I was late to get a driver’s license. I’d waited until twenty to accomplish what most did eagerly by sixteen, and why not? I lived within walking distance of the center of town and had car-owning, licensed friends to get everywhere else. Why rush into the driver’s seat when I felt so comfortable on the passenger side? Anyway I had an involved relationship with highways that a license would soil.
For twenty years my eyes never needed to be on the road, so they could rest on the shoulder where there was a slideshow unrolling behind the guardrail. There’s a lot to see along state-highways and interstates (less true of turnpikes). Riding by at sixty or seventy miles-perhour, I always get the sense I’m passing through the sliver of another story. What’s over the crest of that landfill-hill on MA-128, the one with the plastic tubes coming out of it that made it look like the set of Teletubbies? What’s up with that beautiful garden, clouded with exhaust, that sits nearby behind that chain-link fence? How many kids have used that tire swing way down the sloping shoulder of VT-12A, and how close have they gotten to the raft that floats in the middle of the pond? Why aren’t they there now?
The long route I rode the most, and the one that had the most to say, was the drive from my home in Gloucester, Massachusetts to my grandparents’ house in north-central New Hampshire. My father and I took it often in my middle- and high-school years, not just to visit his parents but also to hike in the White Mountains. All told, it usually took about three hours to get there, most of the time spent on I-95 or NH-16.
We talked a lot or very little, and the eager conversation that began the trip usually sloughed off into comfortable quiet by the time we crossed the New Hampshire border. It would pick up some steam again when Mount Chocorua (a showboat of a mountain if there ever was one) broke into view, but even so, we spent more time thinking than speaking. Still one car away from his six-disc CD player, my father usually let an album repeat four or five times before swapping it out for something else. So while Yo La Tengo and Ron Sexsmith sang their covers of the Kinks, I looked out the passenger window and took note:
There are a lot of empty things in New Hampshire.
Not just space, not the green sweep of valleys heavy with second-growth birch trees and empty of all but a railway scar and a trailhead. I mean buildings, places. Things you can’t pass without wondering at the life that must have been there once, and without wondering what other life might now be somewhere inside.
There’s a barn I can’t get out of my head. We see it late in the drive, outside of Ossipee, before we’re within range of Mount Washington Visitor Information Radio, but after we’ve begun to pass the billboards advertising Settler’s Green Outlet Village (North Conway’s Home for Tax-Free Outlet Shopping). Weathered to the point of colorlessness, it appears abruptly, resting on a large plot of farmland carved out of the pines.
It’s got an old-fashioned tin roof and a single glassless window, partly covered now by trees, on the side that faces the road, and in the years I’ve been watching it’s slumped further and further to one side. I couldn’t pass that barn without thinking about it, wondering who’d owned it, why they’d left it, and what fragments of their life they’d forgotten inside. When I took up photography in high school, I fantasized about asking my dad to pull over so I could take photos of the barn—outside and in—with the photography class’ standard issue black-and-white film camera. I never did. I was too easily discouraged by a NO TRESPASSING sign to photograph any of the human fossils I expected to find there.
*
The barn today isn’t what it used to be. It’s still standing, but now the owners sell advertising space on the roadward side and a new bright-red shed has been built beside it. It was probably never as empty as I imagined it was, but then again, I’m not a photographer anymore.
Why limit myself to capturing what I see when what I think I see is so much more interesting?
The owners of the farm plot offered me a stern correction in the form of bright-red paint and a sign promising of “The best pizza in Ossipee” at the PIZZA BARN down the road. It’s alright, I don’t take it personally. The barn of my dreams may not exist where I thought it did, but it does exist. Just as truly as the abandoned Getty station deeper into the state, sign blank now, windows soaped over. The barn(s, plural) are out there too. The tourist industry isn’t as kind to farmers today as the farming industry was a few decades ago.
If I can’t find my abandoned weather-beaten building in the Granite State, I can just try another—maybe Nevada where ghost towns outnumber “live” towns ten-to-one (Glotfelty).
Closer to home, outside of Essex, Massachusetts, is an old bone-colored house with a wraparound porch. Ivy has been eating its way around the outside of the house for a while now, but some unknown party keeps it in a state of constant semi-repair. Colloquially known as “Motif #2,” it’s not unusual to see a few painters nearby trying to mock it down on an easel.
