‘Space Stares All Around’: Peattie’s ‘The House That Was Not’ and the (Un)Haunted Landscape

Abstract

Elia W. Peattie’s story ‘The House That Was Not’ (1898) opens as Flora, the newly married protagonist, joins her settler husband, Burt, on his ranch on the Western plains. Looking around at the landscape, she feels ‘as if a new world had been made for her’, but her tranquility is broken when she notices a little house off to the west that Burt has never mentioned. Wondering why he has omitted it from conversation, worrying that he seems not to wish her to meet their only neighbors, she quizzes him repeatedly, until, reluctantly, he gives in, telling her in no uncertain terms that ‘“There ain’t no house there”’, that he himself had gone to investigate it and found nothing. He recounts how, confounded, he asked a neighbor for information, and is told that ‘[..] a man an’ his wife come out here t’ live an’ put up that there little place. An’ she was young, you know, an’ kind o’ skeery, and she got lonesome. It worked on her an’ worked on her, an’ one day she up an’ killed the baby an’ her husband an’ herself. Th’ folks found ‘em and buried ‘em right there on their own ground. Well, about two weeks after that, th’ house was burned down. Don’t know how. Tramps, maybe. Anyhow, it burned. At least, I guess it burned!’‘You guess it burned!’‘Well, it ain’t there, you know.’‘But if it burned the ashes are there.’‘All right, girlie, they’re there then. Now let’s have tea.’1