Category: Essays

Essay by Amy McCullough

There are two things I won’t do in our (relatively) new house. I won’t bring in the previous tenants’ mail, and I won’t lie in bed a certain way. 

There’s another thing: I won’t write about it from within it—or anywhere near it, for that matter. I’m in the Las Vegas airport right now; it’s just after midnight, Austin time (10 p.m. here). I’m on a layover en route to Chicago, where I’ll be helping my dad with his homecoming from rehab after a stroke (an unexpected, sobering implication of his elderliness for both him and me). It’s an alienating thing to be on an airplane with young couples and groups of friends and a mariachi band, all excited to arrive in Sin City, when I’m just a tired 38-year-old on a decidedly less celebratory errand. 

I’m writing about the house now because I am far from it. I do not consider myself a superstitious person, but I have been reluctant to “go there” from there, as it were. My main concern is nightmares. I haven’t had any yet, and we’ve lived there going on a year (11 months almost to the date, actually). 

When I first heard what happened there, on Cordell Lane, I thought it was a deal-breaker. I was in the midst of writing Jimmie a message that said, “I don’t think I can live there; those are just too bad of vibes” (or something to that effect), when a new message appeared in my inbox. It was Jimmie, reaching me before I sent my own email, saying he was down. Well, he wasn’t “down” as in cool with what had happened. He may have found it interesting or fascinating, if you had to choose a couple slightly positive adjectives. He might have seen it as a novelty that meant we could be right for the house—just the kind of couple who could “take it,” so to speak (I had a similar thought). But he was not discouraged. He was still “down” with submitting our rental applications. His one caveat was that the killer had to be dead.

 “I mean, as long as the guy who did it isn’t still out there,” he explained, it doesn’t really bother me. 

Okay. I got that. But did it bother me? I thought the vibes were so bad I was ready to let it go, to surrender that bright, sunny living room and open kitchen area with its bay window and white brick chimney, its exposed rafters and high, angled ceiling. I was about to stop imagining myself living in a home with closets and floors that didn’t give you splinters if you walked barefoot. I was “cool,” actually, with looking around a bit more. Mostly because I was afraid I’d have brutal nightmares.

You have likely surmised by now that a murder took place at our house. The previous tenants were an estranged married couple; I believe they were separated but still living together…I think he even had a girlfriend, and that topic caused a pot-boiler fight that alerted the neighbors to some potential violence before the final blows. I would check the details, but I prefer not to Google our address. I don’t want to see the headline, “Two bodies found in East Austin home,” because I don’t want to think about those bodies. I don’t want to start imagining where they were in the house, what room it happened in. I don’t want to think about their three dogs and if they tracked bloody paw prints all around the house afterward, before the police arrived. I can’t remember if he did it with a knife and a gun or just a gun; I recall reading of both weapons, but I might be confused. As I said, I don’t look it up. I don’t want to be reminded of the details. I don’t want to make it too real. 

 But it is real. Two people died in the house we’ve been living in for (almost) a year. A man and a woman not far from our ages, I don’t think, probably in their thirties (Jimmie just turned forty, but close enough). Shay, the ambitious young real estate agent that was helping the out-of-the-country owner rent her home, told us she had to disclose that someone had died in the house. You know, “just FYI.”

“Someone,” as indicated by the headline I prefer to avoid, was actually some two. The man apparently killed his wife and then killed himself. Murder-suicide. A compound noun that surely no one wants associated with themselves or their dwelling.

When Shay first mentioned the death in the house, I assumed it was probably an elderly person, perhaps a parent that was being cared for in their home by a hospice nurse or family member. Then I Googled our address. We moved in in September. The incident happened that June. The house had been “completely remodeled” since, Shay assured us. We were the very next tenants.

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Jimmie says he loves making up stories, thinking about stories, and he does. For some stupid reason, I get upset or competitive when he says things like that. Like, “Oh, do you? Are you the creative one?” We are both creative, and we very often (almost always) work as a creative team (we make independent movies together as a hobby). So it’s pretty stupid to get defensive about such statements, but I sometimes do. I occasionally get a little pick-a-fighty, especially after a drink or two. That may be getting worse as I get older. 

Jimmie and I don’t fight much, but we’ve actually had a few doozies in this new house. I honestly don’t think it’s the “bad vibes.” I think it’s because we wrapped up a two-year project there (a full-length movie titled Gary and the Underworld), and tensions and emotions always run high when we’re finalizing a movie. We want it to be perfect, and there are usually small discrepancies between how each of us thinks perfection will be attained, which leads to some disagreements. It makes sense, and we’re both used to and sort of expect the process to some extent. We feel bad for overreacting to criticisms or ideas we’re not into, but we work on it until we’re both happy with the end result.

