Joseph and I Hook Up in a Haunted House

Terre Haute, Indiana

One day the July after my first year in grad school at Indiana University, my friend Joseph called: "You up for a road trip this Saturday?"

"Where to?"  I asked, hoping he wanted to go to one of the gay bars in Indianapolis. 

"I gotta go to Terre Haute to pick up some stuff, then drop it off at my parents' house in Broad Ripple [a suburb of Indianapolis]."

"How much stuff?" I asked suspiciously.  I didn't want to be conned into helping him move.

"Not a lot, just a few keepsakes.  My parents are selling my great-aunt Rose's house, and they want me to go get what I want before everything gets packed up and sold."

"Are other guys coming, too?"

"There aren't a lot of guys around Bloomington during the summer, so it will be just you and me."  He paused.  It's a pretty long trip, so we'll probably have to spend the night in Broad Ripple before heading back."

Spend the night!  I know what that meant!

 Joseph was  one of the first gay guys I met in Bloomington: an undergraduate history major, with black curly hair, a baby face, and a lean tan physique.  And short -- Definitely my type!  But he was also very popular, dating Rick the philosophy major, then Mark the optometrist, then a medical student named Manfred (really!), so I never managed to squeeze in.

Obviously I wasn't his first choice, but who cared?  This was my chance to get intimate!

Saturday after lunch we set out for Terre Haute, about 1 1/2 hours away.  Joseph said that he grew up in Broad Ripple, but they drove out to visit his mother's aunt Rose almost every weekend.  He had fond memories of fishing in the Wabash River, drive-in movies, dinner at the Pizza King, and drinking hot chocolate at Christmastime

"Aunt Rose is in a nursing home with dementia," he told me. "She fades in and out.  Some days she's almost normal, and others she thinks it's 1961, and I'm her brother Oscar.  But she can still name all of the U.S. presidents, in order, up to Richard Nixon."

"Did she know about you [being gay] before her dementia?"

"No.  I'm not out anyone in my family, and I sure wasn't going to come out to a hard-core Methodist lady.   She was always worried that I wasn't dating enough.  One of the last things she said to me before her dementia began was 'You shouldn't be so picky, or you'll never find a girl."

Aunt Rose used to be a professor of American history at Indiana State University.  She lived in a big, two-story house in West Terre Haute, just across the Wabash.  It was painted a depressing shade of grey, but it had a wide porch and a big, carefully mown front lawn.

As we walked up to the house, I saw what looked like a face in the attic window.

 "Who's that?"  I asked. 

"Who's who?"

But it was gone.

I didn't want to turn him off by being leery of an old house, so I said "Does anyone else live here?"

He shrugged.  "No, but about a dozen members of the family have keys.  We drop by to do housework, pay Aunt Rose's bills, and such.  Why?"

"Oh, um...it's just well kept up." 

The living room was mostly packed up and ready to go, all of the pictures taken from the walls and the furniture all carefully marked with the name of whoever had claimed it.  Joseph took a candy dish and a ceramic figure of a dog.

The kitchen was cluttered with pots, pans, dishes, and various obscure implements in piles on the counters and tabletops.  Joseph took a fondue set, a long-ago Christmas present that had never been used, and the cup his Aunt Rose used to serve his juice in.

It was very warm.  He turned on the air conditioner, but we still had to take our shirts off.

Next came the study, heavy laden with books from a career as a college professor: a three-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Bruce Caxton's Civil War trilogy, plus mystery novels, literature, folklore, music, and about a hundred books on gardening.  Joseph and I filled five boxes with books to argue over later.

He left Aunt Rose's bedroom alone.

Upstairs was a storage room that was pack rat heaven.  50 years of Christmas and birthday cards. Stacks of report cards and school papers. Old magazines, carefully bundled.   Old wrapping paper.  Slide carousels.  Souvenirs of long-ago trips.  Joseph took a nativity set, some Christmas tree ornaments, and a painting of the house.

He left the first bedroom alone and zeroed in on the second, where he stayed whenever he slept over.  There were two twin beds with flowered comforters, a night stand between them, an old-fashioned dresser, and a little card table with framed pictures of Aunt Rose's family.

"Help me get this comforter.  And I think I want the lamp, too.  I used to fall asleep with the light on, and Aunt Rose would come in and turn it off.  Sometimes I just pretended to be asleep, so I would know when she came in..."  he stopped short.  He was trembling.

"Are you ok?"

"She joked that I liked this room so much, I should spend my honeymoon here.  I just... wish Aunt Rose could know about who I really am.  I'm sure she'd be ok with it...I'm so much happier now then when I was trying to be straight, with all the friends I've made...and .."  He started to cry.  I rushed to put my arms around him.  Then somehow we were kissing.

More after the break. Caution: Explicit

Joseph pushed me down onto the bed, and we kissed and groped for a long time.  Then he unzipped me and moved down beneath the belt.  A few moments later, I saw a shadow.

There was a woman standing next to the bed!

Not a ghost, completely corporeal. Elderly, white haired, wearing a fluffy terrycloth bathrobe.  I couldn't make out a face.  She was standing parallel to us, facing the night stand.  As if she was about to turn out the light.

I yelled.  She vanished.

Joseph jerked his head away.  "What's wrong?  Did I bite you?"

"Is anybody else in the house?" I asked, panting.

"Why?"

"I think I just saw your Aunt Rose!"

"You're spooked."  Joseph lay his head on my chest.  "This house isn't haunted, and besides, Aunt Rose isn't dead.  We can go visit her tomorrow, if you want."

"Let's just...let's just finish up and get out of here.  I don't want to be here after dark!"

We grabbed the comforter and the lamp, locked up the house, and drove up to Broad Ripple for dinner with Joseph's parents.  He wasn't out to them, but they still put us up for the night in his old room, where we finished what we had started earlier.

In the morning we had breakfast, sorted through some books to take back to Bloomington, and then, as promised, dropped by the nursing home to visit Aunt Rose.

She was a frail, elderly woman sitting by herself in the tv lounge.

Joseph said "Hi, Aunt Rose" and hugged her.

She looked at him blankly, without recognition.

"This is my friend, from school."

Suddenly she perked up.  "Nice to finally meet you in person!"

"But this is the first...."  I began, but Joseph nudged me.

"Are you treating our Joseph right?  Oh, of course you are!  Forgive my big mouth!  We were just so worried about him.  It seemed like he would never find a fellow...."

Joseph blushed.  "Aunt Rose, Boomer is my school friend.  We're not...together."

She ignored him, asked about my classes, and...called me by name!

Then she was gone again: she had to get ready for her class, but she couldn't find her notes, and where were her new teaching assistants?

Back in Bloomington, Joseph had a new boyfriend within a week.  We never hooked up again.  But at least I got a box of books from Aunt Rose.

How did she know me?

Joseph reasoned that someone in the family must have known he was gay, and outed him to Aunt Rose during one of her lucid moments, and she just assumed that we were together.

But how did she know my name?

 Joseh said my name several times while were were being intimate the day before.  She must have heard it when she came into the bedroom to turn off the light. 

See also: Bloomington: My first visit to an adult store

Is There Sex After Death: A Gideon and Scotty story