Because I’m between major writing projects (transcription isn’t a major project), I was finally able to start THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE on Netflix. No spoilers, please, but I think it’s amazing. Episodic horror doesn’t always deliver – I think it’s a pacing thing, and in the case of what I’ve seen on AHS and other Ryan Murphy shows, a matter of being too clever to be scary.

Anyway, it seems like a good time to share my haunted house song I wrote last month, which totally has a Shirley Jackson vibe to it.

HOUSE OF WINDOWS

It’s a whole wide world out there
A fine, varied, full-bodied thoroughfare
Hundreds of thousands breathe the same air
Footsteps thunder over same streets, same stairs.

The house is gated, silent, and still
Its statues, a marble gleam atop the shadowed hill
They peer from stone eyes, listen with stone ears
Let all with eyes see, let all with ears hear.

Chorus:
The house has many windows
Curtains trembling with ghosts
Moths have made away with all the clothes
The dead inside don’t sleep but doze
It’s a house with many windows
But the windows are closed.

Statues at the gate, statues in the rooms
Inhale stale air, filter in the gloom
Every creaking floorboard, memory of previous doom
A house of many windows, a house of many tombs.

Visitors come to view the walls in awe
Priceless paintings behind drapes only the dead get to draw
Guests all leave unsure how to say what they saw
Any moment a knock on the door, any moment a monkey’s paw.

Chorus

In the deep dark garden, the roses have died
Whatever the tenants tell you, the dead likely lie
From skylights come the gray of stormier skies
A house of many windows, a house of many eyes.

Let all who wish to join us enter in
Remember all your failures, remember all your sins
Death chills the halls, creeps under your skin
The house offers rest, yet restlessness within.

Bridge:
Is life just waiting for death? Is that how it goes?
Am I a house, or am I already a ghost?

Chorus