I don’t remember much in particular about my childhood from ages seven to twelve. In the wake of my parents’ divorce, my household was so chaotic that most memories — even some of the good ones — just blur into a mass of fuzzy and distorted recollections that are hard to place on a linear timeline. The moments I do recall in striking detail seem almost arbitrary in comparison to what I should remember, but sometimes they populate my mind so viscerally, it’s hard to ignore them.
I’m not sure what made her think I was mature enough to watch Poltergeist at only nine-years-old, but I don’t think my mom was ever very concerned about the ways that story might impact my young psyche.
She and my father grew up Catholic in Italian-American households, so technically, ghosts were just a part of interacting with the world around us. If we lost something, a quick prayer to St. Anthony might make him swoop down from his heavenly throne to find it for us. If we were in a dangerous situation, it was possible that St. Christopher might hold us in the blazing glow of his light until we were safe again. Jesus was everywhere, peering over us as we sinned and found ways to do penance for those sins. Moths and certain birds were the spirits of our ancestors visiting to remind us they’re always there when we need them. Like Jesus, the evil eye was everywhere, too, and when we feared it was looking in our direction, we could “tocca ferro,” touch iron, to change its direction. Or you could wear the cornicello — the 24-karat gold “Italian horn” charm that mostly only the men in my family received as gifts to wear every day for the rest of their lives. The past wasn’t a metaphorical specter, but a real one, and nothing could stop it from showing up wherever we went.
The night we watched Poltergeist for the first time together was fairly normal in every other aspect from what I remember. Her, me, and my younger brother ate a semi-homemade meal together, and then my brother went to his room to do god knows what while my mom and I parked ourselves on the old, cream-colored couch I hated in front of the TV. She flipped through the channels for a minute before checking the TV Guide channel to see what the offerings were that night. I wasn’t really paying close attention, but when she noticed the movie was about to start, she said, “Oh, this is such a good one” before flipping to the station where it was playing.
I had no idea what a poltergeist was. When I expressed confusion, she used Beetlejuice — a movie I loved so dearly from the time I was a toddler that I ran the magnetic tape of our original VHS copy basically to dust — to explain: poltergeists are ghosts that can actually move physical objects around like the Maitlands and Beetlejuice can in their movie.
“The ghosts in Poltergeist do the same thing, but they’re a little meaner,” she said.
“A little meaner?” I replied
“Yeah, they’re not very funny.”
By the time she said this, Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) was already kneeling in front of the electronic static playing on the TV set in the Freeling family’s living room yelling “Talk louder! I can’t hear you!” straight into it while her father, Steve (Craig T. Nelson); her mother, Diane (JoBeth Williams); and her two older siblings, Dana (Dominique Dunne) and Robbie (Oliver Robbins) slowly woke up to come to see who the hell Carol Anne is screaming at. As Carol Anne reached out to put her hands on the TV screen, I was rapt.
Quickly, it’s established the Freelings are living the “American Dream.” They live in a nice two-story home in a planned, suburban neighborhood in the California hills filled with families just like theirs. It’s the weekend, and Steve is watching football and drinking beers with other fathers from the neighborhood, teenage Dana is eating food straight from the fridge before she heads out for the day, Robbie is attempting to overcome his fear of the ugly tree that’s outside of his bedroom window by climbing it, Carol Anne is off somewhere playing, and Diane is tidying up the younger kids’ room. It’s a normal Sunday, even as Diane notices Carol Anne’s canary has suddenly died in its cage while she’s cleaning. Nothing feels out of the ordinary; their pet’s unexpected death doesn’t even rattle them.
