Dylan Brogan
When asked if she’s a witch, Tenney-Lapham resident Jules takes a beat to think about it.
“Not a very serious one,” says Jules, who didn’t want to provide her last name. “Some people in the neighborhood call our place the Halloween House. We call it the House of Sin.”
Located on the 1000 block of East Gorham, the house is easy to spot. Small ghouls hang in a row on flower trellises. A giant spider has weaved a black web across the second-story porch. Red string lights illuminate the front of house. A gargoyle watches over the front lawn not far from a bludgeoned skull.
“This is just how I decorate. The inside looks like this, too. It’s just what I do, it’s who I am,” says Jules. “It’s Halloween every day at our house. If you come trick-or-treating with a costume on, we’ll give you candy. Some of the neighborhood kids have done it.”
Jules is dressed in black with a thick metal necklace that matches her macabre-looking house. She slowly smokes a black clove cigarette while lounging on a black wicker sofa on her porch.
“I bring out the cheesy stuff around Halloween: The fake body parts. Anything that’s zombie-related or over the top vampire-related. I do lighting and fog,” says Jules. “I guess I just like the dark aesthetic. The gothy things. I like wrought iron a lot. Stuff that’s dark.”
Talking about Halloween, Jules’ face glows. “I’ve always liked kids a lot — probably why I had four. So maybe that’s part of it,” says Jules, who is a nanny. “The kids who grew up in the neighborhood are now bringing their kids on Halloween. I think that’s pretty cool.”
Jules also moonlights decorating big Halloween parties. She likes the holiday because it takes things that are “dark and scary, and makes light of them.”
“It makes people less serious. Serious is not my thing. I like it when people are laid back and let people be people. I guess the house is my way of saying, ‘Relax,’” says Jules. “Sometimes I’ll work on the yard in a black-hooded dress in the middle of the night. That’s over-the-top and funny to me.”
Almost all who comment on the house say nice things. There are exceptions.
“I was outside and this song was playing that is just people chanting the names of witches over and over again. Some lady stopped by and said she didn’t appreciate me summoning things from my front porch,” says Jules. “It’s just the name of dead witches. You can’t bring witches back to life by calling their names.”
Jules was raised Christian — her father was an itinerant preacher — and she moved around a lot when she was a kid. She says her dad now “lives” in Forest Hill Cemetery but her mom is still alive. Neither care for the House of Sin.
“My mom says things like ‘your house looks dreadful,’” Jules says. “She doesn’t have to like it. I love her and she loves me. We don’t have to agree.”
Jules has some Buddhist and some pagan beliefs. She celebrates Samhain — which she calls the real Halloween — an ancient Gaelic holiday where the “veil between this world and the afterworld is thinnest.”
“It’s kind of like New Year’s. We celebrate the [secular] Halloween first, dressing up and handing out candy. Samhain is more spiritual. After we are done with trick-or-treaters, we go to the graveyard,” says Jules. “We usually do tarot because you get a better reading when that veil is thinner. We talk about the people in our lives who aren’t here anymore, how they affected us and we thank them. We leave things on their graves. Nothing too sinister.”
The House of Sin is an evolving project now in its 13th year.
“Whoaaa,” says Jules, realizing how long she’s lived on East Gorham. “Spooky.”
Samhain facts:
• The festival marks the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the darker half of the year.
• Was celebrated widely in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man two millennia ago.
• The most significant of four annual fire festivals celebrated by pagan people. The others are Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh.
• Rituals involve thanking ancestors and warding off unwelcome spirits. People may have dressed as animals and monsters so fairies, or Sidhs, wouldn’t kidnap them.
• In the Middle Ages, the festival evolved regionally. People carved jack-o-lanterns out of turnips, held parades with noisemakers, and men threw burning sticks at each other.
• Believed to have influenced early Halloween celebrations when Christianity started to take hold of Western Europe in the seventh century.
