Next Time, Phone Home
You can go home again, but visiting your childhood haunts may leave you feeling spooked.

 BY AUDREY VAN BUSKIRK

The syrupy rain clouds finally lifted as I pulled off the Pennsylvania Turnpike just outside of Hershey. My thrill at finding the right exit through the gray was dampened only slightly when the grouchy woman in the toll booth announced "$8.90" after I handed her my slip. $8.90!? What kind of a state...oh right. It's the state of my idyllic country childhood, I reminded myself, of running though meadows, of horse-drawn buggies, of my storybook childhood home--a house I had just spent $8.90 and three hours driving to visit. Rolling down the window, I thought I could smell the chocolate memories of my youth.

 My family had lived in Rexmont, not far from the famous chocolate-making town. Entering Hershey, I felt rush after rush of sentimental nostalgia. The chocolate-kiss-shaped streetlights almost drove me to tears. When I found myself on a road I knew, the one that went right past the hospital where my dad had worked and right past Hershey Park, where I never could go enough, I felt at home.

Driving past Lebanon, around Mount Gretna and into Quentin, I kept seeing familiar signs. There's the antique mall where we bought the player piano; there's the place where we ate funnel cakes; there's the mall where I was Cinderella in a play; there's the Sears where I got my first bra; there's a building I've never seen before. Suddenly I was lost.

 Cursing the ridiculous rent-a-car map, I asked directions from a chubby cop. "You're going the completely wrong direction," he said in the annoyed tone you take with tourists.

 "I used to live here," I told him proudly. He looked aghast.

Though I now think visiting your childhood neighborhood is a very good vacation idea, I didn't go to Pennsylvania for that express purpose. I was in Pittsburgh for a wedding, and by an unlikely coincidence, my sister Sarah, who lives in Brooklyn, had made plans to spend a weekend at our old house, which has been turned into a bed and breakfast. I couldn't pass up seeing her and the house.

 Five hours after leaving my comfortable bed at the Pittsburgh Sheraton, I was regretting the decision. But after several more requests for directions, I was finally on a street I really did recognize. I drove by the Quentin Riding Club, where I'd had a horse named Snickers and collected stray cats. I found the road where my father took countless pictures of the ancient trees that bowed cathedral-like over the pavement. It led to my old school, Cornwall Elementary, which looked exactly the same. During the drive I'd had a nagging fear that my memory was idealized, or even if it wasn't, that progress or decay would have overtaken the area. Incredibly, there were no Starbucks, no outlet malls, no Indian casinos, no cookie-cutter housing developments.

After only one more wrong turn, I could see the house, set on a hill at Rexmont's only stop sign. The red brick walls and white trim shone brighter than my mind's eye had imagined. Pulling into the back parking lot--in between the peony garden I remembered planting (oh the bees!) and the barn that housed generations of swallows--I felt overcome.

 Then my sister came out and told me that the new owners insist the place is haunted.

 I don't know why I should care. I haven't lived there for almost 20 years, and aside from popping up in a dream now and then, Rexmont rarely crosses my mind.

 I've always been jealous of people who lived in the same place their whole lives. They know where their home is. When you haven't, it becomes a complicated question. Is home where you were born, where you went to school? Is it where you've lived the longest? Does it change throughout your life? And what makes a place feel like home? Is it a house? Your parents? Friends? Is it dependent on things--like pictures, a special blanket, grandma's piano? If everyone you know moves away from the place you call home, then what does that place become?

 The place where I went to elementary school felt like home to me at the time; once I left, I don't think I ever felt that blanket acceptance of a place again. Going back, that sense of comfort returned.

 I opened the front door as casually as I had as a kid. It looked exactly the same. Then I stepped into the front room and saw the "Weekend with a Psychic" brochure. For just $275, a person can spend two illuminating nights with Karyol Kirkpatrick, psychic and special investigator, "as seen on Donahue and Maury Povich shows."

 The new owner, Janet, came to meet me. "Hi," she said in a rush. "I'm so excited to meet you. Surely, since you're older," she tossed a disparaging glance at Sarah, "surely you remember the ghost." When it became clear that I'd never had any paranormal experiences there, she huffed and turned away. "It's been written up in magazines," she sniffed. "American Journal did something." My childhood home had been turned into an American Journal segment.

 Though Janet seemed disgusted with our lack of psychic connection, she couldn't resist telling us her story of the ghost that she claims to have seen several times. She believes that the house is haunted by Cyrus Rex, who built the house in 1875 and spent many years traveling in Europe with his companion, Dr. Andrew M. Gleninger. Janet says that the ghost appears dressed in women's clothes of that time but is too tall to be a woman. I wasn't aware that ghosts were necessarily confined to their earthly shapes, but she insists that it's Cyrus, dressed in women's clothing, living the life he couldn't live in the repressive 1880s. It doesn't say much for the afterlife if a would-be drag queen can't spend eternity singing in the clouds, but Janet seemed so miffed that I let it go.

 Ignoring the cover of lace doilies and bowls of potpourri, I could still see us in the house. The yard still held the scars of our elaborate swing set; two trees had the marks of our slide strung up on a thick cable. The electric fence separating our yard from the cows was still there, tempting a touch.

 The yard had a spring house dug into the side of a hill, where grown-ups told us travelers on the underground railroad had hid in tunnels. Fireflies lit up the lawn in summer, and though they always died by morning, we caught them in jars and hid them next to our beds.

 Though we traveled often--even taking a trip to Cornwall, England, with some kids from Cornwall Elementary--I remember feeling that the rest of the world was irrelevant. Is that what home feels like? I'm not sure, but the Rexmont Inn is back on the market. I didn't ask if it comes with the ghosts.