How to Sell a Haunted House

When the cleaning crew arrives again, Louise is waiting for them outside the house. She tells them that she is going to go through the art collection before they can begin to work. The cleaning crew leaves, and when Mark arrives, she shows him the will, telling him that he will have to wait to sell until she finishes going through the art collection.

While Mark calls Brody, Louise begins working in the garage. She is determined to take as long as possible. When he finds out she is right, he asks her why she is doing it. Louise reflects that it is because of how their mother always treated the two of them, but she just tells him it is what Nancy wanted. He reminds her that she hated their mother, had made fun of her art, and even made her cry.

Mark decides to wait outside the house instead of leaving to make sure she doesn’t take anything. Louise slowly begins to work, as inefficiently as possible. She takes one piece, the Squirrel Nativity, out to the garage, but when she opens the trash can, she realizes that Pupkin, whom she had disposed of earlier, is gone.

Mark reminds her that she will have to go home soon, and then he will sell the house. In response, she threatens to move to Charleston with Poppy and extend the process indefinitely. Her thoughts return to Pupkin: She can’t escape the feeling that Pupkin has escaped and is now angry.

When Louise tries to take her stuffed animals, Mark stops her, saying that their parents paid for them, so they aren’t hers. In retaliation, Louise decides to throw all her mother’s puppets, which Mark loves, into the trash. She stops, however, reflecting on how much of her mother’s life was spent on her work.

Louise curls up on the bed in her parents’ room, remembering sleeping in there as a child when she was ill. She remembers that Nancy had wanted Louise to respect her art, but Louise had mocked it. She feels like she is failing as their child and like everything they worked so hard for, in the end, will be thrown away.

Out of exhaustion, she falls asleep, and when she wakes up, it is afternoon. She sees a squirrel in the room and thinks that one has gotten in the house somehow. At the same time, she realizes that what she thought was a pillow on her neck is another squirrel that begins crawling down her shirt. She recognizes them as parts of the Squirrel Nativity. The three squirrels from the nativity scene are all listening for her to move because their eyes are sewn shut.

She kills one with a badminton racket and then runs into the bathroom and slams the door. She can hear the other two scrabbling at the door, and when one puts its head under the door, she crushes it with her foot. When she opens the door again, however, all three squirrels are gone.

Louise goes out into the garage, where Mark is cutting plywood to cover the window she broke earlier. When she opens the trash can, the Squirrel Nativity is there, but the squirrels are crushed just as she killed them. She tries to convince herself that they were damaged when she threw them in the trash, but in the back of her mind, she thinks they were angry, like Pupkin. She turns and tells Mark that she is finished, telling him to sell the house.

As Louise walks to her car, Mark follows her, asking why she has changed her mind. She tells him that she was doing it because he always got everything but that she can’t do it anymore and is going home. She drives away, looking in the rearview mirror at Mark, alone. She can hear her stuffed animals in her head, calling her back, but feels relieved as she drives away, vowing to sever all ties with her family. She tries to convince herself that the scratches on her stomach from the squirrels are just from cleaning out the house.

When she gets back to the hotel, she texts Ian and asks to Facetime with Poppy. Poppy looks terrible and is talking baby talk. She looks relieved when Louise tells her she is coming home tomorrow. Ian is relieved as well; Poppy is wetting the bed, and his mother has made an appointment with a child psychologist. While she is on the phone with them, Mark keeps calling, but she ignores his calls. Then, she hears a banging on her window. Mark is outside, wanting to talk to her.

Mark has Mercy on the phone, and it becomes clear that he wants her to stay to deal with the estate details. Mercy says that she will only sell the house if Louise is involved and gets 50%. In the end, Louise agrees to stay one more week, the length of her original stay. She calls Ian back, and it is difficult to break the news to him and Poppy.

Louise arrives at the house at nine o’clock the next morning to clean it before Mercy does her walk-through that afternoon. She waits outside for Mark, thinking about all of the dolls inside. She starts to believe that, after existing for so long, they must have started thinking. When Mark arrives, they go inside and find the Mark and Louise dolls on the couch. Mark is surprised by the boarded-up attic door, just as she was. Louise tells him her theory that their father boarded it up because of squirrels.

Mark is upset about getting rid of Nancy’s things, and Louise doesn’t want to do it either, but Mercy will base the price of the house on what she sees when she gets there. As she starts putting dolls in garbage bags, Mark identifies each and tells Louise stories about them. She finally offers to give him the dolls, and soon, all that is left is the Mark and Louise dolls. Neither of them wants to touch them.