There used to be the abandoned asylum in Danvers, the invitingly-named “Danvers State Lunatic Hospital.” It took up a huge campus atop of a hill that would eventually overlook a highway; a relic from the time where the developmentally disabled and “sexually deviant” were considered as dangerous or unhealthy as the criminally insane. I’ve experienced it mostly in silhouette, the spire of the central building reaching up like the beak of a hungry bird while the enormous brick wingspan briefly dominates the passing horizon. Built in 1874, it’s the rumored birthplace of the pre-frontal lobotomy, and is known locally as “the witch’s castle.” The complex was closed and abandoned in 1992, an ominous monument to Victorian medicine only fifteen minutes away from the local Walmart. The ghosts of the asylum have haunted their way through many stories—and at least one movie—but as of 2013 the darkened halls and peeling patches of wallpaper have been converted into apartment buildings (“only fifteen minutes away from the local Walmart!”).
But even if I were standing on its empty doorstep today, I would never have been able to bring myself inside. There’s a distinct feeling to a place that’s abandoned, where life had-been but now-isn’t. Stepping inside—just walking up—feels like an intrusive act, like something taboo. Stepping under that slouching threshold and daring to disturb the universe is practically asking to kiss the fist of the falling of hand of God.
There’s a lot of reasons to feel this way. One is that I’ve been trained to, all of us have:
ghost stories walk us into the mansions on the hill, into Wallachian ruins. They peel back the boards over the doors and, with an invisible push, thrust open the wrought iron gates. This is where the bad things happen, in the places of used-to-be. Specters, monsters, and maniacs live in these places. Why else would everyone have left it alone, run off in such a hurry, and let it stand for all this time?
Another truth is an opposite one: we don’t find abandoned spaces scary because of scary stories, scary stories use abandoned places because we find them scary. It’s not that Stephen King and Alfred Hitchcock taught us to be suspicious of the motels with flickering signs, they only picked up on something innate. What is scarier than a place that is not quite familiar, some has-been building from the Uncanny Valley? Well, to be stuck in one with something dangerous.
Thus we have the heart of many effective horror stories.
It’s the emptying that makes these places frightening, that works as the source of suspicion. After all, the people who used to be here must have left for a reason. It’s not their literal ghost that’s scary, it’s their metaphorical one, the impression they left behind. The wallpaper, the furniture, the grooves worn in the wooden floor, the spoons and pans and dolls and clothes left hidden or hanging or sitting in plain sight. All of these people ran off for a reason, and if they ran off so fast that they left their daughter’s doll behind… Well, shouldn’t you be following them?
Everything that’s meant to be populated becomes eerier when it’s empty. A highway where you haven’t seen a car, a turn onto a city block void of pedestrians, a hotel shuttered for the season. There’s a sense that people could (should) reappear at any moment. Perhaps they do, perhaps they don’t. Both options carry with them their own frightening possibilities. Of course, the reality is these places don’t have as much to do with graveyards as we think they do; there aren’t always bodies in the ground or skeletons in the closet. Sometimes people just leave. Many small towns in North Dakota have been systematically abandoned over the past few decades, and it’s not because of any cinematically tragic disaster. The money is just gone from small-time farming. The towns left behind didn’t burn out so much as dry up. Patti Perry, economic development officer for Slope County, North Dakota, tries to explain in a National Geographic article from 2008: “Things happen so slowly you don’t really notice it at first—five leave one year, and then six the next—and you wake up one day and wonder what happened here” (Bowden 148).
Photographer Eugene Richards took the photographs for that article, entitled “The Emptied Prairie.” The lead shot says everything the article does in even fewer words: in the foreground, the spine of a long-dead cow, bleached white in the sun and hidden beneath two feet tall sand-colored grass, in the background, a big gray house being eaten by vines. Even Richards seems to find the photographs eerie; in the magazine’s back pages, he’s asked about his assignment documenting the ruined homes and empty places. “You know that something has befallen the people who lived there,” he says. “They wouldn’t leave if they could’ve stayed. Was there a death? A divorce? Or was it just weariness of the hard life there? There’s no way to know. We found a beautiful wedding dress in one of the houses. It had probably been hanging there for twelve years.” If I were inclined to do so, I could find my ghost-barn out there in the grain and the cold, north of the Missouri river. I could find whole counties filled with them.