That night, everything changes. Carol Anne is once again roused from her sleep by the pull of the static on the TV set. She kneels in front of the TV, reaches for it with her hand, and, this time, a ghostly hand emerges to reach back before a tail of misty light launches itself out of the set and causes the entire house to shake. When her parents and Robbie wake up after the quake, Carol Anne’s tiny, high-pitched voice delivers the line Poltergeist made famous: “They’re here.” In the light of the following day, it becomes a little clearer what Carol Anne meant by that. Objects in the house start moving on their own, glasses break without any cause, and silverware bends out of nowhere. Diane realizes the house is likely haunted, but she’s having too much fun with the ghosts to predict the terror waiting for them. When the day finally ends and Carol Anne and Robbie are put to bed, the true nature of the malevolent spirit’s plan is put into motion. A thunderstorm begins and the spirit distracts Steve, Diane, and Dana by using the ugly tree to attack Robbie while it does what it wanted to all along: kidnap Carol Anne into the spirit realm through a portal in the kids’ room closet so it can have her all to itself.
Carol Anne then becomes a ghost in a way, too. With the angry phantom, she’s trapped in the spirit realm that surrounds the house. So close yet so far away, the Freelings are clueless as to how to save her. Steve begins unraveling entirely, while Robbie and Dana try to continue living as normally as possible. Diane is mostly holding it together, truly believing they’ll see Carol Anne again one day. Some days go by before they enlist the help of Dr. Lesh (Beatrice Straight) and her two research partners, Ryan (Richard Lawson) and Marty (Martin Casella). Dr. Lesh and her team determine almost immediately that the disturbance is not just one poltergeist, but multiple ghosts haunting the house. Meanwhile, Steve’s boss, Mr. Teague (James Karen), shows up to find out where Steve’s been for the last week and catch him on the real estate firm’s plans for further development of the neighborhood where the Freelings live. As they’re discussing the expansion, Steve learns that the firm moved a graveyard to make way for his neighborhood, and they’re planning to do it again, though the consequences of this don’t come back to Steve until the last 10 minutes of the movie.
After the first couple of nights at the Freeling house, Dr. Lesh finally discerns that getting Carol Anne back is outside of her capabilities, so she enlists the help of a medium, Tangina Barrons (Zelda Rubinstein). Tangina explains to the Freelings what’s happening. Ghosts become ghosts because they get stuck between our world and the next one. Because they have to exist among people who are still alive, some of them get angry and bitter about being dead, which makes them envious of people’s life forces. That’s what’s happening with Carol Anne. The malevolent spirit living in the house is jealous of her life force and wants to be as close to it as possible. And there’s only one way to save her. Tangina must tether herself to the human world, then launch herself into the portal in Carol Anne and Robbie’s room to grab Carol Anne, and come out of the other side of the portal in the ceiling of the living room. Despite the possibility that she might be trapped in the spirit realm alongside Carol Anne and scared that Carol Anne may not trust Tangina, Diane doesn’t hesitate to offer herself in Tangina’s place at the last minute.
I was too busy getting my schoolwork done to my very high standards, reading books to distract me from the reality of our new lives, and doing my best to take care of myself and my little brother when my parents failed at it. My parents never sat us down to explain they were getting a divorce until one day, my dad stopped sleeping at the house, so I was already starting to distrust everything they said to me, even when I wanted to believe they were telling the truth. Most of the time, I felt like our lives were whirling around at a speed that was way too fast for me, and I wanted so badly to get off the ride. The uncertainty of the future and my inability to predict the dramas of the next day and the day after that were much scarier to me than the prospect of our house being haunted by a ghost. I’d grown so accustomed to them being around in all of the ways our faith and our superstitions told me they were that the imagined scenario of one of them hurting me seemed impossible. Plus, in my adolescent bravado, I figured that if the house was haunted, I’d already know.
But, for whatever reason, I did occasionally fixate on Diane and Carol Anne’s relationship. My mom and I were close when I was small, and around the time we watched Poltergeist together, I was feeling a shift in our relationship that I didn’t fully understand. In my most private moments, I would think about Diane throwing herself into the closet portal, unsure if she’d ever come back. I’d wonder if my mom would ever do the same for me if I ended up like Carol Anne somehow. Would she protect me from an evil entity none of us could see? Or would she stand back as someone like Tangina did their best to convince me to travel to the other side of the portal with them? Some days, I was entirely confident that she would do what Diane did. Others, I felt much less secure about it, convincing myself that her love for me had a limit and doing something that could potentially kill her was probably where the line ended. I never asked her about it because I wasn’t brave enough to deal with the aftermath of that conversation. I thought she’d either say “Yes” in the same tone she used when she tried to cajole me into believing things were fine when they weren’t or she’d say she “Wasn’t sure,” which felt just as bad as saying “No.”
