A Haunted House

Around the early days of September, I heard a horrible, draw-out wail rising from this old house, near the Karacaahmet district on the Asian side of Istanbul.

Even though I'd passed it by hundreds of times, it had never occurred me before to take a proper look at this place. Look at the beautiful, intricate design of the doors. This was probably the property of a rich Armenian or Greek family, before they abandoned it for better futures.

The house still had old tags for gas lines. This method of heating and illumination was discontinued sometime after the sixties or the seventies, giving a possible date for the last time it was inhabited.

The garden was full of friendly cats, but no ghosts. There was also a deep, old water well that I almost fell in. I covered it up with planks and branches lest the poor cats don't.

I couldn't find anything else in the garden, but there were plenty of dark, broken windows I could poke my camera through...

...the flashes only revealed trash and desolation. Just as flashes were going off, however, a ghostly scream began to emanate from the interior of the house. Now it sounded more like...

...a dog's cry. The "ghost" was just a poor, blind old dog that had somehow crawled into the house to die. It couldn't move about as I took these photos, it just kept wailing and wailing.

I left the place with a terrible sense of sadness for the wretched creature.

If ghosts had any basis in reality, however, Istanbul would be haunted by entire families of Greeks, Armenians and other non-Turkish minorities whose lives had been erased by a century-long history of national homogenization. As if their departure wasn't enough, the remainders of their houses, schools and churches are purposefully being allowed to rot away, as if the buildings somehow constitute a threat to the nation's integrity.