Safe as Houses
or, How to Survive as a Final Girl
SAM MOE
There is an invisible man in your apartment. He looms in doorways. Catch him from the corner of your eye; the curve of his shoulder is the edge of a fridge. His hands, your mouth. Imprint on the bed; hollow space of your throat. Near three in the morning, one of the monitors in the bedroom turns on. It glows grey like the television in Poltergeist. Are you curious, Carol Anne Freeling? No. You are the daughter of a woman who once loved magic and ghosts but has since banished those stories from her life. You are part of a pair of brujas, though separated now from your sister, but it wasn’t always like that. Sometimes you feel like the Crain siblings. Including your cousins, you could be Steven. Your sister is Theo, always keeping the family on track. Hiding her own powers. Your cousins, who hate your family, are Nell and Luke. Your half-sister is Shirley. Together you form grief. But this particular version of the story isn’t about the rest of your family. Today, we are talking about monsters. Houses building monsters. And maybe even a story about all that grief.
We start on the route to therapy. Even though you leave early enough, you still arrive late. After parking your car at an angle, miss getting hit by a minivan, you clutch your computer bag to your chest and run towards the large metal staircase. Like The Haunting, this metal staircase feels dangerous. Thankfully there isn’t a life-sized titan statue nearby, waiting to drown you in a vat of blood. You are safe. Remember to breathe.
Even though there are two conjoined staircases, and her office is located on the second floor, your heart has turned into a prey animal. Candy-apple red rabbit. A maroon fox. Overflowing with the desire to leap through the window. The urge comes later. On the couch, having a mundane conversation with your partner. You misunderstand him. Is he annoyed? You should [redacted]. In your office at school, after misunderstanding your friend’s tone. You make a list of all the reasons you could [redacted]. There are fifty-four items. Save this list and bring it to your other therapist’s office. She’ll know what to do.
Your first therapist is steady. She draws charts of your brain. How you pull ancient fears towards the surface of your mind, like roots from the earth. Can she hear your teeth? Does she notice your shallow breathing? Let’s take deep breaths. Close your eyes. Don’t imagine monsters stalking about the room. Open your eyes. Here sits your therapist, kind face cracking open like a fallen egg.
What’s coming up for you? she asks.
It takes almost an hour to sift through this corner of the past.
Final girls must know when to look over their shoulders. They can sense before they step. They catch a micro-expression the second it flickers across an otherwise placid face. They know of abrasions. Open verses, closed palms. How to kick your way out of a hole. Don’t touch the blanket, which is bunched like a person. Don’t scream when a ghost girl plays with your hair.
Nell, in the 1999 movie The Haunting, is drawn to an ancient house by the promise of an insomnia study. She is the first to develop an awareness of a ghostly presence. You, however, process danger and memories at an uneven pace. Notice Nell and Luke from Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House. Will almost everyone in this room die before the end of the movie? Yes. Do you remember what happened when you were a child that made you so afraid of houses? Absolutely not.
The mansion contains ornate statues, gilded rooms, and decorative headboards attached to each of the beds. In the fireplace waits an ancient flue statue, carved into a scowling lion, large as a boulder. A greenhouse houses a life-sized statue of a man, gazing into a tub of water. He reminds you of Zeus.
Nell explores secret rooms, giggling at unmarked doors, beyond which lurk funhouse mirrors and rotating floors. Think Suspiria. Think torture room. Remember broken bones and ribbons. Your own broken teeth. Abuelita’s jaw, rewired. Your mother’s jaw, grown again from scratch. The right-half of your jaw, arm, leg, body. Remember the medium you met on the corner of Seventy-second and Amsterdam? She read your pam and asked what happened to the right side of your body.
In the mansion, each room is high ceilings, dim lighting, reminding you of your favorite location in dreams, EMDR sessions, and life: the Museum of Natural History in New York City. Sometimes in EMDR sessions, you place yourself in movies and exhibits, attempting to “play out” trauma on a different stage. Other times, you are in your childhood home, where you are human, but your family have all turned into monsters from movies. The Babadook; The Grudge; The Ring; Together. Your mother’s hair is too long, choking you. She has claws for hands and fangs for teeth.