Getting caught in the new disorder of my young life, the kinds of hypotheticals that could only be dreamed up by a precocious kid who didn’t think the adults around them cared very much about them, and my age prevented me from one of the most important lessons in the film. Sometimes, you don’t know you’re living on top of a graveyard until it’s far too late.
I can see now the signs were subtle but they were there, like the unanticipated death of the family pet or the ominousness of a backyard tree the night after you watched one of your kids communing with the static of the television set.
She’d often fall asleep so hard downstairs on that ugly cream-colored couch in our living room that my brother and I couldn’t get her to wake up. We’d test to see if she was still breathing and when we determined she was, we’d amp up our efforts: bang on the wall near the couch, shake her shoulders, yell in her ear. Occasionally, she’d wake for a second only to immediately return to her sleep when she confirmed we didn’t actually have any emergencies for her to be concerned about. Others, she’d just lay there totally unfazed. We’d keep going until we got tired (or bored) and do our best to get on with the remainder of the night.
One of clearest memories I have from my sixth grade year was a day when my brother and I were left at our school’s aftercare until way after sundown. They kept trying to call my mom but they couldn’t find her at work or at home. They eventually shifted their efforts to trying to track my dad instead, but when they got a hold of him, he was about two hours away and had no way of coming to pick us up. At some point, my dad must have called my grandpa and told him what was going on because he came strutting through the door of the aftercare room in his characteristic silk shirt and unlit cigar hanging out of his mouth as if everything was totally normal. He took us back to his and my grandma’s house, where they cleaned us up and got us ready to go to bed soon and fed us the dinner they prepared for themselves. I asked if we were going to school the next day because we didn’t have any clean clothes and my grandma told me she’d have what we wore that day ready for us in the morning. My mom came to pick us up from school the next day, and we all pretended like nothing happened, like it was just a blip in the space-time continuum.
That same year was also when I learned how nerve-wracking and embarrassing it is to be late for school every single day. We’d roll in and the lady at the attendance office would make fun of us by saying we “overslept” or we “took too long” eating our breakfast. I never corrected her, though that was never the case for me. I always woke up to my alarm, and I was always finished with my breakfast before my mom and brother even made it downstairs to grab theirs. Every time I’d ask about it, my mom would say, “You know how difficult your brother is. He never wants to wake up!” and I didn’t question it because I knew he never woke up to alarms and needed someone to get him up. It would be another 20 years before I asked my brother about it. He told me it was her fault; she never woke him up when she was supposed to so he’d do the best he could to rush getting ready, but he couldn’t arrive at a speed that was quick enough to prevent our collective tardiness.
A couple of years went by before the disturbances got heavier, like a set of kitchen chairs stacked on a table by a force you couldn’t see or being the only house on the street to feel the impact of an earthquake.
I’d notice things that confused me: my grandpa showing up some weeks to fill our fridge with groceries, my mom dropping us off at my grandparents’ house for sleepovers in the middle of the week, her erratic driving on the nights when we had to stay late on the recreation center fields for our sports practices and games, the amount of cigarettes she’d go through in a day, the way she never seemed to be fully present or awake or as willing to do fun activities like we used to when my brother and I were small. She started yelling at us — mostly me — a lot more frequently than she ever did. Her rants were often incoherent and filled with expletives I had only just begun to learn the meanings of. My brother and I would run and hide in my room trying to parse out the things she was trying to say to us, often giving up entirely to play a board game or get our homework done and divert our attention from how horrible it felt to be reprimanded when we hadn’t done anything wrong. In the times when we’d take a minute to decompress from the ire of her wrath, we’d chalk it up to the fact that being a single mother was a “really hard job” and her slurred speech was probably just a symptom of being so angry and upset all the time.
I never asked her what was going on, and I never told anyone what I was seeing. For a long time, I thought it was because I was a coward, but I know it was an attempt to protect her. I couldn’t imagine a world without her in it, and I thought as long as she had my brother and me, she’d remember that we were a family, that she’d come back to us the way she used to be eventually.
