From my perch on the shelf, a lovely dollhouse obscures the view through the window beyond. If it weren’t for it, perhaps I’d glimpse trees, a park, or distant mountains. Instead, my gaze settles on this well-crafted miniature abode—a house within a house. Its white façade, adorned with pink lacy trim and leaded stained-glass windows, evokes Victorian charm, suggesting a construction style from the 1890s. A double-decker wrap-around porch graces the front. It bears a resemblance to the house where I spent part of my childhood in Georgetown, Colorado.
Prone to flights of fancy, I imagine myself sitting on a shelf inside of the dollhouse and on that shelf there’s another even smaller house and then in that other house there’s another house. Yes, I’m sitting on a shelf in a house within a house, and there’s a story within the story in that house. Within every story lies another story—every object embodies a tale within a tale ad infinitum.
Who built the dollhouse? When? How did this miniature house end up here in this storage space with me? Did children once play in its rooms and halls? Is anybody home now? Is it a home? I have so many questions, all of which will linger without answer.
The Georgetown house, built in the 1860s—earlier than the dollhouse in my sight—still stands. A house of mystery, like the dollhouse. Strange things happened in that place. It too was white with pink trim, but unlike some of the houses that people built a few decades later, it had simpler lines—no fancy lace. It was a small two bedroom, two story frame house with a single bathroom. My mother and I slept upstairs, and Peter slept downstairs in a room off of the dining room.
Winter rendered the house unbearably cold. Save for a giant coal-fed iron stove that sat to the back of the updated kitchen, and a coal fireplace in the front room, the house didn’t in my memory have any source of central heating. During the coldest months, we all clustered in the front room watching television on our first color television, or doing homework. At bedtime we reticently retreated to our bedrooms burying ourselves in heavy covers—our breath visible in the frigid indoor air.
On one cold winter night, I ascended the narrow, steep stairs to my bedroom. The room looked out onto the back of the property—toward the shed, which still held an intact narrow gauge ore bucket, a mining car that ran underground on a track for surfacing ore. The remnants of Georgetown’s heyday as “the Silver Queen of the Rockies,” lay casually scattered in backyards or hung on steep mountain slopes in the form of mine tailings, vestigial scars from the vast system of mines.
In my room two tall windows faced the back of the property. The glass panes had been poured, and as such contained waves and bubbles, warping the view. The roof of a lean-to joined the house just below the window openings, which delighted me. I first read about lean-tos in one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books. Sometimes I climbed out one of the windows to sunbathe on the gently sloping roof. On more than one occasion, I snuck out through the window and climbed down to a retaining wall to attend a forbidden party with high school students at the other end of town. But on this night, I donned my flannel nightgown, patterned with hearts, and slipped into bed as usual.
That’s when I first heard him. Heavy boots creaked across the wide pine floor toward the window, which he opened just a crack, letting in a shiver-inducing chill. A chair scraped as he pulled it out, then silence, save for the sound of breathing. Terrified, I hid beneath the covers, unsure if he saw me, or of what he might do if he did. After a few minutes, he’d push the chair back, close the window, and depart. It was if I were not there at all. Was he a miner, perhaps one of the many who perished in the town’s extensive underground tunnels? Did he die in this very house?
I confided in no one about the spectral visits, fearing disbelief or ridicule. I lived comfortably with the ghost, for if I existed for him, I was a ghost too.
Decades later, a friend who stayed in that room remarked, “You know your room had a ghost, right?”
I laughed, perhaps too loudly.
“No, seriously,” she insisted. “A man in heavy boots would walk across the room and open the window.”
“I remember him well,” I replied, “but thought he was a figment of my imagination.”
Years later, during a family gathering, my sister Liz mentioned, “I always felt your Georgetown room was haunted.”
“You’re the second person to say that,” I responded. “It’s comforting to know I wasn’t alone in that experience. For years, I thought I might be crazy.”
The mines around Georgetown posed a clear and present danger in my childhood. Occasionally, one would read stories of unsuspecting hikers falling into hidden mine shafts, never to be seen again. We were instructed not to enter any of the many openings to mines. Our mother didn’t know that Peter, I, and our friends enjoyed excursions in to some of the mine openings that were nearby our house. We survived, fortunately.
Surely, the inhabitants of the dollhouse must have experienced danger too, albeit different than the ones we or the miners faced, like falling off the cliff-edge of a table, or getting stepped on. But, I digress. There is another mysterious thing I remember about our Georgetown house.
One time during summer, my brother, Peter, and I were playing Frisbee in the front yard. I stumbled on uneven ground and fell as I dropped back to catch a high flyer.
“Ouch!” Pain shot through my ankle.
“You okay?” Peter asked.
“Think so—twisted my ankle somehow.” I rubbed the sore spot and wiggled my foot around. “It’s not bad.” I sprang to my feet. “Wonder how I did that?”
“Maybe stepped in that hole?” Pete said, pointing to a an indentation in the grass.
Sure enough, there was a hole. “Maybe a gopher made it, or some other critter,” I speculated.
“Maybe. I wonder how deep it is?” Of the two of us, Peter was the scientist. He grabbed a long stick that had fallen from the only tree in the yard, and poked in down into the hole. His arm disappeared up to his shoulder.
“That’s a very deep hole,” I said. “Kind of creepy, don’t cha think?”
“Yeah—“ Peter had his problem solving face on. “Hmmm . . . Let’s use the hose to see how deep it is.”
I fetched the hose, and we fed its entire length—at least forty feet—into the hole without resistance.
“Maybe we should turn the water on and listen for splashing,” I suggested.
Peter agreed.
I turned the spigot, but he heard nothing.
“Let’s drop some rocks in and listen,” he proposed.
We gathered stones and took turns dropping them into the hole, ears pressed to the ground. No sound emerged; the stones seemed to vanish into an abyss.
Later, I learned that Georgetown sits atop a labyrinth of mines, some extending over two miles deep. It’s a wonder that the town hasn’t been swallowed up by the earth.
Many men met their end in those depths. Perhaps my ghost was among them, his spirit wandering through the dark abyss in search of a place to land, much like the stones we dropped that day.
My thoughts return to the dollhouse and the stories it might tell about the life it has lived, it’s inhabitants, the ghosts within, the dark places below. What specters linger within its miniature rooms? I can only imagine.
Great story, Anne! I like the way you are “mining” your past! And I do remember those Georgetown “doll houses” from the one time I visited. Here in Ecuador there is a gold mining town, Zaruma, built on the side of a mountain, so riddled with mine tunnels that they have closed down areas where buildings were collapsing. We visited several years ago…