How to handle the Koçare ancestor ghost haunting your Airbnb

Hint: you make like an Albanian Jordan Peele movie and DIL JASHTË (GET OUT).

The Airbnb felt off the second I opened the door.

Usually, I feel intense relief, especially after a long day of travel. But this evening, haint smoke wafted. Albanian whispers floated down the carpet-covered stairs: dil jashtë. I paused. Tired and wanting to rest, and having already prepaid for three nights, I started gaslighting myself:

Stop imagining things. Don’t exaggerate. The heebs just mean you need rest. Everything will look better in the morning.

And so, like any respectable horror movie heroine, I picked up my luggage and marched straight into the trap I’d set for myself.

1) one of two bedrooms for just me 2) Turns out it's dark inside the Jeannie bottle 3) Breakables 4) I was charmed by how the mops are dried outside the kitchen window on the roof.

I’d originally picked Korçë, a small city in southeast Albania, near Greece, as a base to explore architectural ruins and this delicious savory pancake. I would befriend Korçë during my stay, but we got off to a rough start.

First off, I had problems driving the quaint, one-way, narrow cobbled streets, which don’t feel so quaint when saddled with an SUV because the rental companies all insist they are out of compacts.

Insider travel tip: Gmaps is fine for the main roads, but will fail you in the old towns, where you never know when a winding turn leads to a dead-end, construction, a pothole, or a creatively parked Mercedes.

Gmaps will send you the wrong way down one-way streets designed for donkeys, much to the chagrin of the neighborhood, whose residents emerge to wave as you slowly reverse, dutifully playing the role of blobby tourist boob.

Eventually, I found the red metal gate from the picture in the check-in instructions. Yay.

A pack of dogs emerged. They seemed friendly, but no one wants to be featured on the Yahoo! News splash page, “Woman Traveling Alone Captures Final Photo Before Doggos Render Her Apart.”

At what point do dogs stop begging you for food and see you as the food?

Next, like any proper Goth story, I was greeted by a taciturn gatekeeper.

After minutes of clanging and grunting as I struggled to release a gate pin from the concrete drive, a woman emerged. Without a word, she demonstrated the proper Fonzi maneuver, bam!, and just as quickly, evaporated.

Had she even been there?

A mere 50-point turn later, I was in the driveway, no dents or scratches. Phew.

Here’s a picture from the window the next morning. What you can’t see is the “V” intersection right behind the gate, and the Mercedes parked exactly where I needed to reverse at an angle. But once inside, I had a room with a view, unchaperoned! You can’t see the mountains so well, but they were there.

Before booking, I’d scouted the location. I’d checked for a parking space and a kitchen in case I needed to cook a fish. Nooks for reading and writing. Price, of course. Check. Check. Check.

Online, the velvet sofas, opulent curtains, and handwoven rugs looked as though I’d get to sleep inside my own Ottoman-inspired I Dream of Jeannie bottle.

No froofy girl who grew up in the 70s can resist the opportunity to crawl into a Jeannie bottle. Fun fact: the bottle was a limited-edition Jim Beam decanter, which explains a lot about me.

What I failed to check: signs of the paranormal.

Albanians are known for their hospitality and the saying, “Our house belongs to God and the guest.” I’ve heard that if invited, you will be showered with hospitality.

If invited.

One of the reviewers had written, “This place is too big for one person!” I shrugged her off because I’m American, what is this “too big” you speak of?

Too late, I understood what the reviewer meant: she’d been trying to say the place was haunted. An Albanian matriarch had once ruled here, and her presence remains.

I could hear the pitter-patter of grandchildren’s feet padding down the hallway. Smell the special occasion dinner roasting. Chatter echoed of parents, siblings, husbands, and wives debating the latest family politics.

The place had been purged of that family’s life, the drawers and closets emptied, the kitchen and bathroom Airbnbified, but that night, after a cautiously boiled pasta with tomato sauce, the bed sheets wrapped me like a shroud. They repeated the hallway whisper, sotto voce, “Dil jashtë.”

I couldn’t escape the feeling that Grandma had either died or been put in a home before cousin Fatmir came up with this Airbnb idea.

The more I was in the space, the more I saw Grandma. The darkly curtained room with pink walls and red velvet couches. The breakables, three sets of cream and sugar bowls alone. The black and gold clock hanging on the wall that stopped ticking at 11:20 in 1983. And the clincher: a cellophane-wrapped lampshade.

The reason I rented the place turned out to be the reason I needed out: the personal touch.

This light fixture is stunning, tho. Let’s take a minute to admire it.

“To know what we fear is to know who we are,” writes Guillermo de Toro in his introduction to the Penguin Horror series, which includes classics such as The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher.

So, what was it that this place made me fear? What was it telling me about who I am?

• I’m afraid I’m going to scrape this rental car, and even though I paid for the insurance, go bankrupt paying for damages and wind up homeless under a bridge.

• I’m afraid of people not wanting me in their homes.

• I’m afraid of growing old, dying, and someone turning my highly personalized house into an Airbnb, which I’m forced to haunt.

• I’m afraid that Albania is falling into the neoliberal consumer trap, and I’m contributing by renting this Airbnb, which makes me a late-stage capitalist and a cliché.

• I’m afraid I have a quaintness problem. See also: “authenticity.”

• I’m afraid I’m Orientalist (meaning I fetishize the East) and need to reread Edward Said, the famous theorist who coined the ism.

• I’m afraid I’m stressing myself out for no good reason. Why have I gone to so much trouble to fly to Albania just to create all this anxiety for myself?

  • Okay, now we’re getting somewhere: My mental health can be iffy, and protecting my mind from the dark chasm can be a full-time occupation. I need and crave an interesting life with stimulation. I also have to protect myself from getting overwhelmed.

  • We’ll call this condition Rose Wilder Lane Syndrome. We feel shut in by the farm, so we leave the farm; we need to see the world. But the world is complicated and stressful, so we return to the farm. Only to feel shut in by the farm again. Argh.

    • If we go full Shirley Jackson/Edgar Allen Poe, I’d say I’m afraid of the dark places depression can take you. I’m not Bent-Neck Lady of The Haunting of Hill House, but I get BNL’s terrible feeling that she can never escape her dark fate. That once the gate clanks shut, you're done for.

For what it’s worth, I felt generations of joy and happiness in this house, not sadness or creepiness or BNLs. But the paranormal trails of joy and happiness belonged to the family who didn’t live here anymore; they didn’t belong to me.

Here’s my Blair Witch video. Do you feel the same vibes I did?

After two nights out of my booked three, I decided to respect grandma and GET OUT. I wrote the host that their place was lovely, but my plans had changed (a total lie). I found a brand-new pension for $25 with a bland Scandi look and just enough room for one brand-new bed.

I can’t tell you how well I slept.