Experimental Film

“Of the Vinegar House. They’re all over a bunch of the interior walls, painted right onto the wallpaper, sometimes into the wood.”

“Then that’s where we have to go,” I said, or Safie—the notes, annoyingly enough, don’t specify. But from the next sentence, I’m inclined to think it was me: “That’s what we have to see.”

If Moraine answered, it didn’t get written down. Presently, in ones and twos, the rest of the group trickled in—five people, all told—and we boarded Moraine’s minivan-cum-bus for the drive out to the Vinegar House.

“We call it that because of the smell,” Moraine told us during the drive up; in Safie’s recording, Moraine’s voice has the firm smoothness of a long-memorized but still-enjoyed spiel. “It doesn’t smell all that bad now, not that it smells like roses or anything. But all of us who grew up around here remember hearing the legends, those stories about what happened to Mrs. Whitcomb . . . what might’ve happened, anyways. My old gran told me there was this stink used to hang around the place—really bad, like rotting eggs; or something poisonous, like there’d been a fire, or a big spill down at the Chaste pickling plant.

“When Mr. Whitcomb got married and had the house all dolled up, he took that old field out back and turned it into a hedge maze with a garden in the centre of it, herbs growing wild around big beds of expensive flowers wi

th special names he and Mrs. Whitcomb brought back from their European tour. Everything was beautiful, and when things got real hot you could smell the garden all the way down the hill into Quarry Argent. But things changed after their little boy ran away. . . .”

The museum records for this period note an intermittent series of complaints to the town council about “unpleasant and pervasive” odours coming from the general direction of Whitcomb Manor, whenever the wind changed direction sharply. These complaints start in late 1908, the year that a judicial injunction allowed an empty coffin bearing Hyatt Whitcomb’s name to be buried in the Whitcomb crypt; the last complaint on record was filed in 1925, the year Mrs. Whitcomb was also officially declared dead. But even at the complaints’ peak, between 1916 and 1918, there’s no evidence in the records that any of them were ever acted on in any substantial way. By 1926, Mr. Whitcomb had already returned briefly from Europe to sign various documents and close Whitcomb Manor down permanently, and then promptly left Canada once more, never to return.

“People understood,” Moraine said. “They knew she had more than enough on her plate to deal with already. She was eccentric, sad—special, just like her boy. Never knowing what happened! And Mr. Whitcomb being always away, too, though of course he paid for anything she asked for, like a true gentleman; he begged her to come with him, but she refused. Said she was gonna wait right here until Hyatt came home, or he didn’t. It’s a sad story.”

Our group arrived at the Vinegar House shortly after 1:00 P.M.—an hour later than Moraine customarily began her showings, because I’d made it vehemently clear that Safie and I wanted to see the (usually-unexplored) inside of the house as well. This necessitated a detour to pick up steel-toed boots and hard-hats from Quarry Argent’s M’Cauley Family Hardware Store; Bob Tierney had already authorized the loan, using the museum’s emergency credit card. Once we disembarked, however, Moraine lost no time in leading her charges—now including German tourists Axel Beckenbauer and Holle Abend, and a local family on a day trip from Overdeere, Max LaFrey, his wife Kirstie and daughter Aileen, as well as Safie and me—up the driveway and through the remains of a mixed-fruit orchard that had once blocked the Manor’s view of Stow-apple road, providing shade and privacy, toward their destination.

I can describe the photos Safie took from memory.

Picture a strip of field, narrow and rough, suitable for wheat or rapeseed but gone untilled since the turn of the twentieth century. At one end there’s a small stand of woods, too knotted for easy penetration. At the other, a house—first raised in 1885, then rebuilt to its owner’s specifications in 1902—that has stood here so long it’s begun to sag and split along the centre-line, becoming two rough half-mansions smashed haphazardly together, sutured only by the further process of decay. Between field and house stretch the remains of a garden verdant with weed and herb, a simple maze whose box hedges have grown so thick that access to the back door is difficult in any season but winter.

