Deviant Strategy: Haunting

you have ever spoken to me about hauntings, you will know that I welcome ghostly visitors, and feel comforted by being in relationship with non-human entities. But these relationships don’t always feel safe or easy, and being in a haunted space can bring up many feelings.

I have often thought of a book as a type of haunted house. Objects trigger memories. There are areas that characters return to. There are places that feel simultaneously recognisable and unfamiliar. Memories appear.

There are endless places to discover in the haunted house. Opening a new door leads to a different outcome, or even a different story. In some rooms, objects are picked up and replaced, imbued with new meanings the second time around.

I don’t know about you but i love stories set in haunted houses because they offer a closed set, a liminal zone for transformation to occur, and mysteries to be explored but not necessarily resolved. And because they remind me of dreaming.

I recently shared Brandon Taylor’s essay on campus novels, and I agree with his view that many things can be campus novels if you understand the campus as a set of relations, or a subculture, rather than just an academic space.

There are so many things that can be a haunted house: a hotel, a tower block, a mansion, a wooden hut in the forest, an abandoned station in the Antarctic, Dyatlov Pass, a submarine, a novel.

Haunted houses aren’t only scary; they can be haunted by joy, love, nostalgia, and fierce protection. But they can also be a place to examine and process grief, trauma, and fear.

Sometimes, when you pick up something you’ve written, or read, before it can feel like it’s in a stranger’s hand; something entirely new.

This can be true for the reader and the writer. Both of us pick up that ghostly interference, and learn something new.

One of my favourite haunted houses is the coming-of-age first person game Gone Home. The mystery is one of identity, childhood, and family instead of ancient terror.

I love the idea of a haunted house most of all because it is a place where we can acknowledge that our past lives, our memories, and experiences stay with us consciously and unconsciously.

It is a place where the sacred and the earthly can co-exist.