The Haunted Fireplace
“Do you like scary movies?”
By Emilee Phillips
I was never much into ghost stories as a little girl, but that didn’t make me immune to the heebie-jeebies when something didn’t feel quite right.
The house where I grew up was built in 1875. It’s a rambling white farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Most of the time our home felt warm and cozy, especially when the whole family was together. It was during thunderstorms, or when I was alone, that I got scared.
The old house is the polar opposite of a modern, open floor plan. It has rooms of all different shapes and sizes, each with an atmosphere entirely its own. Every addition to the house brought with it idiosyncratic wall and floor configurations. Our house was imposing and roomy and, to a little kid like me, it felt like a mansion — not of the fancy or fairytale kind, but the big, mysterious kind.
Sometimes, it even seemed alive.
The majority of the house was built with rough cut lumber. There are four fireplaces, two of them in working condition. The wooden mantels are all strictly utilitarian, devoid of ornate carvings or decoration. But the one in the green room is different. Very different.
I should mention that the house was often cold in the winter. We had a pair of furnaces, but their fuel efficiency may not have been up to 21st century standards. They often burned through all of the propane before the delivery truck could make it back for a refill. Or sometimes they were simply unable to ward off the chill of a high-ceilinged house. So, on the coldest nights, my family gathered in the green room around its oversized fireplace.
My brother and I used to wrestle on the worn brown carpet, rolling in front of the fire that always gave off more fumes than it seemed it should. I suppose I didn’t pay it any mind those first few years until one day I looked up at that ancient fireplace and watched the mantel ooze. My eyes got as big as saucers. It was as though I was watching a horror movie and I couldn’t look away.
The walls were bleeding.
Suddenly, every creak I heard in that old house came alive. I could imagine whispers coming from the flames. Every speck of blue dancing in the fire became a spirit showing itself to me just to see if I was paying attention.
When the fireplace was on I would tiptoe in and out of the room, keeping a wary eye on the hearth. If I was quiet, I thought, I would be safe.
It was creepy and sinister and a bit terrifying. And despite countless reassurances from my parents that a menacing otherworldly being had not inhabited that gaping hole in the wall, I wasn’t convinced.
Even now, when the fireplace in the green room is lit, amber fluid seeps from the mantel and oozes over the layers and layers of paint applied to disguise where all the previous drips have been scraped off. And, now that I’m older, I understand it’s not unheard of for old homes built of heart pine to drip resin for years, the heat triggering the flow.
Perhaps the old house isn’t haunted after all — except for the footsteps my father sometimes hears clomping up the steep wooden staircase at night. The steps, oddly enough, are carpeted. PS
Emilee Phillips is PineStraw’s director of social media and digital content.
