The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I didn't really think too much of the house at first. There was some work that needed to be done, and when I'd looked at it, I'd seen the signs of hasty and slightly unskilled repairs, but that wasn't something that scared me off. I'm not a master carpenter by any means, but I know my way around less-than-stellar houses. After all, my first house was a crappy seventies mobile home, and I'd followed it up with a bank repo in Klamath Falls during the height of the housing crisis.

Ponies didn't have professional home inspectors, but really, what was there to see? No electrical system to worry about, and rudimentary plumbing that was just one step above a gravity system fed by a rain barrel. The central heating unit was the fireplace, and for air conditioning, the windows opened.

I had looked through it anyways, and there wasn't anything too alarming. No weird sags or falling plaster; no evidence of termites or any other pests. The yard was overgrown, but that was to be expected. And I assumed the roof was in decent condition, simply based on the lack of water damage. I honestly didn't know very much about thatched roofs.

At the time I didn't know it, but real estate agents were kind of rare in Equestria. The stallion that had been the seller's representative was a little bit twitchy and seemed kind of out of his league. It was only later that I learned he wasn't a realtor in any sense of the word; he actually worked for the mayor's office, and she'd pressed him into the role. Presumably he’d taken the job because he didn't have enough seniority to refuse.

I'd kind of gotten the sense that something wasn't quite right with him from the moment we'd first met, but I'd chalked it up to inexperience. Which I guess was fair; this was something that hadn't been in his job description, after all.

It was fair to say that I was sort of eager to buy property. I'd come to terms with the idea that I was going to be in Equestria for the foreseeable future, and to be honest, it wasn't the worst place I could have wound up. Everybody—everypony—I'd met thus far was friendly and kind, and none of them particularly seemed to care that I wasn't a pony. I got some weird looks every now and then, but no more than I would have expected, given the situation.

Sitting through the closing was just as boring as it would have been on Earth, although there was a lot less paperwork. Instead of giving them evidence of my earnings and savings and outstanding debts, the bank manager herself vouched for me, and there was hardly any paperwork at all. I got the sense that when the bank manager and mayor's assistant bumped hooves with each other and then with me that the deal was closed, and my signature on the deed was a mere formality.

It was certainly better than any deed I'd ever gotten before. The mobile home had come with a title that was essentially the same as the one for my car. The actual house’s mortgage papers had been a bit lacking on the decorative, unphotocopyable scrollwork, but had made up for it in sheer volume of computer-generated paperwork: a hundred pages of legalise that was drier than Moby Dick.

Pony titles, on the other hand, were printed on proper Ye Olde Paper, sealed with both an actual gold-foil seal and a wax signet, and it even came with its own brass tube that I could store it in. And I signed it with a quill pen dipped in an inkpot.

There were no keys to be given at the title signing, because like most pony houses there were no locks. That was something that I'd always found a bit strange, but I guess that since unicorns could easily bypass a lock if they wanted to, and pegasi could get in through any window they cared to, locks were considered an unnecessary extravagance.

I wasn’t too worried about crime. I got the sense that burglary was essentially unknown to the ponies. Maybe that wasn't true; maybe it was something that the newspapers never reported to give ponies a false sense of security. But nopony I knew locked their doors ever.

I don't think that we're born with an inherent distrust of our fellow man; I think that that's a lesson that has to be learned. And it could be that ponies have never learned that lesson—and if so, good for them. I can't help what I am, so I didn't ask for any options for moving services until after the closing was complete, because I didn't want them to think that I was some kind of a rube.

Back on Earth, that wouldn't have been a problem. I could have packed everything into my minivan and moved it piecemeal, or rented a U-Haul and done it that way. Both were familiar options. Here in Equestria, though, there were no minivans or U-Hauls, and while wagons were commonplace, I didn't fancy towing one that carried my worldly possessions.

It turned out that that wasn't much of an issue. Both the bank manager and the mayor's assistant cum realtor knew lots of ponies who had a wagon and would be willing to help me out for a reasonable fee. Probably not coincidentally, their first suggestions were relatives. Having spent most of my life living in small towns, that didn't seem all that odd to me.

It didn't take me long at all to arrange for a mare and a wagon to be at my service for a day, and unlike U-Haul, she didn't charge mileage. She even helped me carry boxes out to the wagon, and then into my new house. I hadn't expected that to be part of the deal at all, and I gave her a rather generous tip, which she initially refused.

That was one thing I'd learned about the ponies that I really liked. When there was business to be done, none of them ever complained that that wasn't their job, or that they weren't getting paid for it, or anything else that a steady stream of former employees at my shop had done. They just did it.

