Since Miss Havisham Came to Stay

Miss Havisham is a very creepy life-size creation made by an artist friend of mine, Greg Harris. Better known for his wonderful impressionist paintings, he was inspired to create Miss Havisham after seeing Great Expectations as a teenager. Well, when Greg found out that I like to collect strange and creepy things, he decided that he would give Miss Havisham to me. She had been standing in a dark and dusty corner of his mom's house for many years - I guess his mom has nerves of steel!

Greg brought Miss Havisham over to my parent's house so I could pick her up there and that's when the fun began :-) Having quite a disturbing presence, my mom and dad looked for a place to put her where she wouldn't give them the willies so they stood her up in their guest room. They found it was just the thing when someone stopped by to visit to send them back to the guest room on the pretense of looking for something they needed, only to be frightened out of their wits by Miss Havisham standing there glancing sidelong at them. I understand my nephew Mark had this particular trick played on him quite effectively :-)


Eventually I got a call from my parents and they said I better come by and pick her up SOON. So Miss Havisham came to stay and my husband took quite a liking to her - calling her Miss Have-a-shoe for some strange reason. We had her standing in the living room at first, but even with my love for all things strange and scary, she was a bit too much for me, so I relocated her to the guest room (now the storage room of old house parts). Well, after a big garage sale and much moving around of old odds and ends from the old house parts room, she ended up in the living room in a chair, positioned somehow to be staring her dreadful stare right at my seat on the couch. I see my husband's hand in this ...


OK - I could take it - I love this stuff right? Well, it was all good, but then the husband decided to go shooting in the desert with the guys and left me home with Miss Havisham alone all night. I made the mistake of renting that scary movie The Orphange. So about halfway through this creepy thriller, I had had all of Miss Havisham's stare that I could take. I took off for my bedroom, locking the bedroom door behind me and escaped into reading Renovating Old Houses - a book recommended by Old House Slave, John of The Devil Queen blog fame. Luckily, reading about remedies for sagging foundations and rotten sill plates took my mind off our houseguest in the living room and I was able to get a good night's sleep.

This morning, I moved Miss Havisham back to the old house parts room where she is currently presiding over the various ghosts of several old houses and a few spiders - and I have reclaimed the living room for the living :-)