I grew up in a haunted house. Well, not the whole house, it’s really just the kitchen. At night you can hear the ghosts opening and closing cabinets, walking around, talking to each other. But, when you go to look everything sits untouched just as it was during the day.

The house is over 100 years old: built in 1913 as a chicken farm, parts of the house remain the same as they were all those years ago. In the kitchen, one of these remaining features still sits: a trap door. When lifted up, you are faced with a set of old cement stairs leading down into the musky darkness. I have never been down those stairs out of fear but apparently they lead to a small cold room that was used as a sort of food storage place for the original residents. I believe this is where the ghosts come from.

During the day they feast on the ghosts of the food that was once down there: jars of preserves, cured meats, potatoes, wheals of cheese. Once the stores have been depleted, they silently float up the stairs, through the trap door and into our kitchen, looking for more treats. They open our cabinets looking for anything to eat, pacing around checking every corner rifling through cans of soup and bags of chips. They rarely find what they are looking for though, because everything says just as it was.

While they are not friendly, their presence is not scary or menacing either. They are simply hungry, moving through the night looking for something to fill their ever-empty bellies.