High school began, and that’s when we finally got sucked into the portal waiting for us in our bedroom closet. I’m not sure if she just lost control or if she decided we were old enough to watch, but she stopped hiding her drinking and it became more severe than ever.
The house completely unraveled, and there were no specialists around to come in and clean it like Tangina attempts to in the movie. My brother and I were left to fend for ourselves every day except for the two weekends a month we got respite by being at my dad’s house. Those four years were filled with so much turmoil, emotional abuse, and domestic mayhem that just thinking about them makes me want to run and hide in my room until the sun comes up again. Even now, in this essay. I want to hide because I want to protect her. Because now I understand the psychological consequences of alcoholism. Because I know there were adults in my life and hers who saw what was happening and chose to do nothing. Because being an addict doesn’t make you a monster — it turns you into a sad and rageful poltergeist of the person you once were trying to make it to the other side of every minute, every hour, every day as you’re spinning wildly in a realm of darkness. I want to keep believing she didn’t mean to hurt me, and I want everyone else to believe it, too.
Those four years severed what was left of the tether between us. Our relationship didn’t have time to recover because she couldn’t stop drinking and no one could make her. We weren’t ever entirely estranged from one another, but we weren’t exactly “family” anymore.
A week prior, my grandma found her immobile and unresponsive on her bedroom floor and called emergency services immediately. When they arrived, they determined she’d had a heart attack, but because she was still breathing, they assumed she just needed to be treated and would wake up at some point. It would be a few hours before they determined she had a massive stroke as they were working on getting her well enough to wake up in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
At the hospital that morning, my brother and I were angry, upset, and confused. The majority of the rest of my family there — my grandma, my mom’s middle sister, and my brother’s girlfriend — were just crying on and off in ways that made us incredibly uncomfortable. We were more optimistic than them, I think, or maybe we just weren’t ready to accept this could be the end. He and I passed jokes instead: “When she gets out of here, I’m going to kick her ass for this,” “If she ever lets this happen again, she’s going to have to answer to us,” “When she gets out of here, maybe we should finally tell her it was us and not the cat who broke that vase she loved.” My aunt eventually got sick of our absurd coping mechanism and asked us to stop, but my brother just shot back, “Well, you know, our mom might be dying, so maybe give us a break.”
All of us, including my mom’s youngest sister and my cousins, spent the majority of the next few days and nights at the hospital. In the moments where I felt comfortable enough to be on my phone and not talk to anyone, I typed things like “stroke risk alcoholics early 60s” into Google. The same results would turn up over and over again: people who drink heavily throughout middle age are among some of the people at the highest risk for stroke in their 60s. I would read these words over and over again thinking about how often the people around her failed her, how my family had the chance to do something when I was still a teenager, how she failed herself, how I was never powerful enough to convince her to do something on my own. I didn’t tell my family about the Google search results because I could already see how they were refusing to make the connection between how she lived and how she was dying. Reality just hung around every conversation we had like a specter only I could see.
Even though it was obvious from the way she was deteriorating, it took the doctors nearly a week to say definitively what was happening to my mom’s body and give us a prognosis. Through the doctor speak and my family’s emotions, my grandma and my mom’s middle sister had trouble comprehending what the hell he was talking about, and I had to break it down for them multiple times before they understood. She had an undiagnosed blood clot in her leg that threw to her heart, which caused the initial cardiac arrest. The emergency team who came to get her didn’t have my mom’s full medical history so couldn’t anticipate that she had a blood clot or a heart murmur. As they were working on her, the murmur essentially helped the clot throw to her brain where it caused a massive stroke. The stroke wasn’t big enough to kill her instantly, instead it wrought havoc on her central nervous system, filled her brain with fluid, and destroyed every ounce of her that was left in there. They could keep her on life support, if we wanted, but it wouldn’t change the fact that she was, essentially, already dead. “Look,” the doctor said, “you can see the way her forehead and eye sockets are protruding here. That’s from the swelling and the fluid. I’m sorry, I know this is an impossible thing to hear, but there is nothing we can do to fix the damage that’s already been done.”