You have two therapists. One for EMDR and one for talk therapy. They take up hours of your life on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Soon, Fridays will be consumed with pelvic floor therapy. You will continue to work on healing your body. One day, you might be able to access pleasure without intrusive thoughts of them. Though they are not center stage in this story, the men still exist. They float. Their bodies are translucent green and blue and pink, their eyes are hollow disks, their hearts contain pearls, rubies, sapphires, loose hundreds, gold coins. Vacuum them up but they froth in the shower. Looming in the stained bathroom mirror. Waiting between the thin strip of couch and floor. If you are not careful, they will drag you back there. To the bad place.
Picture an evening. In this evening, there is a living room with fake wood floors and two leather couches. In this evening, with this fake floor is a black-and-white longhaired cat, resting on the arm of one of the couches. Evening; living room, fake floor, leather couch, your cat is watching, your partner is on the other couch. Obscene phrases about your trauma. Night. Room. Floor. Fake. Couch. Cat. He speaks. [You have been _____ before.Why is that any different? What happened in the past isn’t happening anymore. How is this ____ different from the more recent ones? You used to be happy. You used to write about magic.] Darkness, ribbed paneling, soft seat, small black-and-white forehead, green eyes, he is wringing his hands like he just hurt you. Deer girl, you are not allowed to have opinions; has no one ever told you that? [Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should quit therapy.] He nods. [I just don’t think it’s working for you. I think it’s making you worse.] Starless sky, car headlights shining on tree-bark hues, pink nose, words fall out of your mouths like marbles. Don’t [redacted]. Even though you want to. So. Fucking. Badly.
EMDR is on Thursdays. Your therapist’s office has high windows and billowing curtains. The heat never turns off, so she has a tall oscillating fan. Enter memories, find your mother dragging her hair around the room. Glaring from the couch. Soulless eyes and hungry mouth.
Why are my family members showing up as monsters?
My other clients imagine their abusers as monsters, yes, your therapist replies.
When you were younger, did you notice the queer subplot between Nell and Theo? You’d always felt differently about men and women. Late nights spent in the basement with your best friend, the two of you teenagers, eating pink marshmallows out of a bag, the urge to reach for her hand was sometimes so powerful you forgot to breathe. You are reminded of her. Theo, combing her fingers through Nell’s hair. Nell, calling out for Theo after the house starts to come alive, sculptures of cherubs and spires on a bed moving forward, moving through blankets, moving into the bed like drills. You recall the woman you were in love with, feeding you gummy worms while chain-smoking cigarettes, her dishwater blond hair cascading down her back like a wheat field. You recall going to different parties together. The men separated you. Said you couldn’t enter unless you took off your clothes.
When you were younger, your mother used to wake you up in the middle of the night to show you horror movie classics. Girls climbing downstairs backwards, great whites, asbestos-infested hospitals and men who lost their sanity, men with claws for hands and striped sweaters. Storm drains. Butcher knives. Children seeing ghosts. You’d stumble to bed afterwards, daydreaming about sharks in the hallway, worried one was coming for you. You have new fears about wearing your family’s rosary beads, acquired in Ecuador. Bleeding statues. Don’t go in the greenhouse, it will crack upon your skull. Don’t purchase the clown doll. Don’t go in the basement.
Remind mother about these movies. Of how terrified you used to be. So terrified you’d started to have panic attacks while watching certain horror movies. During The Shining, you dissociate so badly your mother thinks you’re going to have another seizure.
I don’t remember that happening, she says. With one line, she denies your reality forever.
The Massachusetts house is forest. Down the street, conservation land stretches. Recall being with those boys, sand, all their hands. Beer bottles and confessions. You move home in your twenties, having dropped out of graduate school, and there you’ll stay until, finally, you are accepted into a doctoral program. Become sick of green. So sick, in fact, each time you return home, you recall the taste of wood and wires. We can’t talk about those stories here but just know: Lacerations. Bite marks. Plastic against flesh. Smell the television. Inhale static. Oh god, the bed has seen your blood. God. The blood.
During a particularly insidious trip home one December, you and your mother decided to visit the bookstore.
I’m sorry for what happened when you were younger, she’d said. For being a bad mother.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, you replied. Pine trees stretched high along the curve of the street, to bury you next to all the versions of yourself who didn’t make it. Your exiles in Internal Family Systems. Can you love the broken parts? As you write, your lovely students are hanging out in your office, eating candy and popcorn. You want worms? one of them says, handing out Original Gummi Factory sour worms. Are we distracting you? they ask. Absolutely not, you think. Please don’t leave the room while I’m writing about the past.
