Collinwood: My First Haunted House

Haunted houses are very much on my mind this evening as I pack for the World Horror Convention 2013 in New Orleans, a city I've wanted to visit since the first time I read Anne Rice's brilliant novel The Witching Hour, to which I lost an entire weekend in 1990.

Rice is an author whose gifts I have cherished since Interview With The Vampire first came out, but the book that made the list of my all-time favourite supernatural novels (and the list of my all-time favourite historical novels as well) was—is—The Witching Hour, which Rice set in her then-home on First Street. The notion of setting a story in one's own home had not occurred to me in 1990, and it struck me as a particular bit of witchcraft, for lack of a better word. And the book was (and remains) completely and utterly gorgeous.

Consider this description, from the first part of the novel:

"The doctor had never been inside an antebellum mansion until that spring in New Orleans. And the old house really did have white fluted columns on the front, though the paint was peeling away. Greek Revival style they called it—a long violet-gray town house on a dark shady corner in the Garden District, its front gate guarded it seemed by two enormous oaks. The iron lace railings were made in a rose pattern and much festooned with vines—purple wisteria, the yellow Virginia creeper, and bougainvillea of a dark, incandescent pink."

Inside, "[he] smelled that smell again of a New Orleans house in the summer, heat and old wood."

By the time Rice describes the inside, everything from the shadowed coolness to the scent of camphor and genteel rot had imprinted itself on my imagination, and the process of reading the novel had moved beyond the experience of reading it and well into the experience of living it. There are ghosts aplenty in The Witching Hour, as well as witches, of course, and more. But twenty-three years after first reading the novel, what has stayed with me more than anything else is the First Street mansion itself.

I will very likely take a stroll past the house while I'm in New Orleans in the same way I visited Hemingway's house in Key West in the 1980s (sweet-talking my way into a private tour at dawn, culminating an invitation to come behind the ropes to touch Hemingway's typewriter) but I suspect it'll be anticlimactic, because I've already been inside that haunted house, in my imagination, courtesy of Mrs. Rice's prodigious literary gifts.

The house on First Street may be my favourite haunted house, but it wasn't my first. And you never forget your first.

My first haunted house was Collinwood, the 40-room mansion from Dark Shadows, the American gothic television series starring Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins, the morose New England vampire who became an improbable teen idol, festooning the covers of Tiger Beat and 16 along the way. The series ran between 1966-1971, spawning two full-length motion pictures, a series of paperback novels, a 1990s series reboot, and culminating in the Tim Burton film version starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas. My thoughts on Mr. Depp as Mr. Collins belong elsewhere than this blog post, so we'll set them aside for now. 

Unlike my American contemporaries, I didn't come to this love via the television series, which I hadn't seen in April, 1972 when I first discovered the Dark Shadows comic book series from Gold Key.

I was ten, and that issue, complete with the cover image of a young woman being chased through Hell (never called that in the story, interestingly enough) by the dark suited man with the silver wolf's head cane was the most lurid, exciting, creepy thing I'd ever seen. I'd already been primed for a gothic imagination through the Brothers Grimm and the darker fairy tales to which I was as naturally drawn as other children are to bright colours and sunshine.

Barnabas was also my first vampire, but even as a later writer of vampire fiction, that wasn't the most important thing for me. No, it was the house itself, Collinwood, all 40 shadow-filled rooms full of magic and horror and every manner of ghosts. That, and the imaginative possibilities presented by the stories themselves.

"Hellfire" tells the story of a young Collins cousin, Constance, who survives a near-attack by Barnabas, who realizes he can't drink the blood of a member of his own family. It's never explained why, exactly, but ultimately it doesn't matter. There are bigger threats on the horizon, including a mysterious, hypnotic "hellfire" that appears suddenly in the house—a cold fire that doesn't consume, but eventually lures Constance Collins into "the Dark Pit," from which Barnabas must rescue her. The  hellfire appears because of the presence of evil. Not only is Collinwood a locus of evil, but Barnabas's presence itself is apparently evil enough to summon the hellfire.

I began to consume every issue of Dark Shadows I could lay my hands on. My friend Gordie Brown was a Dark Shadows fanatic, I discovered, and he had all the back issues. As I said, I still hadn't seen the series, but I was in love with the stories already. I knew the characters' names, I knew the locale, Maine, which seemed to me a magical, wondrous place of nothing but cliffs and mansions, rocky shores, vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, diarists and letter-writers—and this later preoccupation had already become mine, as I had begun keeping a journal of sorts at nine.

A few years later, we were living in Geneva, Switzerland in a gloomy old villa up on a hill on the outskirts of a country town. My beloved American babysitter, Nancy, a seventeen year old girl of seemingly impossible sophistication and glamour, gave me my first gothic romance novel, bringing my love affair with Collinwood to the next level with the great gift of Barnabas Collins and the Gypsy Witch. I barely remember the storyline, but I remember being riveted to the corner of the couch, bathed in words and colours and images, in a novelist's way that no mere comic book, however glorious, could ever have bestowed.

