It didn’t feel strange that in the era of high-frequency trading, foreign ownership of real estate and housing shortages, my first-time home purchase seemed to be spectre-assisted.
In the summer of 2016, when I still lived in Halifax, I bought a first edition of Helen Creighton’s Folklore of Lunenburg County at an antique store in the north end. I didn’t think much about the name in black cursive on the cover: Iva Romkey. It lived on my apartment bookshelf for a year and moved with me to an old and abandoned LaHave River house that I bought the next spring. No electricity or plumbing, rumoured to have a ghost in it, the house was sold through an elderly woman’s power of attorney just before she passed away.
It was March when I made the offer. Spring melt. Each night I dreamed of rain on its old roof, dampening the walls, darkening the plaster. What would happen to it if the sale fell through.
A water ghost, is what they said. That a young girl who died in the late 1800s had been buried by the old well. A stand of daffodils sprung up there in April: heirloom and double petalled, a kind that can’t be bought out of the Veseys catalogue or the spring bulb bin at Gow’s.
Years passed. New septics were going in to replace straight pipes along the LaHave. Old stone culverts were uncovered, their hidden flow stopped up by the newly buried tanks. Basements along the river started to flood. In the garden, I dug up smooth stones from when the ground beneath the house was a stream bed.
I sat watching the river, in the room upstairs that had been locked up for nearly a century, full of old books and antiques, while the owner rented out the house, decade after decade. One of the renters who had lived here for decades would hear a child’s laughter on the stairs.
One evening at the end of September, I looked at the name on the cover. Somehow I had never really put it together. Iva Romkey. The woman whose name was on my purchase and sale agreement. The woman who had owned the house. The book had been in this room for a hundred years, had been sold off with the other books and antiques before the house had ever been sold, and had now made its way somehow back to the exact room where it had lived all its life. Iva. I had bought not only her old book of ghost stories, but her haunted house, too.