Charles Bowden, who wrote the National Geographic article, interviewed a neighbor about the house in the story’s lead photo, but the neighbor had nothing to tell him. The only woman in town who might have known the former owner was in her nineties and of a fading mind. All one can do is speculate, as Eugene Richards does. But I needn’t go so far in search of an empty place with a story attached. I don’t even need to go to Danvers.
*
The most prominent feature of Cape Ann, the small, rocky, northern answer to Cape Cod, is the island at the tip. On the island there are two towns. The first, Gloucester, takes up most of the space and then some, stretching off onto the mainland. The second, Rockport, sits on the northeastern corner. Stretching between and across the borders and occupying much of the island's center is Dogtown Common, abandoned as a settlement since 1830, now the name of a forest. When it was first founded in the 1690’s it was called the Common Settlement.
I can't vouch for the objective truth about Dogtown's history, but I can vouch for the story. Ask another local and you'll get something resembling the same tale, though each teller's version is a little different. As is so often true of places like these, the story transcends the subject. Truth, hyperbole, and out-and-out fiction are woven together, and the place becomes a part of the story, rather than the story being about the place.
At the time of the Common's settling, it made sense. The island was sparsely populated,
Gloucester and Sandy Bay (Rockport's birthname) were each nestled in opposite corners. The
Common sat right in the middle along the only connecting land route, high enough in the hills that it was safe from natives, and far enough from the coast that it was safe from pirates. But time passed: new coastal roads were built, native populations dwindled, the War of 1812 quelled the risk of coastal bombardment, and the appeal disappeared. The land of the Common wasn’t worth the effort anyway; the hills that had promised safety were littered with granite boulders and nearly impossible to farm. The other towns were more prosperous and were growing, why stay? Gradually, people left, and as they did the story got more interesting. As the first “respectable” citizens moved out, vagrants and outsiders moved in. The place began to garner a reputation. This was Dogtown's first abandonment.
And it wasn't only the buildings that were abandoned, sometimes it was the people. Much of the holdout population of the Common Settlement was made up of widows. Their husbands were mostly fisherman or sailors who died at sea. It's a common story in any coastal town. Many old houses by the water have “widow’s walks,” porches built onto the roof with a view out to sea, so that the waiting wives can see if their husbands’ ships is sailing into the harbor. The colloquial name may give you a sense for how often they didn’t. Gloucester has an iconic statue and a long stone-carved list of names on its waterfront to commemorate the men who never came home. Only in 2001 did they add another statue, further down the boulevard, acknowledging the women and children that the men had left behind.
The women of the Common didn't get statues, they got dogs. Living in a dangerous time and, by most accounts, a dangerous neighborhood, they took the dogs in for protection and for companionship. Generations of vagrants blew in and out of the town with the wind, the children all moved on or went the way of their fathers, and the women grew older. As they died, their dogs were left behind. The town got its new name for the feral packs of former guard dogs that briefly dominated the surrounding woods. In its last days, Dogtown was known as a home of suspected witches. One Tammy Younger would extract a toll from passerby's by threatening to curse their oxen. The town's final resident was a freed slave named Cornelius “Black Neil” Finson. He was found living in a cellarhole in the middle of the winter of 1830, and died shortly after he was moved to Gloucester's poorhouse.
The houses are all gone now, as are the dogs, but a version of the place still endures.
Former dirt roads are now hiking trails, the maps of which still contain landmarks like “Whale's
Jaw” and “Peter's Pulpit,” both large glacial erratic boulders with their own ties to local folklore.
These aren't the only noteworthy stones in the woods-that-were: in the 1930’s, local pseudoRoosevelt and somewhat-odd philanthropist Roger Babson paid unemployed, stonecarvers to carve “inspirational phrases” into boulders throughout the trails. Today, on a long walk through the woods you'll run into stones reading TRUTH or IF WORK STOPS VALUES DECAY. One, reading BE ON TIME, has unfortunate kerning, and reads more like BEON TIME, as if offering a new form of measurement. As if time in Dogtown wasn’t measured in minutes, hours, or years, but in “beons.”
No longer filled with witches and ferals, Dogtown Common is now mostly populated by joggers and dog-walkers, though the trees are still dense enough for the place to keep secrets. The forest is so thick that in spite of its central location, the soundtrack of town life or of the passing traffic doesn’t usually pierce it, just the occasional train or passing jet plane. For that reason it’s a common setting for high school “woods parties,” usually just far enough off the road to be inconspicuous (though always a doomed endeavor from the start: the cops were high schoolers too). I once took a hike with friends where we stepped off the trail aways to smoke.