We spent the next eight hours arguing about what to do because my mom didn’t have any medical records indicating what she would want in the event of something like this happening. Some people in my family couldn’t accept the doctor’s words. They’d say things like, “People have woken up from this kind of thing,” and my brother, my mom’s youngest sister, and I would ask for proof of someone in my mom’s current condition doing that. They’d say, “Well, what if the doctor is wrong?” and I’d point to my mom’s changing facial structure as a result of her now oversized brain and ask if they really believed that was a possibility. I’d remind them over and over again of this memory I had that was just as clear as the memory I had of the night we watched Poltergeist together: We were watching the news while coverage of the Terry Schiavo case was on and my mom looked at me and said “If that ever happens to me, you can’t let me live like a ‘vegetable.’” My brother would chime in from time to time and say, “I know she wouldn’t want this but I understand it’s hard to let go.” I felt more indignant about it. I didn’t think she needed to continue suffering even as she was dying just because everyone was distraught. I didn’t and don’t know what’s waiting for us on the other side, but I wanted to give her the opportunity to make it over if I could. If it was there, I didn’t want her to miss out on walking into the light.
After everyone calmed down, the doctor explained the procedure for “releasing” someone from life support. He explained all the papers my brother and I had to sign, how much time it would take to put the order into action, and that there would be a legal surrogate there when we did it to ensure the hospital had done everything correctly. He also explained that, legally, one or more of us would need to be in the room to witness the “release” in the event that something didn’t go as planned. As if in unison, a chorus of “I can’t do it” came rushing at me before the doctor even fully finished his sentence. I looked at my brother and started opening my mouth to speak but he beat me to it before I could ask him: “Stef, I don’t think I can either.” I looked at the doctor and said, “It looks like it’ll just be me.”
They scheduled the “release” for the following night at 8 p.m., but they didn’t really get to it until after 9. I sat in a chair across the room as the legal surrogate detailed what I was going to see and how it was going to be hard but I wasn’t allowed to look away. But I was barely paying attention. Somehow, the memories of the previous 34 years of knowing my mom came hurtling towards me at a pace I couldn’t slow down. Then, when they finally did, all I could think about was everything we never got to speak about together, all the questions I never asked, all the complaints about my life I kept to myself, all the moments we half-heartedly attempted to reconnect as parent and child, all the things I was too afraid to say or admit or tell her I saw, all the times I wanted to call her just to tell her I love her but didn’t because I was too mad to let my guard down, how I never got to say I forgive her while I still had the chance. I watched them “release” her but I can barely remember what it looked like because I was trying so hard to reconstruct the way she looked when she was singing along to her favorite songs, reading to me from the kids’ literary treasuries she’d buy me when I was really young, and talking about how much she loved painting and her favorite movies.
After 25 years, our roles reversed in a way my nine-year-old brain couldn’t have predicted. I didn’t need her to come save me from the portal because I wasn’t caught in there, she was. I was the only one who could and would go in to help get her to the other side. I don’t know where the courage came from in that moment, but I’m certain I learned it from her in the years before we were haunted.
Right before she flatlined, my brother finally found the strength to come in and sit next to me. We kind of stared at her dead body in silence before he broke it in the best way possible, “I never got to tell her that I always hated when she made ‘chicken surprise.’” A laugh burst out of me for the first time in days and I said, “God, it was awful, wasn’t it? We should just tell her now, I’m sure her ghost is listening.” Without flinching, he said, “Mom, we love you but we never liked your ‘chicken surprise.’”
HORROR IS SO GAY is Autostraddle’s annual celebration of queer horror.
Haunting. Thank you.
Beautifully poignant. You’ve captured so many things but particularly the grief around what ifs, how a life that unfolded in disarray could have been different. This must have been a hard essay to write.
this is genuinely so incredibly moving – thank you for sharing this, what a special piece of work
This is amazing, Stef.
Chilling but comforting all at the same time. So well written, please don’t stop sharing your stories 🖤
Your courage comes through so strongly in this. Thank you for writing this.