It’s a weird thing, going home for the first time in 30 years.

I should say that I don’t really consider the house where I grew up, near Muncie, Indiana, home anymore. It hasn’t been for a long time. I’ve lived other places in the past 40 years and I consider them the more recent and relevant “home.”

So getting to see and walk through, for the first time in 30 years, the farmhouse where I grew up from about three years old didn’t really feel like I was home.

Nevertheless, I was filled with thoughts and memories I’m still trying to process.

My parents moved from the city to the farm sometime in the early 1960s. My dad, who had worked in a factory since about 1946, wanted to be a farmer in his spare time. My two older brothers were in high school and middle school and I don’t think I ever heard what they thought of moving out of the city and to the very rural area, with a small school system, at their age. I was a couple of years or more from starting school, and I kept in contact with my closest friend, a cousin about my age, so I didn’t feel too uprooted.

Besides, the farm was a great place to grow up. The house itself, dating to the 1890s, had been home to farmhands who worked for some large-scale farmers in the area. The house was very plain and no-frills: brick on the outside, plaster walls in the four bedrooms, kitchen and living room and twelve-foot ceilings that seemed very high to a three-year-old. One of my earliest memories is standing on the steps of a ladder, with my cousin, in that living room.

The outbuildings – a huge barn assembled with wooden pegs instead of nails and a grainery building – were wonderful places to play. My friends and I played out a lot of scenarios inspired by “Batman” and the spy shows of the day like “The Man from UNCLE.” If there was a spot we could jump from or hang from on a rope, we found it. Now that would seem nightmarish to the parents of young kids.

I wrote for CrimeReads about how the farmhouse – which was haunted, incidentally – helped shape my love for the scary and spooky in movies, TV and books.

Growing Up Spooky

By the time my parents moved to a smaller space in the early 1990s, I had lived in apartments and houses and made my own home with my wife and, a few years later, our son. My last few times at the farmhouse was to pack up my stuff – books, magazines, model kits – and take it along to my then-current home or trash it.

I lived in Muncie for most of the thirty years after my parents sold the place and I always wanted to go back and see if or how the farmhouse had changed. I didn’t until just recently, after I’d moved to Tennessee but was back in Muncie to see family still there and to talk about my books. My parents passed away many years ago.

My wife and I decided to stop at the farmhouse one night in June when we were in town. We pulled into the driveway and I was struck by how much had changed outside: more of my dad’s original 20 acres had been sold over the last 30 years, making for many more houses close by. The number of trees around the house had greatly increased and the wraparound porch had been finished.

The very nice current owner of the house came out and I noted that my dad had built the garage from the bricks of a downtown Muncie movie theater.

The woman couldn’t have been more nice, letting us in to walk around the place and gawk at what they and the previous owners had done: The kitchen had been expanded and moved, my parents’ bedroom downstairs had changed, the three bedrooms upstairs that had been for my brothers and I were somewhat different.

One of the first things I looked for was the toilet off the kitchen. For most of my life, you used that toilet at your own peril, as a foot or so away steep, vertigo-inducing wooden stairs descended into the basement, which was mostly finished in concrete but still had the aura of a horror movie set. The toilet stairs to the basement had been sealed off and it was a nice half-bathroom now rather that a Doorway to Hell with a toilet at the top.

I’m glad I went back and was happy to meet the owner, whose family has lived there for several years. The previous owners and the current owners have made their mark on the place so much that the inside is almost unrecognizable and you could drive past and not recognize the place from the 1970s aerial photo included here.

It was an odd feeling, a little satisfying and yet mostly unsatisfying, to see the place again. Unsatisfying because so much had changed. It wasn’t frozen in time. Really, it shouldn’t have been, and I’m glad it’s been home to others over the decades.

It’s not my home anymore. Yet it is, weirdly, still my home.