Bunter the moose

Bunter the moose is a mounted moose displayed in the living room of Sara Laughs, with a bell around its neck. The taxidermy figure is more than a piece of household decor: its bell repeatedly sounds when the house’s uncanny presences become perceptible. Because the bell can ring and fall silent without an evident human cause, it becomes a small, concrete point of contact between Mike and what he cannot see—and, eventually, a means of recognizing Johanna Noonan.

Identity and Setting

Bunter stands above the fireplace in the living room at Sara Laughs, where the bell hangs around the moose’s neck. In daylight, after a disturbing episode, Mike sees the mounted animal looking back at him with glassy eyes; a sunlit glint catches the bell, which is then motionless and silent. The familiar trophy remains fixed in place, while the changing sound of its bell gives it an unsettled role in Mike’s experience of the house.

The bell’s ordinary, visible source matters: its sound is not an abstract voice, but a signal attached to an object Mike can locate. Yet the episodes leave him without an ordinary explanation for why it rings. Bunter thus occupies an ambiguous threshold between domestic furnishing and apparent instrument of communication.

Ringing and the House’s Presences

One morning, after Mike has set the Memo-Scriber’s counter to zero before going to bed, he finds it has advanced to twelve. Replaying the tape, he hears a whisper addressed to him: the voice says his name, falls silent for a time, and says it again. In the same passage of events, the recording and the bell belong to an emerging pattern in which sound makes an unseen presence difficult to dismiss. The bell gives that pattern a material focus, while the Memo-Scriber preserves a voice as evidence.

Later, when Mike returns to Sara Laughs, Bunter’s bell rings sharply as soon as he enters. He calls out, and the ringing stops. A woman’s scream then seems to come from everywhere in the bright house; it fades away, leaving Mike shaken. Looking across the living room, he sees the bell hanging still. The sequence makes the contrast consequential: the bell’s sudden activity precedes the scream, but its silence afterward does not resolve what happened or identify the source of the distress.

A Signal Mike Associates with Jo

Bunter’s bell acquires a more intimate significance when Mike wonders whether the screaming woman was Jo and whether she is suffering. On another evening, Mike addresses the apparently empty room while the television changes channels without anyone touching the remote, settling on a film that Jo had loved. He asks whether she is present. The bell rings once, very faintly; Mike takes the sound as confirmation that, for the first time, he is sure Jo is with him.

The bell does not provide a spoken answer or explain the identity of every presence in the house. Its single faint ring instead marks a change in Mike’s confidence: he moves from sensing that something is there to believing that Jo is there. Its quiet afterward, when he asks about a man Jo had been seen with, leaves that particular question unanswered. The object’s communicative force is therefore limited and situational, not a reliable conversation that Mike can control.

Narrative Function

Bunter’s bell makes sound a recurring link between ordinary space and supernatural uncertainty. Its ringing can announce a disturbance; its stillness can follow one; and a single, faint note can carry personal meaning for Mike. These variations prevent the bell from functioning as a simple alarm. What it signifies depends on the surrounding event and on Mike’s interpretation of it.

The mounted moose also gives the invisible an enduring physical reference point in a familiar room. The bell can be seen hanging still even as Mike considers whether the house is haunted by the dead, and its isolated ring lets him register Jo’s presence without seeing her. Bunter therefore helps turn the house’s indistinct supernatural activity into a series of audible encounters, while preserving the central uncertainty over what, exactly, those sounds can prove.