The Tenants Nobody Invited

Ask an exterminator, and he will tell you the first rule of haunted houses: most of them are occupied — just not by people.

Scratching inside a wall at 2 a.m. is usually a tenant with wings or whiskers. Old houses become hotels for bats, mice, raccoons and owls; the animals move through wall cavities like hallways, knock pipes loose, and hold their meetings in the chimney. Half the classic haunting sounds — footsteps, whispers, something shifting in the attic — are a building full of small lives going about their night.

That is why this picture opens the house like a dollhouse. No jump, no shadow in the doorway. Just the tenants, sitting down to dinner, sewing by the fire, asleep where they live.

The spooky part was never that the house might be empty and something else moved in.

The spooky part is that it was never empty at all.

— Merlin Dreams · made with AI