Back and to the right, however, is the ruin of another building entirely: iron struts, black and rusty, outlining what seems to be an invisible barn, a boxy greenhouse cleared of its contents shortly after Hyatt Whitcomb’s “burial” and converted first into an artist’s studio, and then—as we now know—a movie set by adding a stage, a series of hand-painted backdrops, and a windowless wooden shed probably used as a dark room for developing the resultant film strips. Fifty years of foul weather had broken nearly every last pane. Even the shards left behind were dull and blunt, matte grey in any but the brightest light.

“All the time I was growing up here, the Vinegar House was our main creepy landmark,” Safie’s footage shows Moraine telling us, as we stand outside the front door, its gleaming brass padlock the only bright new thing on the entire edifice. “Kids used to sneak over and break in all the time—almost like making a pilgrimage—but we never stayed too long, just looked around a bit and left. Nobody ever had parties here. Nobody came here to park and neck, or what have you. For myself, I haven’t been inside for three years at least, and the one thing I remember is that there doesn’t seem like there’s ever been any graffiti in there, anywhere, crazy as that sounds. What bunch of teenagers doesn’t scribble all over everything?”

Safie turns her camera on me at this point, and I give the lens my most obvious and disdainful eye roll. But it got harder to be snarky once we were inside, especially when we hit an unexpected roadblock; right on the front steps, the little girl, Aileen LeFray, suddenly had a complete meltdown and absolutely refused to proceed further, to the point that she started kicking and punching when her exasperated father picked her up and made as if to carry her. Her parents gave up, and the mother took Aileen around the back—“See if there’re any crabapples ripe enough to eat,” Moraine suggested. Then, lighter by two, our group made its way past the doorframe . . .

. . . and there really wasn’t any graffiti. Not, as Moraine gleefully pointed out, “a scrap.”

But that’s not to say there wasn’t any decoration.

We came in down the House’s main hall, checking constantly for sags and gaps in the floorboards. “This floor can be treacherous,” Moraine said. “Five years back, a kid from Overdeere was here doing his thesis and fell right through, up to his hip. Got stuck there overnight. It was so cold that year, he was almost blue when they found him!”

For all her morbid glee, however, she seemed as relieved—and unsettled—as the rest of us, once we finally got to where we were going.

The “paintings” we found ourselves confronted with were actually a series of freehand-drafted murals covering much of three walls in what was once the Whitcombs’ grand dining room, located at the rear of the house. Its main table—now missing all its legs due to rot, almost invisible upon the rubbish-strewn floor—would have once been angled toward a set of four large windows looking out onto the maze garden and glass house alike, flanking a set of double doors which give way to the terrace. The murals start at the baseboards and rise to a height of roughly eight feet, which suggests they were finished by someone already fairly tall (as a young woman, Mrs. Whitcomb stood five feet, eight inches) using a ladder to boost her reach.

The original paints appear to have been white lead-based, which perhaps accounts for their surprising durability under harsh circumstances. On the video, you can see that although there’s a lot of mould and peeling, the general shape of these images remains clear, along with enough fine detail to give a distinct impression of what Mrs. Whitcomb must have had in mind. (To rebut critics who speculated she must have had help while installing them, the museum dug up records showing Mrs. Whitcomb only brought in local men to help her lay the foundation before sketching over it in charcoal and dividing each wall into sections, which she then personally filled in over a period of two years, 1907 to 1908.)

I don’t know yet if it’ll be viable to get any of the photos or still frames from the footage into this book, or whether it’s even worth trying. Nothing we took that day does the place justice; nothing really captures that room’s queasy power. What few European artists and critics took note of the pieces produced during Mrs. Whitcomb’s honeymoon tour all mention her odd, wavering figures—thin-limbed and indefinite under haloes of diluted washes, outlined in receding layers of pale green, violent yellow, or stark white, as though viewed through eyes squinting against a bright light. If her earlier work was mainly Impressionist and only tentatively Symbolist, the Mural Room friezes seem to transcend these influences—to take them and wring them out, boiling them down to bare essentials, pure, weird, and stark.

