The House Only Misbehaves for the Estate Agent

We love our house, and our house, we're increasingly certain, loves us — which is the only reason this is a strange story rather than a frightening one. For the eleven years we've lived here it has been nothing but warm, easy, and kind: things we lose turn up, the heating seems to anticipate the cold, the whole place has a settledness that guests always remark on. Not a hint of anything wrong. A happy house.

The trouble started only when we decided to sell it.

We're relocating for work — no choice, and no small grief about leaving. We put the house on the market, and the estate agent came to do the photos and the first viewings, and the house, which has never so much as creaked at us, declared war on him.

He got locked in the box room. The door, which has no lock, held shut for twenty minutes while he hammered on it, and then opened on its own. The temperature in the living room, mid-viewing, crashed so hard that his prospective buyers could see their breath in June, and left. On his third attempt, doing an evening viewing alone, he came out white and shaking and would not go back in, and eventually admitted, in the pub we took him to because he was too rattled to drive, that a voice had spoken close to his ear on the stairs, clear and cold, and told him to leave, and to stop bringing people. He resigned the listing the next day. The second agency we tried lasted two viewings. The third sent someone who walked in, went pale in the hall, said 'no, sorry, no,' and walked straight back out.

The house is delightful to us and hostile to anyone trying to sell it. It locks the agents in, freezes the buyers out, whispers threats on the stairs — and then, the moment the strangers are gone and it's just us again, returns to being the warmest, kindest home you could imagine, the heating anticipating the chill, the lost keys reappearing, the settledness settling back down like a cat.

We've stopped trying to sell it. That's where this ends, and I know how it sounds. We looked at each other after the third agent fled and my husband said what we'd both been thinking: 'It doesn't want us to go.' And we found, examining our own hearts, that we didn't much want to either — that the relocation could be managed another way, a long commute, a rental at the other end, keeping this house, which has been so good to us, which so plainly cannot bear the thought of strangers walking through it deciding its worth, which turns into something that whispers on stairs the moment we threaten to hand it to someone else.

So we're keeping it. The house, since we took it off the market, has been perfect again — better than ever, honestly, almost purring. Whatever's in it, or is it, doesn't haunt us. It just refuses, absolutely and with real menace, to let us leave, and after eleven years of its kindness we've decided that's less a threat than a very forceful declaration of love, and we've chosen to be flattered rather than frightened. We live here still. We always will now. It's been made quite clear that we always will.