“A Few More Steps and We Were . . . On Some Edge of Things”: Staircases That Lead Nowhere, Part 2

3,706 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here ^[2])

“They Came Back Not Quite the Same”: Forest Stairs to Nowhere

A few years ago an anonymous Reddit user who claimed to be a United States Forest Ranger (henceforth Mr. Reddit) began to post stories about rescuing travelers in the parks of North America. As European men and women, we revel in tales of enchanted forests, Mirkwoods, and lonely dark paths through canopies taller than giants and trunks older than memory. They sing to our blood! The following are interesting twists to this genre.

According to Mr. Reddit, the “weirdest” of his search-and-rescue cases involved the appearance of “staircases in the woods,” often “30 or 40 miles” out in the wilderness. They looked as if someone had taken “the stairs [from his] house, cut them out, and put them in the forest.” Over the years, the staircases had “come in a variety of shapes, sizes, styles, and conditions. Some [were] pretty dilapidated, just ruins, but others [were] brand new.” In one instance, they “looked like they [had come] from a lighthouse . . . metal and spiral, almost old-fashioned.” A co-worker claimed that he’d even seen a staircase flipped upside down; some mysterious force had lifted the entire thing, then stuck it upright in the dirt, its shape forming a sideways “L.”^{[1] [3]}

The first time Mr. Reddit saw one of these incongruous structures, he asked his colleagues about it, but they all said “not to worry . . . that it was normal.” In fact, “Everyone [he] asked said the same thing,” almost as if it were a script they’d been instructed to read. Although he wanted to investigate these staircases further, he “was told, very emphatically, that [he] should never go near any of them.” At present, Mr. Reddit has learned to, more or less, ignore the stairs when encountering them, “because [they appear] so frequently.” What is unsettling about staircases in the woods, we ask. The obvious explanation for their existence is that they are the solid remnants of settlements that have since rotted away. And yet . . . the image triggers something in my mind; perhaps it does in readers’ minds as well. These staircases connected to nothing and going nowhere are things that I feel/fear have visited me in dreams. They are intermediate in a number of ways, between the natural mountain and man-made house; seemingly artificial staircases found in a nearly human-free environment.

After one of Mr. Reddit’s first missions (the rescue of a four-year-old boy), his trainer took him by a detour to “show [him] one of the hot spots where [they] tend[ed] to find missing people.” There was “a natural dip in the land near a popular trail,” enticing many hikers to “move downhill because [it was] easier.” It was all state-protected land, meaning that “there [couldn’t] be any kind of commercial or residential development out [there].” The most a traveler “would ever see [was] a fire tower or makeshift shelter that homeless people” thought they might get away with building. He and his partner continued walking a few miles into the woods, the latter constantly “pointing out places [where she had] found people in the past.” Then, Mr. Reddit saw “something in the distance.” Pausing, he noticed that whatever it was had “straight edges” — peculiar, since nature rarely contains such perfect lines. When he mentioned it, the trainer said nothing. Instead, she “hung back” and allowed him to investigate on his own. He got to

within about twenty feet of it, [when] all the hair on the back of [his] neck [stood] up. [It was] a staircase. In the middle of the f**g woods. In the proper context, it would literally [have been] the most benign thing ever . . . just a normal staircase, with beige carpet, and about ten steps tall. But instead of being in a house, where it obviously should [have been], [it was] out [there] . . . The sides [weren’t] carpeted . . . and [he could] see the wood [it was] made of. [It was] almost like a video game glitch, [in which] the house [had] failed to load completely and the stairs [were] the only thing visible.

For minutes Mr. Reddit stood there, dumbstruck, his “brain . . . working overtime to try and make sense of what [he was] seeing.” The trainer approached, then simply said, “get used to it, rookie.” But her casual mien was belied by a subtle, indescribable tension. As he began to move closer to the steps, she “grabbed his arm.” “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she said. “You’re gonna see them all the time, but don’t go near them. Don’t touch them, don’t go up them. Just ignore them.” He opened his mouth to question her, “but something in the way [she was] looking at” him told Mr. Reddit that it was best to remain silent. The two moved on. The subject didn’t “come up again for the rest of [his] training.” But “she was right,” he added. “Every fifth call” or so, Mr. Reddit would run into a set of stairs. At times they were next to the path — “within two or three miles” of it. But other times, they were “twenty, thirty miles out,” rescue teams finding them only “during the broadest searches or training weekends.” They came in all different kinds, all different sizes. But the biggest, and perhaps strangest staircase of all his acquaintance seemed as if it had once been part of a “turn-of-the-century mansion,” its length “at least ten feet wide, with steps leading up at least fifteen or twenty feet” high. Even so, and since that first unnatural sighting, Mr. Reddit found that all of his veteran colleagues gave him “the same response [his] trainer [had]”: It’s normal. Don’t worry about it, they’re not a big deal . . . but don’t go close to them or, heaven forbid, climb them.

