It’s hard (impossible?) to be a resident of Salem, Massachusetts, without having an acute sense of Salem’s history, an awareness of the infusion of witchcraft culture into the tiny metropolis, and a feeling for the twists, turns, and final spillage of this history and culture into the yearly Halloween frenzy. Salem has a delightful dark side; it has a culture of tolerance, inclusion, inspiration, imagination, and fantasy; and it has a lot of good clean fun that comes dressed as anything you want to be. Looking through Salem for objects to add to the doll house, it was clear that it had to be a haunted house.

Why a doll house? Maybe because it was there and it caught my fancy at the right moment. Anyway, something about it spoke to me and said take me home. So far the venture of rehabilitating this shell of a Victorian doll house has sucked me into a 1:12 scale world I was completely unfamiliar with. I have found it to be absorbing to the point of inversely affecting many of my other efforts and obligations. But it has also been an opportunity to image and create unique philosophical, social, and fanciful, spaces. Where most of today’s toys, and doll houses, for children are about activities, this Doll House is about states of mind, relationships, and the power of stories.