Hidden by the trees and a huge granite boulder was a tree house, a tarp lean-to, and a camp stove. I think my friends knew who these things belonged too and tried to explain, but I was to mesmerized to remember what they said. There were just enough essentials scattered around for a life out there, if you wanted it. We didn’t stay long; I was too afraid of heights to climb the tree and was in no mood to linger in a place that felt so much like someone’s home. Later on in that same walk, we wound down a sloping trail into the center of Dogtown, where a creek ran off the hills and under a wooden footbridge while light filtered through several layers of green canopy above us. It was quite the pastoral scene; you’d never know you were only twenty minutes from an industrial park or a few beons from farmland.
Not all the secrets are quite so quaint. While the tree house likely wasn’t the residence of a homeless person, it could have been. He wouldn’t have been the first. A suicide isn’t out of the question either, more than one body has been found hanging from a knotted rope tied around a tree limb. Those stories aren’t common, but they’re there. It doesn’t take much digging to knock the dirt off them. And knowing that those things have happened—on top of knowing what the woods used to be—adds an eeriness to even the sunniest midsummer jaunt. When the sun starts to set the silence in the trees stops being quaint.
Dogtown tells a very common, very American story. Really, the same one Charles Bowden and Eugene Richards found in North Dakota: people tried to make a place home and it didn’t work. Dogtown’s story is particularly interesting because of the layers, like the opposite of stratification: the first settlers left the houses, the husbands left the wives, the wives left the dogs, until eventually even the vagrants and the dogs left the whole place behind. If places were capable of loneliness, one might wonder if Dogtown took it personally. Its name comes from the result of one abandonment; the widows and their dogs take center stage in any story about Dogtown. They were ripe enough creative material for Harry Chapin at least, who turned the story into a song for his album Heads & Tales. One line goes: “Yeah, you soon learn there’s many more than one way to drown / That’s while going to the dogs here in Dogtown” (Chapin). Clever, certainly, given the history that runs parallel to Dogtown, but like the empty mail-order houses in North Dakota, Dogtown isn’t a town that drowned. It starved, dried up, and emptied out. It has more in common with a beetle left on a windowsill than one dropped in a glass of water.
In another line, Chapin’s narrator calls the place a “graveyard granite town” (also clever, given all the granite on the Cape that’s been quarried into headstones). It’s an observation that Eugene Richards would likely agree with, where all the homes still around to photograph. He describes the remnants and buildings of the ghost towns he documented in North Dakota as having the “quality of a graveyard.” We often take that kind of description of abandoned places at face value, but what gives really something the quality of a graveyard? Is it death? Perhaps, but in spite of Richard’s theorizing and Chapin’s clever wordplay, we can’t know that death filled these towns like it filled graveyards. Is it the quiet? Can’t be, plenty of places are quiet without bearing the weight of that description. Is it the monuments? That’s another maybe—the shape of a gravestone and the face of a paint-peeled, sun-bleached barn aren’t dissimilar, and books are quick to describe Dogtown as a revolution-era ghost town—but there’s more to it than that. At the heart of it, it comes down to one thing. It’s all about the promise that emptiness makes; it’s impermanence.
*
We’re ephemeral. Frail. Temporary. Mortal. Whatever pretty word you want to use to cut it, that’s the fact of the matter: we’re here for a while, then we’re not. Both graveyards and ghost towns are stark reminders of this, abandoned graveyards being perhaps the worst combination of the two (the only thing sadder than a gravestone is one that’s been knocked over, vandalized, and allowed to sink into a rising tide of weeds). Perhaps that’s why we’re so quick to put ghosts in these places, as a reassurance. Or maybe it just feels as though the ghosts should be haunting these places. An abandoned soul deserves an abandoned home, after all, and if they have each other they aren’t even really abandoned. To think of an empty asylum as populated by ghosts mitigates the more grounded fears that can come from the same location: that this place is just empty; not just a monument to short-sighted medical torture, but to failure. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair” might as well be painted on the walls (and maybe it is—like I said, I haven’t been). The sand or the sea will suck it down eventually, ghosts and all.
