Over the years, people have asked if I’ve ever encountered the ghost of the person I was writing about. The answer has always been no. But with Carson McCullers, the southern writer of novels such as The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding, it’s a little different. I spent two weeks living in the Georgia house where she spent her childhood and adolescence in the 1920s. Something was up in that green-and-white bungalow on Stark Avenue, in Columbus. While I’ve still never met a ghost, in McCullers’s house, I came damn close.
McCullers’s childhood home is a handsome little place with a generous stucco front porch, low rooflines, high ceilings, and a deep backyard with a scuppernong arbor. There are camellia japonica shrubs in front and a holly tree as tall as the house in back. Her family moved there in 1926, when McCullers was nine, her brother eight, and her little sister four. McCullers left home in 1937, though she often returned for visits.
