Bodwin, also discusses the home's rich past later on, stating that "women died there," specifically his grandmother, mother, older sister, and aunt. We also learn that Sethe's grandmother, Baby Suggs, lived there once she was freed from slavery. Morrison writes about 124 during the time Baby Suggs was there, indicating that the house was "cheerful" and "buzzing." 124 doesn't become the haunted, spiteful home we are shown at the beginning of the novel until Sethe kills Beloved in the shed.

Throughout the novel, 124 continues to change. Morrison initially describes the house as "full of baby's venom," and later on, she also mentions that 124 is loud, then later quiet. All three descriptions hinge on events that take place within the house, including Sethe and Beloved's fighting and Beloved's departure from the house. In an interview with NPR, Morrison also discusses the haunted aspects of 124 as it relates to the characters.

The house, in many ways, feels like the physical embodiment of the absent Beloved. Sethe has a total of four children: Howard, Buglar, Beloved, and Denver. Howard and Buglar, the oldest and second oldest (children #1 and #2) have run away, scared off by the ghost of their baby sister; Beloved (child #3) is dead; and Denver (child #4) remains in the home with her mother. Therefore, it doesn't seem coincidental that the house number on Bluestone Road is 124 (the number 3 is missing, just as Beloved, the third child, is missing, having had her throat cut by her mother rather than be returned to slavery). There is a red, pulsing light in the entryway, a light that Sethe says is the sad ghost of her baby girl. The stairway is white, painted that way many years ago to help this baby girl crawl up. Here Boy, the dog, won't enter the house ever since the ghost picked him up and threw him against a wall. In so many ways, the house is connected to and symbolic of the ghost of Beloved, Sethe's third child and first daughter.

The house in this powerful novel is given human qualities through personification that makes it seem as if it were another character along with Sethe and Denver and the rest of the characters populating the pages of this novel. The house in a sense is shown to bear the emotions of Beloved, and is severely impacted by the events that took place in it, namely the infanticide that robbed Beloved of her life. Note how the house is first described in this book:

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughters Denver were its only victims.

Note the use of personification to describe the house as if it were a character in its own right. But also think too of the way in which the house is shown to have been created through what happened to Beloved so long ago. Past events are shown to have consequences for the present, and a major theme of this novel is the way that the past intrudes in on the present, and cannot be forgotten. The house is one way in which Baby Suggs is shown to be unable to escape what happened previously.