So Long, Haunted House; or, The Failure to Catch Graham Greene’s Spirit

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
Emily Dickinson

We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in its place.
Daniel Boorstin

We left the bar and took a closer look at the house: an ugly square building with no character but its secrecy and its security. There were steel shutters on the already heavy doors and the windows were barred as well as shuttered. Only a hole, the size of a half-crown, in one of the doors gave us a view within. The house was certainly not empty—I could just make out in the obscurity two pictures and a cupboard. To me the house smelt of an old crime. A woman’s scream? ‘We have to see inside,’ I told Chuchu.
Graham Greene, Getting to Know the General


I rarely buy a tabloid newspaper. Virtually never, in fact. But the headline of the July 13 edition of Panamá’s Día a Día cast a spell on me: “Tumban la casa embrujada” (Haunted House Demolished). The cover photograph showed a man and his son walking over the rubble as they collected the rods that once helped hold the building in place. There’s money to be made selling haunted iron as scrap.

I had read about the ghostly dwelling years before I ever dreamed of living in Panamá. Graham Greene, one of my literary heroes, wrote about it in Getting to Know the General—the account of his relationship with Omar Torrijos and Panamá. The author of The Power and the Glory, among other outstanding novels, said that the house was alongside the Pan-American Highway, shortly after crossing the Bridge of the Americas, on the opposite side of the Canal from the nation’s capital. At the time of Greene’s writing, in the early 1980s, the building had reportedly been empty for more than forty years. People claimed that the place was inhabited by a woman’s spirit and that her screams and the rattling of chains could be heard at night.

Haunted houses have always fascinated me. In my most prevalent recurring dream I’m inside of one, trying my best to deal with the often benign, and sometimes terrifying, apparitions.

It should not be surprising, then, that only two months ago, while my wife and I were having dinner with Mónica Martínez and Alicia De León—two formers students from my days at FSU-Panama—our conversation strayed to the subject of haunted houses. I asked the young women if they knew of any such buildings in Panamá City.

“No,” they replied. “But there's one on the old road between Arraiján and La Chorrera. People say it’s haunted by the ghost of a woman.”

“I think that’s the one Graham Greene wrote about!” I exclaimed. I got my copy of Getting to Know the General and read out loud the passage in which the Englishman describes the house.

“Yes. That’s it,” the young women said.

When I first arrived in Panamá—four years ago—I’d ask every new acquaintance if they had heard about Graham Greene’s haunted house. Sadly, no one seemed to know a thing about it. Eventually I stopped asking and assumed that it had been the product of the writer’s fertile imagination. But a couple of days after Mónica and Alicia confirmed the house’s existence I made a resolution to ask them to take me there next time they were in Panamá, on vacation from their studies in the States.

But what would be the point now?

In Getting to Know the General, Greene tells how, after failing to enter the first time (the owner was not available), he became obsessed with the idea of going inside. After several other attempts, the Englishman finally got in and, after looking around, he left, disenchanted and doubting that the house was haunted. But after that, the writer was able to move on with his life.

I, on the other hand, am now condemned to be forever haunted by the photograph of a father and his son walking on a pile of rubble. But I was never interested in seeing the woman’s ghost. Not really. I just wanted to stand on the same doorstep and look through the same peephole that allowed Graham Greene’s imagination, at least for part of his stay in Panamá, to come alive. Maybe then I would have encountered a lingering trace of Greene’s literary ectoplasm, and then I would've danced through the mist in the hope that some of it would cling to me.