The House
As I drove my mom to work on a Friday afternoon we went past this house. We discussed how it fit so perfectly with all the things I have been learning in my Haunted Landscapes course. On my way home I stopped to take a few photos. My dad works at the elementary school in Port Burwell and he told vague stories of past families who had lived there while the house was already in a tragic state of decay.
I sent some of my friends the photos when I got home, two of them expressed a desire to go and see it for themselves. So, as Reading Week had just approached, that Monday morning I went and picked up H and M and we drove out to Port Burwell. When we got there, we discussed our intentions of the trip. We sat and debated for a while as to whether or not we would dare to venture in. We reviewed our values, our images in our community, and our desires. After a bit of a delay, we got out of the van, walked up to the front of the house, snapped a few pictures, and then took off to the back of the house. To our surprise, there was no back door; instead, just an empty doorframe. I was the first to enter in, going slowly, watching my step and freely taking photos as M and H closely followed behind. We only stayed in for a few seconds, long enough to peer around the corner and see some of the possessions that had been left behind by the numerous home owners that came and went.
![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/827e17_10c2880677754f17a5100983ccdb09dd~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_450,h_600,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/827e17_10c2880677754f17a5100983ccdb09dd~mv2.png)
As we returned to the van and settled ourselves down, all three of us couldn’t stop thinking about the highchair. Knowing some of the history of past families who had lived in the house, the objects we had seen, especially the highchair had a grave heaviness to them. Object correlative refers to objects in an environment that convey meaning or symbolism that can solicit emotion (Douglas, 2021). That is what the highchair did for the three of us. We felt compassion for the families who had to live in such conditions. That highchair haunts the past of those families while serving as a great prop for aesthetic exploration and documentation (Schrock & Sittler, 2015).
UrbEx