But a few of those Gary-related arguments got me thinking, as we sat on our back patio, drinking rye whiskey and beer and getting more and more worked up, as we misunderstood each other and overreacted with each back-and-forth, about how things could escalate to such a horrible end. It has crossed my mind: What if this house is cursed? What if a bad enough fight leads us to dark, evil places we never would have expected?

I don’t worry about that often or even realistically. Jimmie and love each other very much. We truly want nothing more than to live together as long as possible. The envisioned possibility of a homicidal scenario is not a rational fear, but it’s one of those things that crosses your mind if you live in a murder house.

It’s also the kind of running-away-with-things imaginations Jimmie and I have. We can’t help but imagine horror movie plotlines, even if it’s wrong to have those thoughts about a real thing. Clearly, we realize this event did not happen to be our creative muse, but it happened, and we became a part of that story by being the next people to live there, and it is a muse.

It also, in a strange way, is an inspiration to be good to one another, to be the most confidence-inspiring couple. Can you imagine, for instance, what the owner must have been thinking when reviewing applications? How solid of a couple is this? Lucky for her, pretty solid. At the time of applying, we had 8 consecutive years of rental history in Austin and 11 years together. We’d even lived (enjoyably) on a 27-foot sailboat for a year; that’s compatibility.

But the storylines arise. I was doing some yard work not long after we moved in, and I found a bone in what seemed like the remains of a raised garden bed. There were no wooden borders anymore, but there were mounded areas of fresher-seeming soil, where the grass grew more lushly, as if someone had amended it with compost and fertilizer…or, you know, like a fucking grave.

So, of course, it crossed my mind that, if I continued digging and poking around, maybe I’d find more bones, human bones—and lots of them. Maybe the wife wasn’t the husband’s first victim? Maybe she was one of many. 

It was probably from a past barbecue…or maybe some incident involving wildlife. Our dog, Dexter, has already killed two possums in our backyard—a skill we did not realize he had until about a month after we moved in, when he made my jaw drop in all earnestness as I watched him pluck a white-faced victim off the top of our rather high wooden fence and drag it down into an area of Tradescantia plants we call the “Secret Garden” (it’s sort of hidden around a corner). In the Secret Garden, Dexter took Springsteen’s advice and did not think twice; he promptly broke his victim’s neck—Jimmie heard the crack. Jimmie disposed of the body and I cleaned up our bloody hound dog, who did not have a single scratch on him. I do realize the faux pas when I let him out and say, “Try not to murder anything tonight” or when I refer to the yard as a crime scene (but it never occurs to me until after it comes out).

Jimmie actually just confessed to me last night that he has had a dream about the house—not a terrifying, gore-filled re-creation of the crime, but a story about a song and a cassette tape (which, incidentally, also involves digging). It’s interesting to me that it came up last night, because I was already planning on writing about this during my Las Vegas layover, while I had “the chance”; it’s also notable because we never talk about it. We agreed at some point not to, to avoid giving the event “energy” (this is an idea we got from Yoko Ono; she says something in an old interview about giving more energy to peace than to war).

Jimmie is a musician, even if he wouldn’t call himself that. He has played trumpet his entire life and has added bass guitar, keyboards, and tenor saxophone over the years. He’s added sax with especial vigor. The instrument he plays belonged to my paternal (favorite/only known) grandpa; Jimmie took it up to give it life outside of a dusty storage space on the second floor of my hermitic uncle’s house (and because he wanted to learn). And playing it has become a new passion for him. I (and Jimmie) believe this has something to do with the saxophone liberating him from the anxiety intrinsically linked to his trumpet playing (which developed from years of self-imposed pressure as a young man).

All that considered, I wasn’t surprised that Jimmie’s story related to “the horror” is also about a song. In his dream, he is working on a song and has something he really likes, a start, but he doesn’t know where to go with it. It feels like it has an ending, a direction, but he can’t find it. He has songwriter’s block. Then, one night, he is drawn via a strange impulse, an instinctual attraction, toward the backyard. He begins to dig and eventually finds a tape—and it has his song on it. His whole, completed song.

Jimmie interpreted this to mean that the guy, the murderer, had the same experience, wrote the same beginning of the same song in our house. That eventually he filled it out, realized where it needed to go, and recorded it. Then, presumably, he lost his mind and killed his wife and himself. I’m not sure where in that sequence he buried the tape, but you know how dreams are spotty and weird. This is all speculative, but the gist is that the song goes with the house, and the tenant becomes victim to the crazy-making songwriting experience. Jimmie’s character in this story is probably supposed to add to the composition and bury the tape again, then kill his whole family or what have you. 

