Inside
a Haunted House
It’s all in the foundation.
The dust, the spiders, the bodies,
the little beams of light which reveal only enough of the cavernous
(carnivorous?) basement. It’s in the loneliness, the isolation, in secret
histories and past violence which resurface like the head of a laughing demon
from a bottomless well. It’s in the decay of house and family, in lengthy
shadows and dark corridors.
A haunting, every part of it, is in
the foundation.
Allen Ginsberg tells us that to
write the truth we should kill our darlings.
In the story of a haunted house, we
cannot afford to kill our darlings. We must keep them close, close to save us
and close to hurt us. Our darlings must be kept for their longing heart beats
and their curved, bloody claws. A house and all of its ghosts are made real by
detail, by feeling. And without our darlings, literary or not, we can hardly be
said to feel.
But hauntings are not always people,
not always demons.
A man can be haunted by a memory, by
a taste. Souls can be dogged to the end of the earth by longing, by unrelenting
force and by a past that stares back at them from the hungry dark. Revenge,
regret, hatred and even love are forces far more powerful, far more terrifying
than translucent man waving chains, some bloody face or burned serial killer.
These forces are real. Sometimes they can be destructive, sometimes they can
even be evil.
It takes more than a ghost to make a
haunted house.
More than a demon.
It takes something real. Palpable,
terrifying, strong emotion.
A good haunting never ends, but
follows us long after we put down the pages.
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