The Poltergeist Only Targets My Brother's Chair

Our family home has been 'active,' as my mother delicately puts it, for as long as I can remember — the ordinary poltergeist portfolio of a busy old house: cupboards found open, the occasional flung mug, doors slamming in still air, footsteps on the stairs when the stairs are empty. We're used to it. It's background weather. But over the years we all noticed the activity has a fixation, and the fixation is my brother Danny's armchair.

Danny died at twenty-six, eight years ago, a car accident, and his chair — a battered green wingback he'd claimed as a teenager and defended like territory — stayed in the corner of the living room where it had always been. Nobody decided to keep it as a shrine; nobody decided anything. It's just that whenever we've tried to move it, get rid of it, or — worst of all — sit in it, the house objects.

Sit in Danny's chair and things happen. Not to you, exactly — to the room. The lights stutter. A book comes off the shelf across the room, not falling but leaving, arcing a foot out before it drops. Once, when my uncle plonked himself down in it at a wake and made a joke about it, every door on the ground floor slammed at once, hard enough to crack a pane, and my uncle got up very slowly and never sat there again. The chair itself is never damaged. It's protected. It's the one still point in a house that throws things.