Set against a background of a thousand tiny colour points and arranged in a sort of procession moving inward from either side, faces cast down but hands upraised as though in supplication, the figures range from child-sized to adult but have few other signifiers—possibly universally feminine or simply androgynous. Some appear to carry farming tools like rakes and scythes, while others tote sheaves of fruit, grain, or flowers. All have something in common with both Jan Toorop’s Indonesian shadow puppet-inspired “soul” figures and classic Byzantine ikons, up to and including their use of three-quarter semi-profile and full-body mandorlas or glories, outlining light clouds similar to the effect observed in Kirlian spirit photography, which supposedly reveals the human body’s aura, or life-force.

But they’re also attended by what seem to be “shadows” done negatively, in even brighter colours—green shading upwards to viridian, yellow to citrine, white to palladium. Slightly larger than the figures that cast them, these “shadows” are thin and predatory, almost skeletal, with long hands and nodding, wide-mouthed heads, blind and seeking. Their bottom halves terminate in tails rather than legs, coiling and twining with each other like snakes or tentacles, in some cases seemingly attempting to ensnare the feet of the individual figures to whom they find themselves attached. As in the famous illumination from the Liber Scivias showing Saint Hildegard von Bingen receiving a vision from God and dictating its content to her personal secretary, the processional figures are also linked by a five-tongued flame emanating upwards from their eyes, which joins into a vine or tree-branch above them.

On either side, these branches merge with the gigantic central figure—not immediately apparent on entering the room, since you have to turn around to see it—whose body is mainly composed of the yawning aperture of the dining room door, two flaps of a pale cloak or pair of wings falling to either side of the frame, and a veiled, almost featureless face with blazing white eyes fringed in gold glaring down at visitors from just above the lintel.

No flaming sword, Safie’s notes read—margin-scribbled, almost a footnote. But it’s Lady Midday all the same. Who else?

I don’t remember exactly how long we held up the tour in that room, though it was probably a good thing Aileen LaFrey had ended up staying outside with her mom, given the awestruck, breathless, and totally obscene exclamations I kept making. Our fellow tourists Axel, Holle, and Max were all too ready to leave before long, but as Moraine explained, insurance regs meant she couldn’t let anyone out of her sight; so long as one stayed behind, everybody had to. To get us moving, Moraine finally had to lean between Safie and me, and offer—

“Hey—want to see Hyatt Whitcomb’s secret place? Upstairs?”

Because he spent the latter half of his short life increasingly subject to debilitating seizures, the Whitcombs’ only child lived in what Moraine called “a glorified closet” next to his parents’ bedroom. “They wanted easy access to him at all hours, just in case,” she said, as we trudged carefully up the stairs, “so they took the doors off and hung up a curtain. He was seven years old but he still slept in a kind of a crib with a lid over the top they could latch every night, because sometimes he would get up in his sleep and wander off. They’d already hired a girl to go everywhere with him when he was awake—her name was Maura Sauer, from God’s Ear—so they made her a bed in there that was right up against the side of his crib, hoping if he did get up, she’d be there to catch him.”

Much like his mother, Hyatt Whitcomb was artistically gifted. Whenever he was ill, which was often, he would lie inside his crib sketching on long rolls of rag paper with soft chalk. A lot of those drawings are in the Quarry Argent Museum’s back-shelves, only a chosen few on general display. What neither of the Whitcombs could know, however, was that Hyatt had already found a way to get out of the crib and avoid his nurse’s detection.

“That little cubby’s right back against where part of the roof comes down to meet an outer wall, close to one of the chimneys,” Moraine said. “And if you take the wood panelling off, you can get into an access ladder-way the builders left to make it easier to clear blockages out of the flue. There’re rungs cut right into the big load-bearing beams, going all the way to the ground and a little service door out the back. Well, poor little Hyatt must’ve figured out one of those panels was loose, or maybe he kicked it loose during one of his fits and nobody noticed, I don’t know. One way or another, he finished prying it free, dropped it down the ladder-way, and tacked up a bunch of his sketches to curtain it off, so he could come and go as he pleased. Boys do things like that, no matter how ‘special.’”