Two students are playing with a large rainbow Slinky. I have a disease called I’m-scared-all-the-time, one of them says. Laughs.
Lately, you have been crying. While once, you were prone to high emotions—young enough, and perhaps not deep enough into your own anguish and embarrassment—now, you think you know better. As in, if I’m crying around my friends, then I’m a terrible person. This evolves into numb periods. The numbness. Words grow and die on your tongue. Numb stretches for weeks. You have hours of confusion, unawareness of how you feel. Alexithymia. Suddenly, it’s twelve in the morning and your body is not thirty-five but nine. You can feel your tiny body on the soccer field, watching as a group of girls bullies you. Runs away from you. Speaks to you like your body is a commodity and your existence doesn’t matter.
Your mother tells stories about how she and your biological father fought constantly before the divorce. She asks if you remember. You only remember their fighting when you are older, and even then, just a memory’s edges. What you wonder, now, is how much information your body has stored. How much trauma can one person contain, before they begin to break into shards? But then again, you’ve already started to splinter. Three weeks prior, you relapsed. You’d gone almost three-hundred days without hurting yourself, until one evening you were triggered bad enough you needed an escape. It didn’t work, of course; it never does.
Nell is curious. In her free time, she traverses the house, inspecting papers, combs, recorders. She moves from excited to anxious. In the greenhouse, she sees a vision of Theo, hanging in a purple dress. Sometimes, you wonder what would happen if you [redacted]. You decide being alive but numb is better than the alternative. At least you can see, ever so slightly, through to the other side.
One o’clock in the morning. Your body reverts to being nine, your pajamas are now purple leggings and a turtleneck. A puffy coat, purchased by your abuela. Late night, you are nine, you are purple, sobbing at the desk. Sobbing because of constant bullying. Sobbing because you couldn’t have access to food or friendship, a safe house, a safe family. Your rescue cat senses your distress. She comes to purr on your chest, pushing her face into your hands until you are thirty-five again, now half-asleep. The dimly lit space holds ghosts.
It has been years since you’ve felt comfortable falling asleep on the couch. You are always hunted. Little red rabbit. Recall how you couldn’t rest in the Massachusetts house. You can sleep, but all four beds have seen your [redacted]. In two of the beds, you were [redacted]. The upstairs couch is lumpy and green. Late at night, you imagine someone behind you, arms ready to strangle. Once, during a fight with your mother, she put those shiny red nails around the column of your throat.
There is a scene in the 2013 Insidious, when the Woman in White appears during the daytime. An abusive parent and antagonistic ghost, the Woman in White is seen facing away from the camera, staring at a distant point in the living room. Lorraine, one of the human characters, walks by the living room without so much as a cursory glance. When she returns to the hallway, we see the living room is empty. You didn’t catch this detail on your first watch. Your second time around, however, you are more aware; you are scanning each room for ghosts. Hints. Clues.
As you comb through your memories and your journals, you are searching for proof. Of neglect, abuse, trauma. Viciously, you hunt down details like a bloodhound. Each story given to you by your mother, you save.
Late night. A classroom at school. Nine students, working on memoir. Dim lighting and lo-fi jazz. As you type, your stomachache worsens. In an evening, during class, in an ambient setting, your mind has started twisting. You have been disassociating for hours while trying to teach. Staring at the floor. Staring at the back of your eyelids. Gripping the edges of the table while your students share stories that came up for them as they read Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House. Think of your own house and wonder. Late night. Small group. Light like soft gold. What memories does your childhood home hold?
The Haunting has been criticized for its use of dramatic lighting and CGI-monsters. But you don’t blame the directors for using campy methods to convey this story. You have your own ways of going back to the past. You are shocked by your own face in the mirror, come three in the morning, awake again because you thought you heard someone breaking into the apartment again. Upon finding your glasses, bleary, you find your cat is playing with a corner of the couch again, and nothing more. Your partner is still asleep. You pray this night he will be well rested enough to be gentle the next day.
Ghost House is where you grew up. Located in Sudbury, Massachusetts, Ghost House has two floors and four bedrooms. There is a faded wooden porch and a boiler room which terrify you for reasons you can’t comprehend. The past is curled like a snake just out of sight. The neighbors have the wrong stories about you. Recently, your mother has gutted your bedroom, or so your sister says, by throwing away all your furniture. We can’t focus on the men right now. They’ll have their own hauntings.
