The Haunting of Hill House

 My latest Netflix binge here has been The Haunting of Hill House. Unfortunately, I don't remember the Shirley Jackson classic on which the series is based, but I suspect that the two have in common a house and the presence of ghosts in the house, and not much more than that. Nonetheless, the series struck me as inventive and sufficiently creepy, doing well with the creation of real characters and relationships. It held my attention unfailingly, and it often got me to thinking, ruminating on related ideas, and actually seemed the cause of a couple of fairly vivid nightmares. 

You know, we have long loved to imagine special powers that special people might possess. The power to divine a supernatural presence, or even to see that presence, the power to determine a character of evil through the mere handling of an object, an ability to see the past as it occurs, to see the dead, to see the future, and so on. 

In fact, this "power" does exist, but it is the exact opposite of what we would like it to be. It is not the power to discern what most people cannot see or feel. It is the power to discern things that actually do not exist. The paranoid schizophrenic sees an invisible world and fully believes in that world. The deranged person inhabits a magical world, seeing, touching, interacting in the realm only of his own disturbance. 

I knew a boy who saw faces in the wallpaper, faces in the wood of the cupboard doors, and so he tore down that wall paper, he tore out those cupboards. I knew a boy who covered his windows with aluminum foil because a cat that turned to a witch at night would peer in through those windows. 

In the last stage of Alzheimer's, my mother saw people behind a screen in her bedroom. I don't like those people. Of course, there were no people. There was not even a screen. She saw a tall dark man with a hat and this one scared her most of all. 

Last night I saw upon the stair a little man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. Oh how I wish he'd go away. 

Maybe she was just remembering an old bit from Glenn Miller, and only got the height wrong.

Sure, there's a hidden world. It's just not one that is seen by people with a special gift. It is the obscure world seen by people who are suffering a debilitating illness.