Heritage

Old houses have always given me the heebie jeebies. I think about who lived there, and more importantly, who died there. I shiver a little to think about it anywhere, even at the house my parents built. I’ve had this problem from the time I was little. Maybe I watched too much CSI, but I can’t help but think about the history of places.

There’s a green house with a windmill next to Texas Tech campus. I didn’t realize for the longest time that no one lived there; it was just a lovely house, albeit one right next to the interstate. All through college, I thought that it was just a random house, nothing more-—until I started taking the bus out to the satellite parking lot this year.

The house is part of the National Ranching Heritage Center. I don’t know how many times I rode past it unthinkingly, until the day that something suddenly clicked. I realized that it wasn’t just any normal creepy old house: it was a tremendously creepy old house. The Ranching Heritage website tells a lot about the story of the house, but essentially what it says boils down to failed dreams. A man wanted to build his wife a house next to the train tracks, but the train went though another town after he had already built the house.

The Barton House, as it is called, has artifacts of times gone by placed inside. Some of them are from the Bartons; some of them are reproductions. I didn’t go in to see any of them. I don’t know if I think it’s disrespectful, but I don’t want hordes of people coming in and puttering around in my house after I die. Maybe, to some people, an empty high chair conveys warm memories of babies playing with Cheerios but, to me, it doesn’t. It’s like an old doll, found in the dirt—even if it’s not the ghost of a dead child, it’s the ghost of a memory of a child. In some ways, I think that is even creepier than an actual ghost; no priest can exorcise the demons of memories.

Mrs. Barton bequeathed the house to the Ranching Heritage Center, so perhaps she didn’t feel the same way. I just can’t get past the history of what has happened to an object. I don’t even like to buy used clothes, because who knows what has happened in it, to it? If these walls could talk-—I wouldn’t want to hear them. All they would say would be words of disappointment, of abandonment by the humans that they took care of for so long. How could I possibly stand the grief that emanates from each of those silent, empty houses?