Almost all of them, anyway. The plot thickened when a park “buddy” regaled Mr. Reddit about his own confrontation with an Unidentified Forest Object. “Buddy” and his team were searching for a teenage girl ten miles from the main woodpath when he, too, saw a solitary flight of stairs. “Curiosity got the better of him,” and Buddy left the group to check them out. To his surprise, the steps were “pristine and white”; no debris from leaves or dirt marred their perfect surfaces. At first, Buddy felt no sense of alarm, only bewilderment. But then, “he slowly climbed the stairs.” The whole time, he half-expected an alien to appear, or the rest of his crew to jump from the nearby brambles, yelling Gotcha! Still, “he got to the top with little event, and he stood there looking around.” However, as the seconds passed, the air began to shift. “The longer he stood on the top step, the more he felt like he was doing something very, very wrong.” He had crossed a boundary into a dimension where he had “no business.” It was the feeling that at any moment “someone was going to come and arrest [him], or shoot [him] in the back of the head.”

As Mr. Reddit had before him, Buddy “tried to brush [the foreboding] off, but the feeling got stronger and stronger,” until he realized that he could hear nothing — not even the roar of his own blood pulsing through his ears. “The sounds of the forest were gone” in an aural vacuum that reminded him of “some kind of weird, awful tinnitus, but more oppressive.” Regretting the climb, Buddy scurried back down and rejoined the search party. He decided not to mention what he’d done. The crew failed to find the missing girl, and when night fell, they all trudged back to base. Buddy’s superior soon cornered him. Words and face harsh with “intense anger,” the lead ranger asked if Buddy had approached the staircase — a question that was more of an accusation. “You went up them, didn’t you?” Taken aback, Buddy wondered how his trainer knew. Clear answers were not forthcoming, and his boss merely shook his head. “[I know you did,] because we didn’t find her. The dogs lost her scent,” he answered. “What has that got to do with anything?” asked Buddy. Anyway, he had only been on the stairs for a minute’s time, probably less. To this, “The trainer gave him [a] really awful, almost dead-eyed look, and told him that if he ever went up another set of stairs again, he’d be fired.”

These are just a few selections from Mr. Reddit’s “staircase in the woods” treasury, that also includes episodes of sinister taunts and odd deer antlers. Some seem like obvious exaggerations. But others have an undefinable something — “that ring of truth that only really traumatizing events have.” Explanations have ranged from the mundane (they’re a bunch of stairs that are all that’s left of old dwelling places, you dummy; Mr. Reddit is concocting wild tall tales, or he has been the victim of hazing rituals) to the extraordinary (they are passages for interdimensional aliens or demons). Regardless, they resonated with the wider online public. Even if the presence of these staircases have rational explanations, the fact that they might be out there — seemingly detached from anything visible, seemingly of no use — makes us wonder, in spite of ourselves. We are driven to give them a use; to attach them to some intent. Do they really go . . . nowhere? This is as disturbing to us as an individual, or a people that has lost its connection to purpose. Staircases in the woods are out-of-place, or displaced, as are the persons who presumably installed them. If the truth lies in a supernatural direction, however, were those stairs put there for us to go up, or for something else to come down? Should everyone disappear from the Earth tomorrow, the idea that there would be countless staircases left to wait in vain for our ghost-feet is a vision that would make our abandoned planet seem less quietly peaceful and more disquieting. Something terrible has happened, they will communicate to any future passers-by. For my part, should I ever spot a lone staircase in the woods, I haven’t decided whether I will climb them, or if I will “just ignore them” and move on to the more familiar, friendly trail.

“The Stairs Were Dark . . . But I Did Not Stop”: Mansion Stairs to Nowhere

British architect J. J. Stevenson once said that “an Englishman’s house is his castle . . . the ownership of land includes the earth below it and the heavens above.”^{[2] [8]} And what connects the “earth below” to the “heavens above?” Staircases, of course; ones tangible and imaginary. This brings us to the final variety: those house-stairs that lead to no known destination “above,” or “below.” Before the twentieth century, stairwells — often located within interior walls, or towers — were not carpeted, nor were they sufficiently lit with windows or glass brick. Stair-trekkers relied on torches, candles, and hand-held lanterns to guide them. The distinctive grumbles of old houses muttering under their own weight echoed off the stone. Women gingerly hiked up their long skirts, whose length could be as dangerous as the dark before making the ascent. They were therefore the perfect setting for manifestations of the uncanny.