We project onto these empty houses all the things we don’t want to find in our actual homes. Despair, wickedness, sadness, madness, cruelty, failure, death. “That dilapidated former mill is where the serial killing hobo lives. That shack that was once a farmer’s home has a tolltaking witch in it now. That asylum is haunted by the victims, how sad it is. We’d never do anything like that now!” We put the things we don’t want to be in the places where we don’t want to live, a kind of social compartmentalization. These places are already eerie, a world we know but don’t, like a face that’s not quite right. Why not put all the problems in there? Ghost towns are haunted, but my town’s not haunted, so it can never be a ghost town. If the monsters are in the house behind the wrought iron gate, then they can’t live behind the picket fence. That’s the story we tell. In the brave daylight we can look up on the hill and say, “pfft, nothing to that but creaky floorboards.” But in the nighttime, who’s to say what makes what noise? If a board creaks in a town with no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?
If I were standing in the dust of a Nevada ghost town right now, close to midnight, I’d doubtless be uncomfortable (I spare my dignity here, I’d be terrified). Who knows what could emerge from the darkness and hurt me or the things I love. But I’m not in a Nevada ghost town right now, I’m in a well-lit, thrift-store furnished apartment. That doesn’t mean the town’s not there, wind blowing a rusty gull-wing door against the skeleton of a facade. Are there ghosts walking around there, shooting the shit and waiting for someone to haunt? Probably not. It’s just empty. Just wind and the dreams people left dead in the dust. That’s scarier.
Yet even that narrative falls short of the truth. We talk about ghost towns and forgotten homes like they are truly empty, devoid of life. The truth is anything but. There’s probably more life in that ghost town than there is in your hometown. Thing is, it’s not human.
*
Nature will survive us, though we may not survive nature. That’s a commonly forgotten truth of much of the debate about climate change. People talk about saving the planet, and they mean it, but it’s not the planet that needs saving. The planet as we know it, perhaps. Us, definitely, but whatever we do to it, the planet will survive. It will flood the subways with water, cover the highways with moss, and that’ll be it. Perhaps there will be a couple vast and trunkless legs of stone to let the coyotes remember the Anthropocene, but I doubt they could read the words on the pedestal and, being coyotes, they’ll probably pee on it either way. It’s not the world that needs saving, it’s us. The world will do just fine, even if it takes a few years (or beons) to get back on its feet.
Take a look at our truly “abandoned” places, and what do you see? Life, but not ours. Dogtown is only one minor example. The trees and the dogs took it back, but it’s still a cultivated space. Volunteers keep the brush and the weeds off the trail, repaint the signs, cut down sick trees, help manage the deer population. Humans may not live there (at least not officially), but our hands are in the cookie jar. But if you go somewhere where humans can no longer, where the very act of being there is fatal, you find something else. With the splitting of the atom, man found a way to undo himself.
The disaster at Chernobyl is thirty years old this year. Thirty kilometers of human life disappeared in the span of a day and a night, evacuated out of the exclusion zone where radiation would be too dangerous for human life. But birds don’t carry Geiger counters and boars don’t care for evacuation orders, so they stayed put. Nearly twenty miles worth of human lives were carved out of this stretch of Ukraine and their shells were left behind. Pripyat, once a town of 50,000 people, was the closest city to Chernobyl when it belched atomic poison into the sky. The amusement park in the town, and the ferris wheel with bright-yellow cars, has become iconic. Any photo essay cataloging international human abandonment includes pictures of Chernobyl, and pictures of Chernobyl always include at least one of the ferris wheel, not looking nearly as fun as it once did.
But life isn’t gone. The USSR did a rush-job to contain the nuclear reactor, and within seven years the radioactivity had gnawed through the concrete shell like termites through plywood cabinetry. Birds and mice made nested in the holes unprotected, while any visiting human had to be so thoroughly swaddled in clothes so as to be unrecognizable. North of the reactor, pine trees have regrown the limbs they lost during human occupation. Yet, even for nature things aren’t perfect. The pine limbs grow in misshapen, irregular runs. In the more radioactive areas, fallen leaves and dead trees fail to decay (Fang). Every year, some of the swallows in the area are born with patches of albino feathers. They fly through the ruins of
Pripyat, apparently unaffected, but when the flock migrates south none return (Weisman 274). But this is some swallows, not all swallows, and the riverside four miles south of Pripyat is now one of the best birding areas in Europe. The natural lifespan of the animals living in the exclusion zone are shorter than average, but life finds a way: the voles of Chernobyl reach sexual maturity faster than their foreign peers, and bear children faster too (Weisman 277).
