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" (Optional soundtrack to this blog post...)      Sometimes I catch glimpses of old Victorian gentlemen out of the corners of my eyes, severe with their sideburns and tails. Once or twice, I&amp;#039;ve put down the hammer because I&amp;#039;ve thought I heard a baby crying. But if our house is haunted \u2014 a question we&amp;#039;ve been asked a thousand times \u2014 I think it will be the maid&amp;#039;s footsteps we&amp;#039;ll hear in the night. I have no idea how old she was when she lived under our roof, but I imagine her as a young girl, locked in her room above the brick-walled kitchen. Maybe she was fresh off the boat, having survived the journey from Scotland or Ireland; maybe she had come into Port Hope from one of the surrounding farms. Either way, her life was not an easy one. She suffered in our house. Everything about her room reminded her that she wasn&amp;#039;t what she dreamed she might be. The floorboards were shorter and coarser than they were in the rest of the house. The trim was thinner and plain. There was no insulation and no source of heat. She couldn&amp;#039;t see out her windows, which were pushed toward the plaster ceiling. She was confined to the narrow backstairs, was never allowed to run her hand down the grand railing that swept toward the towering front door. Her place was in the back of the house. To decorate, she cut illustrations out of newspapers and early magazines and pasted them to her walls with flour and water. There was no pattern to them. She cut out portraits of aldermen and a little girl holding a dog; a doll&amp;#039;s face; political cartoons and an advertisement for a bank; an account of a shooting contest; a watercolor of horses standing in a field; an illustration of three little girls on a beach, and another of a girl and a bird. In 1880, she carefully snipped out each fragile piece of paper and stuck them to her walls. And only the other day, Lee and I cut them out and pulled them down. We didn&amp;#039;t like doing it. But because her room has essentially been untouched all these years, exposed to the elements and trickled through with rain, it has suffered nearly as much as she did. The plaster has gone moldy and cracked, and the wind whips through the walls. We want her room to become part of our house. We want to run ducts to it, and electricity, and to refinish the floor and fill the walls with warmth. But before we can do any of that, we had to take down her pictures. We had to remove the one comfort she&amp;#039;d been given, that drawing of three little girls on a beach. We were careful about it. We tried to save all of them. Some of them disintegrated. Some of them were too stained for us to see. But the rest of them, we peeled off and kept, a growing pile of onionskin on the floor. It wasn&amp;#039;t just her history we were taking down; there were the artists, too, and their subjects. It was an army of ghosts we were disturbing. For 130 years, they had stared out from those walls the way she had stared at them. That room in the back of the house might have represented their last stand. If she decides to haunt us \u2014 if any of them do \u2014 I hope she understands why we did what we did. I hope she understands we were just hoping to bring her in from the cold. READ MORE OF MY SECOND EMPIRE BY CHRIS JONES &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; PLUS: Follow My Second Empire on Twitter and Your RSS Feed &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a8930/ghosts-in-your-house-111510/?src=rss>