The haunting.(First Person)

ALL OF US are haunted by something in our childhood--an event or a person, an atmosphere or a feeling. I am haunted by a house, the house my parents bought the year I was born. It was a large, crumbling eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manor house, with dilapidated seventeenth-century outbuildings, in a south-western French village called Empeaux. It was a deeply unfashionable and eccentric buy at the time--though cheap--for Empeaux was much too remote--a whole thirty-five kilometres from the nearest city of Toulouse--for most people to want to live there.

Set in what seemed to us to be vast overgrown parklands, the house, which my father had named "La Nouvelle ...