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Initially, I wondered if a neighbor would say something, mosey over nonchalantly and ask, “You know what happened in this house, right?” But no one has been that classless, luckily. But there are kids around, and you know kids will say anything. Mariah, the grade-school-age daughter of our across-the-street neighbor, basically interrogated us the day we arrived with our moving truck; her little brother rolled his eyes as if to say, “She always does this.” She asked us what we were doing, formulated specific questions about items we were carrying out of the truck, asked if we had jobs and what and where they were. She is a natural journalist. So, she might have said something. Hopefully she doesn’t know.

You never know how people are going to take it, so you don’t tell anyone—or that’s what you agree to do before having your first houseguests. Along with agreeing that we would generally let the topic, um, die, Jimmie and I also agreed we probably shouldn’t tell anyone, especially anyone atthe house. (For instance, Jimmie told Richard, a coworker who he very much likes and respects but who is quite unlikely to come over, about the murder-suicide and about his dream; that seems more acceptable because Richard won’t ever have to think about that while in the space where it happened.)

The November after we moved, two of our closest friends came to visit from Portland. They are siblings (brother and sister), and the sister was bringing her newish boyfriend. We had met him briefly once before in Portland and liked him, but we did not know him well. Ashley, the sister, and I are best friends, and our birthdays are three days apart. So we make a point of getting together every year for “Scorpio Fest.” This was Scorp Fest 2017, and it would be everyone involved’s first time at our new house.

We now had two extra bedrooms, so that was exciting. Ashley and Shane could have the room we intended to convert into a guest room. It is normally my “boudoir,” a spare room that I’ve converted into an indulgent, early-‘90s-themed mega-closet and dressing room in a reactionary move against our old house, which we loved but which had, well, “nominal” closet space is putting it nicely.

Chris, the brother, could have the “Devil’s Office,” another extra bedroom that is basically a juvenile space for playing video games while seated in vinyl bean bags. (We don’t smoke pot often, but let’s just say that whenever we have some nearly all of it gets smoked in there.) It’s also, weirdly, a slightly smaller-scale replica of our old living room. We went a little bonkers and bought all new living room furniture for our new house—which, if I haven’t made clear, is a pretty beautiful, spacious, and stylish place in which to live (less the upsetting history). So we put our worn-out previous couch, as well as a lamp and a large piece of art from our old living room, in the Devil’s Office. It has this name because, for a few months after we moved in, we had every intention of turning that extra space into a set for a scene in Gary and the Underworld that, not surprisingly, takes place in Beelzebub’s place of business. (We ended up shooting the scene elsewhere, but the name stuck.)

We decided before this Oregonian threesome arrived that we would not, under any circumstances, bring up the incident at the house. We felt fairly sure that the Bonds (the siblings) wouldn’t care, meaning we didn’t think they’d be bothered, personally. We do not believe in ghosts—an important factor in our ability to live where we do—and we didn’t think they did, either. But we didn’t know about Shane.

As their visit went on, Jimmie and I both became more and more tempted to bring it up. We felt this temptation separately, we came to find out later; we were both effectively keeping our mouths shut about it, even to each other. The Bonds, as I have said, are some of our dearest friends in the world, and if we were going to share with anyone, it would be them. Also, that is just “one spicy meatball,” as an ex of mine would have put it. With the right (read: best friends who don’t believe in ghosts) company, it was hard not to want to spill the beans about the spilled blood.

I had resolved that we should tell them the day they were leaving. I thought, just in case they did find it upsetting, it would be courteous not to make them sleep in the house after planting that seed, a gruesome acorn from which to sprout (as I myself was certainly terrified) a horrible nightmare. I was going to tell Jimmie that I thought this was a good course of action the night before they left (in case he was feeling tempted, as well).

But he beat me to it.

In a moment of attempted male bonding during which Ashley and I were picking up a pizza, he told Chris and Shane. Chris was enthralled, in the ways a decent person could be. Shane Googled it…because the Internet makes things true. Having seen that Jimmie (who, admittedly, he did not know well) was not shitting him, and—unfortunately—being someone who does believe in ghosts, he got a bit too loaded and then freaked the fuck out.

I won’t go into the gory (social, not corporeal) details, as I would like to remain friends with these people. But a knock-down, drag-out fight between Shane and Ashley was the end result, fueled by simmering tension between boyfriend and brother (and not helped by some previous dickish behavior of Jimmie’s and a bit of OCD new-house uptightness on my part). Take booze and ghosts, add any amount of fodder for conflict—and drama is going to ensue. 