Larger mammals have moved in as well. Some, like the European bison, have been purposefully reintroduced. Others, like the boar, the roe deer, wild horses, just gravitated to the space and it’s opportunity. Bears hadn’t been seen in the area in over a hundred years, but there is now a population around Chernobyl (Sim). Wolves, too, have returned. Investigating the higher echelons of the food chain gives a strong indication of the whole ecosystem’s health; deer and other herbivores tend to have lower levels of contamination because of their diet. But wolves and other carnivores consume many deer, absorbing a portion of that radioactivity for each animal eaten. But recent scientific investigation has found that the animals seem to be doing fine.
Camera traps placed around the exclusion zone show that the animals’ primary concerns were just what you’d expect them to be: food and water (Davis). There’s a lot of that around Chernobyl, so nature’s settlers have moved back onto a frontier of abandoned homes, black storks and red foxes flying around cooling towers and trotting across the floors of former hospitals. Nearly empty of people (there are still a few holdouts) the abandoned landscape is hardly empty of the other life that can find peace and promise there.
*
Nature isn’t the only thing that finds beauty in abandonment. Plenty of people do as well. Excepting even the ghost stories (which can be beautiful, if you’re the kind of person to think so), people go their whole lives finding small beauties at the intersection of natural forces and forgotten fragments of human life. Any given summertime you can find tourists and locals on Gloucester beachs (the pebblier the better), scouring the sand for sea glass—bottles, windows, sometimes pieces of china that were dropped into the ocean. The shattered fragments roll around for years, enduring the same forces that turn ocean rocks the shape of eggs, until the wash back up onto the beach, polished smooth. Green and brown are the most common colors, usually from beer or soda bottles, but blues and pinks aren’t impossible finds. More than one business in town turns the brighter pieces into jewelry.
In other regions and countries there are subtler versions of the same idea. Cicada molts— the skin the insect leaves behind when it reaches its final life stage—are sometimes worn decoratively in places where the insects are apt to emerge. Usually by children, but sometimes as a fashion statement. They’ll pin the empty shell of the bug to their shirt like a broach.
*
For a long time, my grandfather gardened. He can’t anymore—he’s got emphysema and knee trouble dating back to Vietnam, not to mention all the development that’s come to his and my grandmother’s “Retirement Village” (their name, not mine). The land he grew strawberries in has another home on it now, and the view isn’t quite as pastoral as it once was.
When he gardened—on a low set of beds with more square footage than his house, spread out in a haphazard, accidental maze—he liked to decorate. But, nostalgic, penny-pinching hoarder that he is, he didn’t like decorating it with new things. He opted for junk. A bobbling, dashboard Hawaiian woman hula-ed on a tree stump. From one tree, an old tin watering can hung from a low branch, on another, a rusted out lantern. A statue of a jockey that was meant to double as a lamp (the lamp has been missing on the broken statue for my entire life) stood guard against squirrels and rabbits. Near the front of the garden, a bundle of sprouting daisies were ringed, artfully, by a toilet seat.
All these things—not just the statues and the watering cans, but the houses, the barns, the nuclear reactors—had other lives once. Other hands touched them, used them, defined who they are. They sat on different shelves or stood in a neighborhood that was exactly the same but entirely different. Human life happened in and around them once. But life goes on, the beons pass, and these are the cicada skins that humans leave behind, pinned to the breast pocket of the world like a prom corsage. Sometimes it’s tragedy (of both the personal or the international variety) that does the damage, that pushes people out of the nest they’ll never see again. Sometimes it’s simpler than that. For some lives to continue, old ones must be forgotten.
But those lives still happened, the mark was made. People often talk like humanity has been walking the straight line to species-wide success since the first proto-human ape fell out of a tree, but that’s not quite right. There are false starts and bald spots and failures we leave behind for nature to rub off the timeline. Those failures are as human as anything we’ve ever done—not just because they chronicle stories but also because they allow us to make up new ones. History, after all, is written by the victors, and the world’s empty houses look anything but victorious. Perhaps that’s why they’re so fascinating: their stories are both in the past and entirely untold, existing in a state of absolute unchangeability and complete possibility. Their past and their future is uncertain, half built by man and half rebuilt by nature. They stay firmly planted on their shifting ground, preserved and not, while we pass by them on the highway in a rush to get somewhere, moving just slowly enough to see them and wonder what happened.