I was to learn in later life that "Marilyn Ross" (whose gothic novels I consumed by the gross, as my teenage years unfolded, at least 30 of the provided by my glamorous benefactor, Nancy) was actually a Canadian writer in the Maritimes, whose name was...Dan Ross. I wish that I had known then that boys could write gothic romances, and that Canadians could, too. But I was already in thrall to Marilyn Ross's books, not only the Dark Shadows series, but others, with names like Satan's Island and Phantom of the 13th Floor. But the Dark Shadows series was my favourite.

In a nearby town, my parents indulgently bought me an antique bamboo walking stick, after extracting a promise that I wouldn't hit my brother with it or poke anyone's eye out. In the early hours of the evening, I would walk the empty country roads under the moon pretending to be Barnabas, or pine in my room pretending to be one of the interchangeable series of governesses and gentlewomen in distress who seemed to wash up at the door of Collinwood as regularly as the tide.

More importantly, I began to crystallize a dream of someday writing books like these: moonlight book, all gaslight and stars and long, empty corridors full of shadows. I wrote what is now called "fan fiction" as a school project for English class: a "novel" of about five pages called Barnabas, Quentin, and the Silver Bat. As I recall, it was a good idea in theory, except for the slavishly aped Marilyn Ross-style writing, and characters that someone else had dreamed up, and the fact that it was five pages long. Today, no one would ever accuse me of underwriting, or minimalism, so perhaps I just hit my Jay McInerney period before hitting puberty.

But let me tell you, there was something to be said for writing it in an upstairs bedroom in a 150+ year-old Swiss villa near the shores of the same lake upon which was perched the Villa Diodati, where Mary Shelley had first dreamed of Frankenstein; something to be said for having one's own personal Collinwood, at twelve, in which to dream of becoming a writer.

A lot to be said, actually.

In the same vein, I read Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot in that house during a storm of Frankenstein-level intensity. I cherished the moment when the lightning flashed so brightly that the verandah furniture cast shadows on the wall across from me that seemed almost alive. The borders of children's minds are permeable. This is why they learn languages so easily, and retain them for life. Gothic imagery is it's own language, and those of us who write in the genre often learn it early, and it stays with us long after childhood. Indeed, it's a language we likely never completely forget.

As an adult, I've always cherished old houses.

Our house in Milton, Ontario, where we lived for six years, was over 100 years old. By the time we lived there, I was already a working magazine writer, though I was beginning to dabble in fiction, too. A vampire anthology I edited with Thomas S. Roche, Brothers of the Night, contains my story "The Dead of Winter," which was my experiment with what Anne Rice had so spellbindingly accomplished in The Witching Hour: using one's own house as a setting for a story. I believe it was haunted, too. An incident occurred in that house which provided the seed for my novel Wild Fell, a ghost story of sorts, which is coming out this November from ChiZine Publications.

Our present house in Toronto, on a shady, tree-lined street not far from downtown, is likewise well over a century old, part brick, part clapboard. I write in a gabled study  at the top of the house with a weathervane on the peaked roof. In the introduction to Queer Fear, I wrote of our house that, in summer, you can smell time sleeping in the cool, dim rooms: the smell of old wood, the chill of the odd, unexpected draft, the ghost of woodsmoke from the fireplace.

I've written both Enter, Night and Wild Fell here.

Writing Enter, Night, I was acutely aware of the degree to which Parr House, the mansion of the monstrous matriarch of the town of Parr's Landing, was an homage to Collinwood. This was also noted by my great friend, the novelist and distinguished Hollywood biographer William J. Mann. Bill was, like me, a child of Dark Shadows. At the same time, Parr House also incorporated vistas and memory-views of Villa la Muraz, the house outside Geneva where I lost myself in Marilyn Ross's world. And even though Enter, Night is about vampires, it's also about old houses and what they represent, and what they represented to me.

Among my friends I count some of the finest writers of dark fantasy fiction in print today. The source of other writers' inspiration is for them to share, or at least for another blog post. But I will say that one thing we all have in common is the degree to which where we're from informs the writing we do now—where we're from, and what we took from it. It's like that story of the blind men and the elephant. They all touched different parts of the same animal, but each envisioned a radically different beast based on the part of it they touched. That's at least part of the experience of writing life.

I'm now packed and ready to go. The car is coming for me at a very civilized hour, an hour that will have allowed me a decent breakfast, my essential coffee, and a romp with Beckett in the graveyard near the house.

I've already been warned about the weather in New Orleans—40 degrees Celsius (sorry, Americans, you're on your own, I've forgotten how to do the calculations.) I was in Delhi once, many years ago, and the temperature was something like 43 degrees Celsius, which made me feel microwaved. That said, I've been warned by my friend, writer-director Ron Oliver (who has a fun blog of his own, worth checking out) not to complain on Facebook about the weather every half-hour. Both of us agree, there's nothing more intrinsically Canadian, or maybe Ontarian, than talking about discussing the weather.

That said, if I don't return on Monday, or ever blog again, rest assured I've either gone Angel Heart, or downed in the humidity on Bourbon Street, pumped full of gumbo and liquor.

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