When they go out to the garage to dispose of the dolls, neither of them wants to go back inside. When they do, they discover that the power is out. While Mark goes to fix the problem, Louise opens the refrigerator and finds half of a sandwich, which she knows that her father had wrapped. She remembers her father baking stollen for friends and family every holiday.

Louise sees a puppet down the sink drain and reaches in to free it. Suddenly, the garbage disposal turns on. She jerks her hand out and falls across the room. Mark has turned the power back on, and when he comes back inside, she suggests they wait for Mercy outside.

When Mercy arrives, Louise goes in with her and Mark waits outside. Louise sees that the Mark and Louise dolls are no longer in the living room. Mark couldn’t have moved them because he was with her all day. She starts to get spooked but controls herself. Mercy talks about the changes they will have to make before selling. They hear a thump from the attic, and both assume there are squirrels up there. In Nancy and Eric’s bedroom, they are surprised by the Mark and Louise dolls standing in the corner of the room. Even Mercy notices that the house seems strange.

In the bathroom, they are both startled when something knocks below the sink. Louise makes the excuse that it is the pipes. Outside after the tour, Mercy tells them she won’t sell their house until they deal with the fact that it is haunted. She recommends that they ask Aunt Gail to cleanse it, as she has done for other houses before.

After Mercy leaves, Louise turns on Mark for bringing her back when she had almost left. Like Mercy, Mark is convinced that the house is haunted, but Louise still won’t admit it. He refuses to sell the house, saying that if the house is being haunted by their parents, he won’t cleanse it. As they are arguing, the sun sets.

Louise decides to switch tactics and manipulate Mark as their mother used to. She falls back on a family ritual: Pizza Chinese. She convinces him to participate in the family ritual and says they will ask their parents to leave the house. He is reluctant to go into the house after dark, but in the end, he agrees.

Pizza Chinese was their parents’ New Year’s Eve party tradition—every year, they would have a big party and order pizza and Chinese food. While Mark is picking up the food, Louise tries to make the house feel warm and welcoming. Before they eat, Mark speaks to their parents, and Louise chimes in. When they hear a thump in the attic, Mark gets excited, and they wait for their parents to tell them what to do. Mark tells Louise that he had agreed to Pizza Chinese to give her some closure with Nancy.

Louise realizes that it is time for her nightly call with Poppy, but Ian texts her that Poppy doesn’t want to talk to her. Instead, Louise refocuses on her goal of getting Mark to sell the house. Mark says that the night of the accident, Nancy told Aunt Honey that their dad had been attacked. Louise corrects him, saying that their father had an attack. Mark worries that it might have been the opposite and wonders, if so, what had attacked him and whether it was connected to the boarded-up attic door.

Mark says that, to get rid of the bad energy in the house, Louise has to admit what she did to Mark when they were younger. She responds by yelling at him for his behavior when they were teenagers, and he is incredulous that she doesn’t remember what she did to him. Mark tells her she tried to kill him. Louise thinks that he is wrong—she didn’t try to kill him, Pupkin did.

Louise had a collection of stuffed animals when she was very young, but she loved Pupkin the most because he was so special to her mother. She spoke for Pupkin, and while the adults thought she was saying what she wanted, she was voicing Pupkin’s thoughts that appeared in her own head.

When Mark, as a baby, began eating with the family, it disrupted dinner, and her parents bickered. That night, Pupkin told Louise that Mark eating with them ruined everything and made him want to do something bad. She quieted him, but he was angry, and afterward, her other stuffed animals were scared of him. When Pupkin took one of her stuffed animal’s heads off, Louise got angry enough to act. She locked Pupkin in the closet.

In the middle of the night, however, she woke up to Pupkin trying to get out of the closet. Her stuffed animals were angry and turned their backs on her. Pupkin got out of the closet and climbed over her in bed. He bit down on her finger so hard that she thought he would bite it off. He told her she had to do as he said. Scared, Louise agreed.

Pupkin ordered her to do hurtful things to Mark, but her brother responded by wanting to be closer to her. When Christmas arrived, they visited some family friends, the Calvins. After they opened their gifts, Mr. Calvin took Louise and Mark into the backyard. Louise, who was five at the time, had Pupkin on one hand and was holding two-year-old Mark’s hand in the other. Pupkin wanted to see the ice, so Louise took them to the Calvins’ pond. Louise went out onto the ice, and Mark followed her. Pupkin told her to tell Mark to go further onto the ice until he fell through. She and Pupkin watched until the water was calm again and then returned to the house.

Louise then told everyone, as Pupkin said, that Mark was in the bathroom. Mr. Calvin, however, found him in the pond. He and Nancy drove Mark to the hospital, while Mrs. Calvin stayed with Louise. Afterward, Louise stayed at Aunt Honey’s house for two days, and when she finally got home, her parents wouldn’t allow her into Mark’s room. She heard her parents arguing, but Pupkin was happy, so Louise was happy too.

