn’t sleep well that night, and I don’t think you did either. ”

Meritt had no memory of Ondine leaving the house at night. He thanked Wexler and watched him go back up the road.

He went inside and asked Ondine, “Do you go outside at night? ” She looked at him for a long moment. She said, “I don’t know. Have you ever wondered whether you’ve done something?

” She did not answer further. That was late November. The following week came the first heavy snow, and with it the last part of this story. On the night of December 2, 1949, Meritt woke at 8:51.

He wrote the time in his notebook the next morning. He wrote: “It wasn’t a knock on the door. It wasn’t footsteps. A word.

Someone said a word beside the bed, not to me, about me. I cannot tell you the word. ”

Ondine was not in the bed. He got up, went through the house with his flashlight: the living room, the kitchen, the pantry, the stairs to the attic.

He went down to the cellar and looked at the hook on the root cellar door. It was open. He did not remember opening it. He closed the door.

Then he went upstairs. He found her in the summer kitchen. She was sitting on the floor in her nightgown, her back against the timber wall, hands folded in her lap. She was awake.

She was not shivering. The room was so cold he could see his breath. There was no lantern lit. The door was shut behind her.

He said her name. She turned her head slowly and looked at him. He said her name again. She said, in a voice he did not quite recognize, “She wants me to let her out.

” He asked her what she wanted. She said, “She has no name. She never had a name. She only has the house.

” He crossed the kitchen and picked her up. She was very light. Too light. He noticed, carrying her, that her feet were bare and the soles were clean.

She had walked across the summer kitchen’s board floor, which had not been swept since August, and her feet were clean. He also noticed that the summer kitchen door, which he had opened to enter, had closed behind him. He heard it close. He did not turn.

He carried Ondine through the pantry, the kitchen, the living room, and up the stairs to the bedroom. He did not look at any of the doors along the way. He told me in 1982 that this was the only time in his life he could not force himself to turn and look at whatever was behind him. He said, “I don’t know what was there.

I know I didn’t want to see it. I know I’ve thought of it once a week ever since. ”

He carried her to bed and sat with her the rest of the night, the lamp burning, and did not sleep. In the morning he made coffee.

He did not ask her about it, and she did not bring it up. They ate breakfast. Then he went to the barn, hitched the truck, drove into town, and called his cousin in New Bedford from the drugstore. He asked if there was room for two people for a while.

The cousin said yes. Meritt went home. He told Ondine, “We’re going down to New Bedford for a little while. ” She asked when.

He said, “Tonight. ” They left that night. When I spoke to him thirty-two years later, he did not tell me exactly what happened in the last hour they spent in the house. He said only that when he closed the front door for the last time, he closed it slowly, closed it all the way, and heard the latch catch.

And that Ondine did not look at the house as they drove away. She looked at her hands the whole way. She did not speak until they crossed the state line. Then she said, “I don’t think it noticed we were leaving.

” She said, “I think it was busy. ” She did not say what it was busy with. They did not go back, not that winter, not in the spring. In April, Meritt drove up alone to check the property.

He said the house was still standing, the pond had thawed, and the yard looked like any yard in April. He said he opened the front door and stood on the threshold and did not go in. He said what he heard while he stood there was a chair being dragged one inch across the floor of the room above the living room. He closed the door and latched it.

He sold the property that summer to a man from out of state for less than he had paid, and was, as he put it, glad to be rid of it. That man kept it four years and wrote to Meritt in the spring of 1954 asking if the house had always been cold. Meritt did not answer. The man sold it in 1955 to a widow from Hartford, who kept it eight months and put it back on the market for less than she had paid.

It sold again in 1956 and has sold since then every four to seven years, never for more than the previous owner paid. In 1971 a family from the Providence suburbs bought it, the family most people think of today when they hear about the house. Their story became a movie, and you may have seen it. But they were the eighth or ninth family to live there since Elvidge Halloran finished it, not the first, and not the last.

Their story is not the whole story. It is one chapter. Ondine Vandrisliss lived to be eighty-nine and died in Providence in 1994. In her last year she asked me to sit with her twice a week and write down what she remembered.

She remembered most of it: the smell of the plaster, the voice through the wall, the walk in the yard she had not known she took. She remembered August 14, the day they moved in, and she remembered December 2, the night of the summer kitchen, almost perfectly, as she said. What she could not remember were the eleven quiet days. She had no memory of any of them.