Few people recognize the importance of stairs in Robert Chambers’ famous collection of short stories, The King in Yellow. Most find themselves riveted to the image conjured by its title, or to the mysterious play around which the action turns, a play whose second act haunted all of its readers unto the verge of despair, then plunged them down into the depths of madness and suicide. A closer study reveals that all of these tales featured real and metaphorical staircases to other worlds. Have you found the yellow sign?  The narrator in “Repairer of Reputations” “climbed the three dilapidated flights of stairs” that led him to the enigmatic Mr. Wilde — a man intent upon fulfilling the designs of a supernatural deity/entity. Indeed, “The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon [paled] before that which could not rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their unborn thoughts . . . [for] he [was] a king whom emperors have served.” Shuddering in dread and ecstasy, the narrator answered, “You are speaking of the King in Yellow . . .” After receiving his instructions, he left Wilde and “stepped into the corridor. The stairs were dark.”^{[3] [9]} Did these return him to street-level, or did they, like the lines of the cryptic play, transport him to where

the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink behind the lake,
The Shadows lengthen
In Carcosa [?]

Did he arrive

where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
[To] stranger still,
Lost Carcosa [?]^{[4] [10]}

This imagery — “trembling,” “worm-eaten,” “old ruinous,” and “unlighted” stairs — were repeated throughout the book.^{[5] [11]} Each stanza or act was a successive step toward something too vague to describe, too horrible to contemplate, and yet too irresistible to ignore.

Chambers compiled these stories and had them published in 1895. Beyond the borrowings from authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce, The King in Yellow might have owed its inspiration to the wider nineteenth-century fascination for mansion-stairs. There are too many Victorian stories to count whose plots revolved around some grand staircase, hidden staircase, or staircase that caused a fatal tumble. The upper-middle classes of Europe and America were responsible for an enormous nineteenth-century construction boom. Industrial fortunes granted newly-affluent families the ability to build multiple homes in different places for the different seasons: a stylish town home for winter; a spacious country estate for summer; a western ranch where railroad magnates could play at cowboy; an eastern residence where families could throw parties and marry off their daughters. Southern plantation homes featured great halls and majestic, marbled staircases that flew up to second- and third-floor galleries. At times, they modeled their new homes on the confectionary image of medieval castles. Concealed steps to “alchemy” laboratories appeared, and staircase turrets and towers returned, this time lit with ornate glass-windows.

When New England native Sarah Pardee-Winchester inherited her husband’s fortune (from the Winchester firearms company that he founded), the spirits of her dead family seemed to close in around her. She left for San Francisco, then designed and built what became the infamous 24,000 square-foot Winchester House. It was furnished with 160 bedrooms, 10,000 windows, 20,000 doors, and 40 staircases.^{[6] [13]} From the 1880s until her death, construction on the enormous property hardly ever slowed, so that the home’s shifting and constant expansion seemed almost “organic,” almost as if it were building itself, or eating up the space around it. In a bit of an understatement, Sarah once described the house as “rambling.” Inside, there were as many styles as there were rooms: trinkets taken from fairs and exhibitions; German chandeliers and Austrian crystal; English wall and floor-coverings; Asian furniture below to French paintings. Flanking the sides of a ballroom, stained-glass scenes were built around various Shakespearean quotations. One of these was a selection from Richard II, a rumination on the deposed King’s fate: “These same [haunted] thoughts people this little world,” Richard murmured to the solitary walls of his prison. A second inscription from Troilus and Cressida read: “Wide unclasp the table of their thoughts . . .” Apt lines for Sarah’s temperament, but odd choices for a ballroom — unless the designer had no intention of putting it to use, but planned it only for wallowing in the “little world” that had become an obsession, even a prison, of her “thoughts.”

One of the strangest aspects of the Winchester House were stairs that led nowhere. Most say that this mansion’s bizarre design was merely due to an old lady whose wealth allowed her to indulge her eccentric creativity. Perhaps she meant for her four sisters and/or other relatives to live with her and thus kept remodeling the house in anticipation of future guests. The builders, working at all hours, needed rooms in which to rest. But what contemporary viewers found were not wings awaiting visitors, but hallway-mazes that twisted this way and that for miles and for no apparent reason. Walls of stained glass made to resemble a spider’s web added to the sense of falling into a black widow’s couloirs. Indeed, the house seemed fashioned to catch the living and the dead. It is no surprise that others have insisted that Sarah meant the Winchester House to be a trap for the ghosts that tormented her. To her way of thinking, these wraiths would take one of the hallways to no destination, then become confused, losing their way and thus their ability to disturb her peace. Stairs and ghosts are spiritually similar. They are tied to certain spots, yet they wander. They are links to “the other side,” but have not crossed over themselves. According to local legend, the moment that construction crews received news of their client’s death, they fled. Boards were half-nailed down, as if abandoned mid-hammer blow.