In EMDR memories, your mother is back as a long-haired monster with claws and too many teeth. She appears this way in the Ghost House. In the Fairy House, your mother is always crouched on the floor of your father’s kitchen. She is screaming and crying and clutching her face. Other times it is you on the kitchen floor, clutching your own face. Sometimes you are holding your arms. You never see your mother in the New York City apartment, which is also known as the Poltergeist Realm. The apartment, in your EMDR memories, is always empty. You are always hiding in the fabric closets, or in the corner of your aunt’s old bedroom. Danger is a raised voice. Danger is saying, I don’t know, when interrogated.
Nell risks her life in The Haunting. She climbs the spiral staircase in the greenhouse, hoping to find what is trapped inside—the souls of deceased children. Soon, the staircase comes to life; it twists like a prey animal, groaning and creaking as it tries to take the victims’ lives.
In talk therapy, you focus more on this idea of haunted staircases. Why do they terrify you?
You have memories, fuzzy, about a horror movie featuring a spiral staircase. You write about staircases. Your mother used to stomp up the stairs when she got home, angry and screaming. As an adult now, you run upstairs in the Ghost House, fearful a monster is chasing you. But the clearest memories are from the Poltergeist Realm. Located on the fourth floor of a walk-up, the Poltergeist Realm is dangerous. Because of the lack of elevators and cameras, you often climb the stairs with your heart in your throat, expecting someone to be lurking on one of the landings. Your mother tells you horror stories, about women who are kidnapped in their own apartments by landlords, taken up to the roof and stabbed to death. She calls to tell you a woman who went running in a miniature park across the street at night and was stabbed to death. A woman running through Central Park at night? Stabbed to death. Children walking home alone, unattended, without parents? Stolen. Yanked beneath supermarket grates on the sidewalk. She tells you you’re going to die on the subway. You’re going to die going out past nine. Past West 116th street. If you don’t eat only green vegetables for the rest of your life. If you don’t quit claiming you have depression when, really, it’s what she calls “malnutrition.” The stories become layers, like an architect sculpts depth in a house.
Your therapist is pleased at the influx of memories. She is smiling. She is so proud of you for remembering quickly, and even though you are terrified, the edges of your face also itch from being perceived as doing the right thing.
Towards the end of The Haunting, Nell’s peers in the sleep study are worried about her. They don’t believe she is seeing ghosts, having witnessed none themselves. It isn’t until the house comes to life, metal rods reaching out from the bed to splay Nell to the bed like a butterfly in a display, they realize she has been telling the truth. But not before. Not even when she screams for help, tells them detailed accounts of what she has gone through.
Once, when you were a teenager, you had friends over for dinner. You must have done something wrong, your mother started screaming at you. After witnessing her wrath your friends knew: something in your house was off.
A non-haunted house can become haunted, if all the necessary elements are there. You’ll need several of the following: a man’s sweaty palm, slamming itself onto a table; his good throwing arm; a kitchen too small; a bad day at work; for you, yourself, to be triggered, therefore you are checking-in on everyone’s moods, therefore you are driving them up the walls; empty doorways at night, with shadows; a creaking hall; wood floors, either fake or real; a bathroom with a walk-in closet beyond; someone else’s footsteps; someone else’s hands on your body, just as you’ve drifted off to sleep. A person, capable of drilling holes in your psyche with their screams. You, having gone too far, pissing everyone off by existing with your own haunted brain.
Towards the end of The Haunting, Nell decides to give herself over. No one wants her to stay in the house, in the dark, alone. At night. Everyone wants to leave alive and unharmed. Safe.
Luke is adamant he can help Nell. Taking a club, he begins to strike a painting of Hugh Crain. Everyone screams at him to stop, but it’s too late. Paintings peel themselves off the walls and statues come to life. Luke is shoved into the fireplace, killed by the ancient lionhead flue. When you were younger, your mother’s wrath was an invisible creature. You hadn’t yet learned her mood swings, her micro-expressions, what made her tick. Perhaps you will never learn. Do you remember the argument with the batteries? She’d entered the living room with a silver camera in her fist, screaming at you. Why did you swap out her batteries? Did you think she wouldn’t notice? But you had no idea what she was talking about; you cried and begged her to stop, this wasn’t your fault. Her rage was random, snaking through the house with wild abandon. She followed you to the bathroom and bedroom, twisting the knob like a monster in a children’s movie. Like creatures stuck in a time loop. The residents in Mike Flanagan’s 2018 adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House shake in bed as their ghostly older selves attempt to yank open their bedroom doors. Knobs twist; you can see the wood beginning to splinter as she pounds on the frame. If you don’t open this door right now, I swear. But you don’t open the door. At least, you don’t remember doing so. Instead, you take cover in the corner of the room, pulling out a small sewing kit from beneath your nightstand. You take the needle and press until her voice disappears.