Thus it was that two days after buying my first Equestrian house, I had moved in and begun the process of settling.

There's a process to settling in to a house you own that's different than an apartment. When you get a rental, you know that you're stuck with the current arrangement. You know that you have to live with the kitchen setup or the undesirable fuel-oil furnace in the basement. You make your choice based on what you see and what you know you can live with.

When you own the house—even if you have a mortgage—you already have in your mind the changes you're going to make. Maybe it's renovating the bathroom or improving the kitchen; maybe it's something more major like deciding that you want an addition or a back porch. You tend to care more about how it sits upon the land, because that's your land. A green thumb, or a wannabe is going to imagine new landscaping around the place, and how the light might look as it comes through aspen trees outside the bedroom, and if you own it, it's worth planting those trees. You're putting down roots, just like those trees are.

Unless the house happens to exactly fit your needs or you have an enormous budget, you start off compromising some. You've already spent a lot of bits to get it, and now you have to prioritize the improvements.

From what I'd seen on House Hunters, Property Brothers, and countless other HGTV shows, the really rich get all that done before they move in, but that wasn't in my budget—either financially or temporally. Instead, I sort of envisioned a rough timeline of changes that spanned from 'as soon as possible' to 'when I get around to it.'

Perhaps it was laziness, but I did want to get a sense of how the house fit me and how I fit the house before I decided on anything major. There were some painting projects that I had in mind, and a few repairs that I thought should be early priorities, but for the most part, since I wasn't really that used to pony houses anyways, I figured I could live with it the way it was, and I'd sort of postpone my to-do list until I'd found the things about it that really annoyed me.

An empty house always seems bigger than it really is, and it's only when you start to move all your belongings in that you realize that the house isn't as large as you imagined, or else you own too much stuff. Luckily, the latter wasn't the case at all. I did have more clothes than there was closet space for, but that wasn't something that was a surprise. The mare who had helped me move said that fancy unicorns in Canterlot were the only ponies who owned as many clothes as I did.

One benefit to ponies of their clothing-free lifestyle was the general lack of window curtains. Back on Earth, there were so many options for window dressings at nearly every store, up to and including the dollar store, that I'd never imagined a world where such things were seen as an extravagance rather than necessary, and it went without saying that there were no provisions in my new home to hang curtains on the windows.

That was one thing I'd been prepared for, and a few nails and some scrap cloth made serviceable enough curtains for the bathroom and bedroom. Later on, I could put up proper curtain rods and maybe have a seamstress make actual curtains, and I could putty up the holes I'd just made in the window trim, but that was really a low-priority project.

Maybe the curtains weren't really needed, anyways, but I had the thought in my mind that I'd be taking a shower and one of my new neighbors who was a pegasus would just fly up to the bathroom window. Or maybe when I was sitting on the toilet.

I don't think they'd find that awkward at all, but I know that I would.

Aside from that improvement, I set up my bed and got a few boxes of clothes opened. Like most people, I had grandiose plans for organization at the beginning of the moving process, and as moving day approached, the plans defaulted into a 'throw things into a box and hope I can find it later' form. Luckily, I only had a few critical boxes, and those got packed last and thus were on top when the wagon was loaded. That, of course, meant that they were the first boxes moved into the new house, but at least I knew that they were on the bottom of the pile.

There's a process to getting used to a new home. Everything is strange, and to the lizard-brain possibly a threat. And on top of that, there's a weird sort of eagerness, a feeling deep down that this is mine and I need to explore it. I think it's a little bit dampened on a rental, but when it's something that you own, you're in a state of hyper-sensitivity to everything, even the things that aren't an issue at all.

My house in Klamath Falls had glow-in-the-dark stars and planets on the ceiling of the bedroom, and I somehow didn't notice them until the first night, and they freaked me out. Plus, there was less traffic than I was used to, so instead of a constant roar from a nearby highway, it was mostly silent and each car and truck that passed seemed louder and closer.

And there's also the strange noises the house itself makes as it settles.

That's what really gives a home a personality; the little creaks and pops it makes. I have to assume that it makes them in the morning when the sun's light hits it and causes things to expand, but I’d never heard them, or just dismissed them if I had.

At night, every noise and shadow is possibly a threat, and it doesn't take the lizard-brain too long to start filling in the blanks and telling you that each one of those noises is something that's going to get you if you fall asleep.

I'm sure my rental house made similar noises, but if it had, I'd forgotten every one of them, and the nighttime paranoia set in as I was laying in my bed in my empty except for boxes bedroom. I had a hard time determining what came from the house itself and what came from outside, but one thing I was sure of was that I heard hoofsteps above my head.