She said, “Those should have been our best days in that house, and I can’t remember a single one. ” She paused, and said, “I think whatever was there was resting. ” And once, near the end, she said something else that I did not write down at the time, and I write it now from memory: “I don’t think we were the ones it wanted. I think we were just the ones there.

It wasn’t finished when we left. ” She said this quietly, looking at the ceiling of her bedroom in Providence, and she did not repeat it, and I did not ask her to. She also asked me, in one of our last conversations, whether I had been to the house myself. I said no.

She said, “Don’t go. ” I said, “I don’t know how to get in. ” She said, “That’s not what I mean. Don’t stand in the yard.

Don’t stand at the edge of the road. Don’t park and get out to look. If you have to pass it, pass it. Don’t slow down.

” She said this with her eyes closed, hands folded on the blanket, and I said I would not. She said, “Good. ” After a moment she said, “I think when I go, it will be a little lighter. I think a part of me is still there.

I think we all left a piece of ourselves in that house. That’s what it takes. ”

In our last visit I asked her what she thought Sepia Halloran had been. I asked carefully.

I did not use the words “spirit” or “ghost,” because Ondine never used them, and I had learned from the beginning not to put words in her mouth. She thought for a while. She was very tired that evening. She said, “I don’t think Sepia was the thing in the house.

I think Sepia was the first person who taught the thing in the house to want. I think the thing was there before her, and I think Elvidge found it, and I think he brought her into it, and I think when he died, she was the only one left who knew how to feed it. And after she died, it had to learn to feed itself. It’s been learning ever since.

That’s what I think. But I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before. ” I asked, “Do you think it can be stopped?

” She said, “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone has tried in a long time. I think most people who go in there either learn to live with it the way Wexler’s grandmother did, or they leave the way we did. ” She added, “I think we did the right thing by leaving.

” I said, “I think so too. ” She said, “But I’m not sure it was enough. ” A week later she was gone. The clean version of the house, the one you may have seen in the film, leaves out the eleven quiet days.

It leaves out the smell in the plaster, which Ondine finally identified for me in 1993 as the smell of a burned lamp wick that has gone damp, but stronger and older and stranger than that. It leaves out the hook on the root cellar door and the groove carved in the stone for it. It leaves out the constable, whose handwriting failed him in 1842, who moved to Ohio the following January. It leaves out the letter in the archive, written in a woman’s hand, warning someone not to answer him through the wall.

It leaves out the minister who buried Elvidge three days after his wife had buried him in a corner of the yard she could no longer mark. It leaves out the fact that when Meritt Vandrisliss returned in April, he did not enter the house, and when I asked him, forty-one years later, why not, he said: “Because if I went in, I don’t think I would have come out with the same mind I went in with. ”

The house is still standing. If you look for it, you will not easily find it, because I will not put the road on a map.

But it is still there, and someone lives in it. I have not asked them what they hear at three in the morning. Uriah Wexler died in 1958, and his grandson still farms the neighboring land. When I spoke to the grandson in 1992, he said the same thing his grandfather had said to Meritt Vandrisliss forty-three years earlier: “The house doesn’t ask for much.

Just don’t put your ear too close to the walls at night, and keep the hook on the cellar door shut. ” He said his grandfather once told him, when he was a boy, that the house did not have a ghost in it. It had a habit. A ghost, his grandfather said, is a person who does not know he is dead.

A habit is a house that has learned to want. And this house, his grandfather said, learned early. Meritt kept the notebook until his death in 1987. His daughter, born in New Bedford in 1951, who never spent a single day in that Rhode Island farmhouse, gave it to me at the funeral.

She said, “He asked that it be given to whoever asked for it. ” I asked. That is why I can tell you about the sound in the west wall at three in the morning, and what he wrote in the margin of the empty page, and about the eleven quiet days. I have driven that road twice since then, both times in the spring, and both times I did what Ondine asked of me: I did not slow down at the driveway.

I did not stop the car. I did not look at the house from the road. But on the second visit I noticed something I had missed the first time. On that stretch of road where the temperature drops and the sun never reaches the ground, on the right side about a mile from the driveway, there is a small pile of stones.

It is not a rock pile. It is not arranged. It is a heap of rounded stones about fist-sized, stacked haphazardly, a foot from the road. I did not stop to count them.

I did not get out of the car. But I have thought a great deal about that pile of stones in the years since. And I wondered whether Burley Combs, or someone like her, put the first stone there in 1842, and whether everyone who left that house since has added one. I do not know.

It is only a road, and a pile of stones, and there is no way to prove what it means. But I know what my hands wanted to do when I saw it. They wanted to put a stone on the pile.