One of my childhood homes had a spiral staircase that led from the central part of the house up to a loft that served as my parent's bedroom. When we first moved in, the stairs were lined with beige carpet and the railing was painted an ugly, poop brown. My mother stripped the fabric from the steps and painted the metal staircase a melange of bright colors. It felt fun and welcoming during the day, but at night the spiral pattern loomed out of the shadows, twisted and unnatural in a way my young mind found unsettling. I was afraid of this staircase. I often imagined one of us slipping on the top step and falling head over feet down to the bottom, our bodies breaking and rearranging like a character in Death Becomes Her. Or I imagined our house on fire and my parents trapped in the loft, my siblings and I escaping into the yard and huddling together as the house burned and our parents’ screams echoed through the night.
I didn’t sleep well as a child, too often plagued by vivid, terrifying dreams. I remember one night, sick with a fever, I awoke to the sound of a train. But it wasn’t a far-off signal, traveling through the dark from across town. No, this train was close, too close, and moving closer by the second. I stepped out of my bedroom as the train came barreling through the loft and down the spiral staircase, metal clanging against metal at a deafening pitch. I remember screaming, and I remember my mother racing down the stairs, the touch of her cool hand pressed against my fiery forehead. I remember her tucking me back into bed. The train was not the most frightening thing I saw come down those spiral stairs, though. That honor belongs to poltergeists.
My parents love movies. They never shied away from showing us their favorites at an early age that would likely horrify most parents these days. The only movie I recall them ever really hesitating to show us was Night of the Living Dead. It was Halloween season and we wanted to watch something spooky. They went back and forth with each other, debating whether it was too scary for three young kids. Ultimately they decided to go ahead, with the caveat that this was one of the scariest movies they had ever seen, and we were free to stop watching at any time if it felt like too much for us to handle.
We didn’t make it even halfway through the movie before we asked to turn it off because all three of us found it comically bad.
Night of the Living Dead was one of the least scary things I have ever seen. I almost felt bad for my parents. This is what passed for horror when they were growing up? We switched and watched Poltergeist instead, an early 80s movie where a ghostly presence terrorizes a family after they move into a new house, and a little girl gets sucked into a tv. There’s even a bit in the movie where a creepy clown doll comes to life and attacks a little boy, but that’s not especially scary because if you own a clown doll you kind of just have to expect that eventually it’s going to come to life and try to kill you. Sorry to blame the victim.
What I found especially chilling about Poltergeist is a scene where a wispy, ghostly form slowly descends a staircase. It has been decades since I have seen this movie and yet that image remains so clear in my mind, along with the one that tormented me for months after: that same ghostly form slowly descending our spiral staircase. I couldn’t look at our stairs without seeing a hazy white apparition drifting down from step to step, coming for me.
The other day I was trying to find a Halloween movie that would be appropriate for my five-year-old (but that wouldn’t make me want to drive a nail through my eye to escape from boredom) when I got to thinking about what it will be like to someday show him the movies that his dad and I found genuinely frightening when we were growing up. Will Poltergeist be his Night of the Living Dead—all camp and terrible special effects? Or better yet, will The Ring? The Ring scared my husband so badly that he has refused to watch horror movies since. Though to be fair, he wasn’t a big fan of horror movies to begin with and he especially dislikes ones where creepy, demonic children terrorize people.
We saw The Ring together on Homecoming night instead of going to the school dance. I can’t remember if we both went home and changed first, or if we went straight to the theater from dinner, him still in his suit and me in my sparkly silver dress. It was a late showing and by the time he dropped me back at my house after the movie, all of the lights were out and everyone else was asleep. I made him walk me to my door, through our dark garage where the light had burned out a long time ago and no one had ever bothered to replace it. Then he drove home alone to his own quiet, darkened house where his mind stirred and stirred with frightening images as he made his way to his attic bedroom and tried to get some sleep.
I try to imagine my son watching this movie someday and what his reaction might be. It’s a movie about watching a videotape (a thing that doesn’t exist anymore) and then answering a phone call (a thing that never happens anymore) to receive a cryptic warning about your impending death. Just writing that out sounds so stupid I can already picture my kid rolling his eyes and asking incredulously, “you thought this was scary?”
Like Poltergeist, I haven’t seen The Ring in decades. I have no idea if it holds up even a little bit. In all likelihood, if I watched it today I would laugh at how silly it is and tease my husband mercilessly for being as frightened as he was all those years ago. After all, my parents were forced to admit that by the standards of early-90s film and television, a black-and-white movie about literally the slowest zombies you’ve ever seen who look like Wall Street guys stumbling back to the office after a three-martini lunch was not especially scary. Time comes for all of us and makes us look like fools.
The house with the spiral staircase is gone now. One year the Guadalupe river flooded its banks and surged through my old neighborhood. The house next door to ours was knocked off its foundation by the rushing water and smashed into ours, destroying it. My family had already moved away by that point, but I went back a couple of years later to visit a friend and we drove down to the spot where my house had once been. No one had rebuilt on the land yet, so there was nothing there except an empty yard reaching all the way down to the water. I stood in the overgrown grass and let the house rise up around me, conjuring each room in my mind. I pictured myself as a little girl, drifting through the house like a ghost, haunting the now empty space I had once called home.
My poem “Flood,” originally published in Canary, a literary journal of the environmental crisis, is about this same home and even makes mention of the spiral staircase. If you’d like, you can read it here.