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.

And when we've tried to remove it — twice, both times a family decision that it was 'time' — the poltergeist activity escalates from background weather to a genuine storm, for days, until the chair comes back in from the garage or the skip and returns to its corner, at which point the house exhales and goes back to its usual low-level grumbling. We have, functionally, been forbidden by our own house from getting rid of my dead brother's chair.

My mother's interpretation, which I've come around to, is not that Danny is angry. It's that Danny is still SITTING there. That the chair isn't haunted, it's occupied — that whatever's left of my brother kept the one seat that was ever fully his, and the house, or he, simply won't tolerate anyone taking his chair or pretending he's not in it. The flung books and slammed doors aren't menace. They're a twenty-six-year-old's outrage at someone sitting in his spot.

So we leave it. We even, God help us, talk to it. Christmas morning, everyone gets a seat, and the green wingback stays empty, and my mother says 'morning, Danny' to it, and nobody thinks it's strange anymore. The house is calm as long as his chair is his. It's the cheapest thing we've ever done to keep the peace, and I mean that in both senses.