When they took her into Mark’s room, he held out his hand, and she took it but then asked to go to her room. Pupkin wanted to watch television, but she didn’t care—she wanted her other, kinder stuffed animals. They withdrew from her, scared, and she realized that her stuffed animals hated her. She dug a hole in the backyard and, against his squirming and protests, buried Pupkin. Once she was back in the house, Pupkin’s voice faded away, but her stuffed animals never spoke to her again.

Louise protests that Mark is remembering the story wrong, even as she can hear Pupkin’s voice in her head. In her version of the story, Mark wanders away and falls into the pond. He tells her that, even though the family would prefer he didn’t, he remembers it clearly. All his life, he has wanted someone in the family to admit what happened, but no one ever has. He remembers looking up from the water and seeing her leave and gets angry when she tries to change the story again. He tells Louise that he remembered everything when he was 14.

Louise tries again to convince him that he is wrong, but Mark is adamant. She then turns the subject to his failed college and careers. He argues that their family is full of secrets. His perspective is that the entire family has always been afraid of making her angry and gaslighted him because of it. Even so, she had always acted like she was better than all of them. He made the funeral arrangements because, after their parents died, he was sure that she wouldn’t even bother to come home.

Mark goes to the bathroom and then calls for Louise, sounding scared. When she goes in, she sees the Mark and Louise dolls in the bathroom and a lipstick message on the wall reading “Mark Kom Hom” (190). Mark and Louise are each convinced the other did it—she is angry, but he is confused. He decides to leave the house and says she should, too. She reacts by losing her temper and yelling at him that he is a failure. He is shocked that she thinks that about him, telling her that at least he is smart enough to get out of a haunted house. When she continues to attack him, he turns and leaves in silence. She follows, haranguing him all the way to his truck.

Mark stops and reminds her of a time when he was 10 years old and they snuck out of the house. She had taken him outside, at night, and they went to the cemetery. They dared each other to run through it and ended up laughing together. He brings her back to the present, saying that he is talking to that sister when he tells her to leave the house. Louise has a moment where she thinks about it, but then she pushes it aside and returns to her assertion that ghosts don’t exist. She also backtracks on his story about the drowning. Frustrated, Mark leaves her there. Louise considers going to her hotel room but decides to stay the night in the house instead.

Louise is upset that things have fallen apart, and Mark doesn’t know the whole story. After she buried Pupkin, she saw him on her parents’ bed the next day, looking brand new. That day, when Pupkin returned, she decided to believe an alternate story, in which she didn’t bury Pupkin and hadn’t drowned Mark. After that decision, she became practical, withdrawing from the puppets and focusing on the real world. She hadn’t even thought about the true story until tonight.

Louise turns off the lights and goes into her bedroom. She wedges a chair under the doorknob, wishing she had gone back to her hotel. She has a terrible dream about Pupkin and Poppy, and when she wakes up, her bedroom door is open. When she reaches for her phone, Pupkin attaches himself to her arm and won’t let go. She jumps from the bed toward the door, falling over a chair in the hallway. While she is detangling herself from the chair, Pupkin lands on her and she ends up on her back, with the puppet standing on her chest.

When she reaches to push him off, he stabs her eye with a sewing needle. She stands, tries to get her bearings, and then pulls the needle out of her eye. When Pupkin comes for her again, she runs back to her bedroom, but before she can close it, he gets inside. She runs for the closet and tries to close the door, but he stabs her fingers with another needle. Before he can reach her, however, she hears gunshots and sees Mark shooting the puppet over and over.

Louise runs for the door and climbs into Mark’s truck. They drive away, but she yells for him to stop and throws up on the side of the road. She wants to go to the emergency room, but he looks at her eye, pronounces it fine, and takes her to Waffle House. When she can’t order, he orders for her, remembering what she always ordered as a kid.

She is still worried about her eye, but he forces her to open it, arguing that people get shots in their eyes all the time. After a moment, she can see fine and starts to relax. She starts to laugh hysterically, and Mark excuses her behavior to the server. Louise thinks of The Velveteen Rabbit and laughs even harder. She thinks that she should have a psychological evaluation, but Mark tells her that Pupkin is behind everything and forces her to confront the truth about what just happened. His theory is that all the energy her mother invested into Pupkin stayed with him and even spread to some of the other dolls and puppets.

While Louise is still avoiding the truth, Mark stays calm and straightforward. He forces her to acknowledge what she knows happened, not letting her fall back on what she wants to believe. He decides to tell her why he dropped out of college, which began with him joining a radical puppet collective.