Abandoned Ghosts

From the air small villages and towns look neat and tidy, tucked into different squares of green that look well tended and carefully nurtured. As you drive through those small towns and villages, though, the squares of green are more often than not run over by brambles and shrubs, left fallow years ago. The villages and towns are neat and tidy, but you will see shells of houses, sorry structures that look unloved, with shuttered windows and falling tiles. Every village and town have abandoned houses, whose owners have died, leaving no descendents, or who simply can't keep up a property that to them is not worth the bother.

In our village there are two abandoned houses, large and manorial both. One is almost in the woods, next to the dolmen lately rediscovered, the other is at the crossroads. The one near the woods must have been built about seventy years ago by one of the richer people in the village. But his son eventually lived in the old house on the main road and when the father died, the son sold the house. It was bought by a neighbor from another village who rented it for a while, until the house fell into such disrepair no one wanted to live there. The money for the extensive repairs is not there, so crows, pigeons, and wrens have flown in through broken windows and missing tiles and theirs are the only lives that grace the property. It was rumored by the local boys to be haunted, who, after the death of the owner, egged each other on one night to enter the house (the owner had been a disagreeable man who had made enemies of many neighbors). When they got to one of the front windows a light appeared in it and in that light they could see the bier lying on the floor. They fled and never returned. The most likely explanation is that the headlights of a car in the village momentarily illuminated the window and projected their shadow on it, causing them to see what their brains were wired to see.

The other house on the crossroads is quite centric. It was built to be so, because it housed one of the taverns of the village once upon a time, before I was born. I still remember some summers after I first moved here seeing the owner open the windows and doors and living there for a month before she went back to Madrid, where she had moved many years ago, following her children and seeking a better life than serving wine in a tavern. But it was only one or two years that I saw her. The owner, who was quite old, died, and her children weren't planning on coming back to run a small village tavern here, so they sold it. The same man who bought the house next to the woods bought this one, too. For the first few years he took care of the house and its small yard, but again, the money for repairs had disappeared when the repairs became necessary. Now the owner is accosted by dementia and his sons, business owners, can't be bothered with a white elephant. These past few days there have been gale force winds and some tiles have flown from a corner of the roof. The French windows on the second floor balcony have been blown open by the wind, letting the rain in to drench the wooden floor boards. It's become a sad danger. 

Almost every village has an abandoned house, but in the interior of Galicia there are even abandoned villages. Villages where maybe one or two elderly people live, the last of a population of sometimes over a hundred. People follow the jobs, and the jobs have centered in the west of the region, along the axis that is the tollway that runs from Ferrol in the north, to Tuy in the south, passing through some of the most populated cities in Galicia, such as A Coruña and Vigo, along with its capital, Santiago. The east of the region has remained in the past, with agriculture being its principle sustenance. It's also a beautiful area, with impressive mountains, on the edge of the Cantabrian range that stretch westwards from the Pyrenees. My husband and I have made daytrips and wandered along the roads in the Courel area of Lugo. It's impressive how people used to live in that area long before the comforts of daily life appeared that we are now used to. But now, after hundreds or thousands of years, people are abandoning the mountains and leaving behind villages that seem to sink back into the hillsides. Sometimes we stop the car and wander around on those trips and peek through cracks or open windows into past lives that still have witnesses speaking mutely. Some families leave behind things they no longer need and in one house time seemed suspended. We expected someone to enter the room at any moment and ask what we were doing there. 

Some of these villages have been put up for sale and bought, usually by foreigners. The new owners then fix the houses, usually working themselves, and register the entire village as a rural hotel. These villages usually become something akin to interactive museums, where visitors can partake in farming and tending to livestock, much like the original dwellers of the village once used to. But, of course, their visit is just that, a visit. Life wasn't easy. That is one reason people moved away. These hotel villages are a way to keep life in the mountains, but it's not a natural life. The only year-round dwellers tend to be the owners and any staff they may have. It's not the same. 

Ghosts live on in some of these places. If the day is quiet enough and you are still enough, you can almost see someone leading a cow on a yoke and hear the tumbling of the cart wheels. And hear the clink of dishes behind a window and a dog barking in a barn. And then the wind blows and the dog is not in a barn, but down the road, barking out the window of a visitor's car, the barking growing fainter as the car continues its journey.