Curbside crying took place, as did screaming in the house and on our front lawn. The front door was definitely slammed. During and after, I couldn’t help but wonder what the neighbors must have been thinking: hearing escalated, shriek-pitched fighting from the house where the worst kind of domestic dispute had played out just six months prior.

Speaking of the front door, if you Google our address (which is, apparently, the thing to do), you’ll see older photos of it with a cherry red door. It is now cobalt blue. I can only imagine that’s because the owner didn’t want to leave the door of the “murder house” red when going ahead with an overhaul remodeling effort. 

The first thing Jimmie and I did when we entered through that door as actual tenants was light a sage “smudge stick” and walk through the house, cleansing each room of “bad vibes” while listening to “At Dawn” by My Morning Jacket (you’re supposed to repeat something positive or important to you or listen to some sweet jams; we chose the latter). Neither of us necessarily subscribe to the idea that a sage smudge stick actually does anything, but Jimmie is from Oregon and I lived there for a while (in Eugene, even), so we are both part hippie (native and honorary); as such, we have soft spots for such metaphysical leanings, and the ritualistic/ceremonial aspect of it appealed to both of us.

When we were debating about living there after discovering the details about “the “death in the house,” as Shay put it, I arrived at the smudge stick idea as a way I could make myself feel okay with living there. Often, for me, just deciding something will work for me is enough to make it true. So we did that, and the sage is still in our fireplace, a totem to our good vibes. (Truth be told, we broke it out again after Scorp Fest 2017 just for good measure.)

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The other superstitions I have mentioned. I won’t bring mail with names of the victim or the murderer into the house. I suppose I don’t want their presence there, in any form or suggestion. We don’t get things for them very often, but pieces do come. And I take them directly from the mailbox to the recycling bin. I have never mentioned this to Jimmie. The one or two times I’ve seen a piece of mail for one of them in the house or in the indoor recycling bin (because he beat me to the mail), I promptly take it outside without a word.

And I won’t lie in bed, in our bedroom, on my back with my arms crossed over my body. It reminds me too much of what I imagine is done when you die, how you’re put into a body bag. I remember (or was it my imagination?) seeing an image in one of the news stories about our house of a body bag being carried out. I suspect my psyche might have made that up afterward…but I think I saw it. I’m not going to check. Regardless, I don’t feel at all comfortable mimicking what I picture as that position: the position of death.

Like I said, I don’t know what room it happened in, and I don’t (ever) want to. When it came up briefly with Chris—after he confessed to me that Jimmie had served that spicy meatball (and that he was still okay with being our houseguest)—he flippantly said that it probably happened in the Devil’s Office. I have no idea why he’d say that other than to be nice: He might have realized it would help me sleep at night, forestall my nightmares—which, clearly, has been my fear all along. Good friends can read your mind like that.

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I’m about to get on the plane to Chicago, where I will (hopefully) sleep. This might be the nightmare’s best chance to get me, actually—I just gave it quite a bit of energy, here at Ruby’s Diner in Concourse D of McCarran International Airport. At least I will be far away from the source as I sleep; flying through the air, uncomfortable in the small, non-reclining seat of a cheap, necessary flight; but unattached and not lying in an undesirable, corpselike position. 

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Amy McCullough is author of The Box Wine Sailors: Misadventures of a Broke Young Couple at Sea (2015, Chicago Review Press). She is the former music editor of Willamette Week, Portland, Oregon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning alt-weekly newspaper; has written for Eugene Weekly, SAIL Magazine, Loyola Magazine, Finder, and Edible Austin; and is currently editor of Wildflower, the magazine of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. In addition to writing, she makes super-low-budget movies with her partner and former shipmate, Jimmie. They live in Austin, Texas, with a singing hound dog named Dexter. Read more about Amy on her website, theboxwinesailors.com.

Images by Jimmie Buchanan Jr.

Editor’s note:

I was trying to figure out how the writer was going to wrap this essay up. Endings are difficult, and sometimes the wrong ending can derail an otherwise great piece. I love the way she comes back to the airport terminal at the end. I love the immediacy she creates by bringing us there with her as she is about to board a flight, writing this essay that has been nagging at her.

I also love the idea of horror-as-muse, and the guilt that comes along with understanding the impropriety of murder as a muse. As writers we all have our creative springboards, our muses that lead us into the creative work. Because of choices McCullough makes in terms of how much she will reveal, and when, “Google My Address” becomes an essay about creativity more than an essay about murder, serving as a kind of confession of how creative people use other people’s pain as a jumping-off point for art. M.R. June 2019