At the end of The Haunting, Nell has sacrifices herself to Hugh Crain. She turns into a spirit, freeing the souls of deceased children trapped in the house. You can’t imagine being trapped inside a house for all eternity, though you grew up hiding. In every closet, beneath all tables, in the clothing racks of department stores. You have nightmares about being dragged away, clawing the floor until your nails fracture. Leaving bloody tracks in your mother’s hardwood floor. Imagine, as you often do, a protective barrier surrounding your body. The ghosts can’t get to you if you’re sealed in a glass coffin.
In EMDR this week, you are able to unlock new memories. Of the girls in the field at school, kicking and hitting you. Of someone hitting your jaw. Mud and grass, a child in purple on her stomach, sobbing. Your stomach remembers the impact. Your legs recoil at the thought of all those sneakers.
When your partner suggests you used to write about happy, magical worlds, remind him how many times the words mouth, jaw, blood, hurt, and stuck appeared in your earlier novels. How you wrote romantic relationships which you hoped would disguise abuse you were enduring. Recall your friends, asking why you don’t write about happy topics. A colleague’s daughter, who said, after one of your book launches, All she writes about is self-harm, eating disorders, and exes.
There is no way to go back. To reach the woman you thought you were, before the abuse began. Since it started when you were so young, there is no way of knowing if you ever had a personality growing inside you. It has tried and failed, tried and failed to be released. There is nothing you can do but try and work on the trauma. Try and get the help you need. Tell people you care about when you’re not doing well. Allow them to help save your life. The first step in forming a community is being present. Loving, kind, justice-oriented. So, so gentle.
While you can’t return to the past and stop your haunted house from ever growing in the first place, you can take these steps to rework the energy.
First: Learn about your cousin, dancing through your abuela’s apartment, now coated in frosty blue lights. Yes, she hates you. Yes, your mother’s family left forever because they thought you were bad news, thought you were on drugs, thought you were going to ruin their kids’ lives. Say it. [I was gang-raped by so many men, and sexually abused throughout life, that my hold on reality started slipping, and my pelvic floor is damaged, and I only feel pain during intercourse.] It will never get easier to talk about, but it will get easier to love yourself.
Second: Your cousin dances across the dining room table. At your abuela’s funeral, she tells you she’s been working back the magic in the house. And yes, she hates you, but at least she’s doing good work. At least she came to the funeral.
Third: Don’t go back to Connecticut.
Fourth: Skip Massachusetts for a year. Return when you feel safe enough to do so. Medicated, and with a plan in place.
Nell is not a final girl. And even though what she thought she was doing was valiant, you don’t have to do the same. You don’t have to walk the long strip of hallway between the living room to the bathroom, where your tools await. You don’t have to do these things. You can eat arroz con pollo with maduros and dream about the future.
But if you must go home, ignore the following:
The beetles, the flies, the egg sacks, the fungus, the mold, the tooth in the bathroom wall, the space where the stained bed used to be, the bathtub, broken window, broken mirror, broken wall, stains, nightmares, the four-poster bed, your exes, the tennis courts, the nitrous parties.
An incomplete list of what you must pack:
Your therapist’s phone number; a journal; your medication; water; a car; emergency money you’ve scrounged together over the years; a flashlight; a comforter; a first-aid kit; jumper cables; a towel; a cupcake; tampons; extra hoop earrings. Your fluffy pink coat. Your life. Your grandmother’s prayer card. The ability to leave alive, intact, and with all the veins still inside your body.
SAM MOE is the author of nine books. Her most recent poetry collection, Red Halcyon, is forthcoming from Querencia Press. Her debut short story collection, I Might Trust You, is out from Experiments in Fiction (2025). She has attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and received fellowships from the Longleaf Writers Conference and the Key West Literary Seminar. Sam has also attended residencies at The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, VCCA, and Château d’Orquevau.