Like it has done to some of the more popular mountain trails, the tourist industry has sapped the place of its unquiet energy, at least by sunlight. But popularity fades as surely as the day. Mansions eventually crumble into a pleasant kind of rot, their very dilapidation breathing new life into “haunted houses.” Where else can one find the essence of the two great human fears that signify nowhere — infinity and zero — in such immediate form: those corridors that are both endless mazes and dead-ends?

Nowhere-stairs that represent zero and infinity, and are placed inside domestic scenes have also appeared in our art. M. C. Escher’s houses of impossible stairs, or stairs that go round in ceaseless circles, were as mathematically and visually appealing as they were disorienting. It is a “quantum feat,” to go up and down at the same time. Escher once described his House of Stairs (1951) as “playful,” a draftsman’s exercise in which “roughly the whole of the top half [was] the mirror image of the bottom half.” The overall effect eliminated “the distinction between ascending and descending” action.^{[7] [16]} Most of us have agreed that there is a “playful”-ness to the piece. But the overwhelming sense is one of dizziness, as our visual neurons are drawn into a climb that lasts forever, while at the same time they demand that we avert our gazes, lest the slight vertigo also continue to pound away at our brains. The grotesque worm/centipedes that marched up and down with their human limbs add to the off-kilter experience.

Relativity (1953) took this effect to yet another level. In this piece, Escher imagined three forces of gravity working perpendicularly to one another: “Three earth-planes cut across . . . at right-angles, and human beings [were] living on each” plane. Were any one of them aware of the other two dimensions? No; though they seemed to share the same staircase, it would have been “impossible for the inhabitants of [these] different worlds to walk or sit or stand on the same floor, because they [had] differing conceptions of what [was] horizontal and what [was] vertical.” On the top staircase, for instance, there were two individuals processing side-by-side and in the same direction, yet one of them was going downstairs and the other upstairs. Contact between them was “out of the question,” for they inhabited different realities and therefore could have “no knowledge of each other’s existence.”^{[8] [17]} Boundless imaginations have limits when expressing ideas on the page, but there could theoretically have existed an infinite number of these alternate worlds, these planes that constantly passed by one another without seeing past their own little footsteps. Escher’s was a trippy universe into which both Chambers’ Yellow King and Sarah Winchester’s meandering house would have fit — as much as “infinite zero” could fit, at least.

Profound conclusions come from first recognizing the obvious. While writing this piece, it became apparent to me that the ghostly — the immaterial — is intimately connected to, even dependent, on the material. And what is “the material”? It is the stuff-ness of our lives: the history we can handle, the things we can see, the ground beneath our feet — yes, the stairways we can climb — that show us who we are and where we are going. Each of these tales were about “lost” people. Tellingly, they got lost while taking the stairs, a common structure that, by definition, leads to definite, solid places and stories. Or so we think. Though it is a pale reflection of actually being taken captive, stairs to nowhere likewise instill a sense of being held hostage; of being suspended in amber between home and away. Lost in plain sight — or beyond plain sight. I have come to a deeper understanding of the word “unsettling.” It combines the comfortable anchor of settle — as in moored to the foundations of a house, or the roots of familiar foothills — and introduces the un, a negative, even alien, element to the domestic image. Indeed, “settling” itself is a term that means a thing that has moved in the past, and might still be moving in the present — settling, or sinking into the ground — and subtly suggests that whatever it describes will never truly be “settled” at all. It is this kind of familiar/not-familiar elegance that characterizes a good autumn yarn. It is also the kind of feeling that makes a person want to gulp hard, turn around, and attempt the climb tomorrow.

After all, the stairs aren’t going anywhere.

Notes

^{[1] [19]} All of the quotations are from Reddit threads, the collection of which can be found here ^[20].

^{[2] [21]} Philppa Lewis, House: British Domestic Architecture (London: Prestel, 2011), 7.

^{[3] [22]} Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow ^[23] (Project Gutenberg, 2011).

^{[4] [24]} Ibid.

^{[5] [25]} The King in Yellow is a collection of ten pieces of short fiction. The first story is explicitly about the mysterious Yellow King and his awful play (though the play itself is only sparsely quoted from), while the others evince varying degrees of weirdness, from the horrific to the romantic. All refer back in some way to the first story.

^{[6] [26]} For more on the Winchester House, see Mary Jo Ignoffo’s Captive of the Labyrinth: Sarah L. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2010).

^{[7] [27]} M. C. Escher, The Graphic Work of M. C. Escher (New York: Ballantine, 1967), 14.

^{[8] [28]} Ibid., 14.