You know I didn’t want to, have to haunt you, but what a ghostly scene

i’ll never recover from this song

— JOURNEYS END IN LOVERS MEETING: ELEANOR VANCE

My Tears Ricochet by Taylor Swift x Haunted Doll House by Laurie Lipton x The Haunting (1963) x The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson x Haunted House by Morris Kantor x I Know The End by Phoebe Bridgers

Apocalypse ~ Cigarettes after sex // Haunting ~ Halsey // Wuthering Heights ~ Emily Brontë // Richard Brautigan // Emily Dickinson

I used to think that my house was haunted, back when I was a kid. 

I’d put rainbow sticky notes on the walls to see if a ghost would move them as I slept with my head under the covers each night. I didn’t know what a haunting was, but evil had made itself so comfortable in that house that it seeped into the walls like nicotine and fear, poisoning the air supply for generations to come. I live beside a graveyard, after all. Ghosts latch on to vulnerable people. I’m still not quite sure if they ever leave.

Sometimes a ghost will take on a human form. I am possessed by the ghost of my father’s anger, and his father’s anger, and his father’s anger as well. I think that a father is a type of ghost. Having a father is a type of haunting I will never be able to explain on a page. There are no blood curdling screams, no pools of corn-syrup-fake-blood sticking to my bathroom floor. The ghost instead lives in the hole his cellphone made in the living room wall back in 2009. The ghost lives in those green eyes I share with my sister that we’d both do anything to change. The ghost lives inside of me, and I really don’t know how to perform an exorcism on my own flesh and blood.

Apparently, there are no clinical cases of haunting, and it is instead an alphabet soup of diagnoses that make sure I will never have children of my own. The haunting is hereditary, after all. It doesn’t matter where I end up, I will pack the skeletons in my closet into a moving van and cry when I wake and the graves I placed on opposite sides of the house have already been dug up.

I don’t think that I live in a haunted house anymore.

I think that I myself might be the haunted house, with smoke pouring out of the windows and a foundation that is crumbling as we speak. I am haunted by the ghost of my mother’s sadness and her mother’s sadness and her mother’s sadness as well. A mother is a type of ghost that does not wish to be a ghost. If a ghost is meant to be invisible, my mother dedicated her life to fulfilling that prophecy— as if Weight Watchers or the expensive grocery store would reanimate her, as if enough Diet Coke could replace the formaldehyde sitting in her veins. Having a mother is a type of haunting, one that I will never escape. The ghost found me in the form of secret social media accounts and a diary full of calculations when I was twelve years old, in the form of sugar free energy drinks and a near death encounter with hypophosphatemia just a month before my eighteenth birthday. The ghost is in my body still, no matter how hard I try to kill it. It will always live in my kitchen, slamming empty cupboard doors and whispering promises into my ears. My mother will bring this ghost into every kitchen I ever try to relax in. My mother’s kitchen is haunted by her own mother, who’s mother passed this ghost on to her.

The only way to stop being haunted is to become a ghost yourself. I do not like that I may already be someone else’s haunting. In an ideal world, I am invisible— not like a ghost, but like air. I do not want to take up space for anyone. The only way I wouldn’t see blood on my hands would be if nobody were to think of me at all. I hate knowing that I am my brother’s ghost, that I haunt this house just as our parents do. Being alive is a type of haunting, I think. One can be haunted by themself. I think that maybe everyone is.

I will never understand the extent to which this house is haunted. There are ghosts that my parents will never tell me about, ghosts which still possess them in ways too dangerous to share with me. Whether I know their names or not, the ghosts hiding under creaky stairs and bleeding floorboards are family heirlooms I will inherit against my will, no matter how many attempts I make to bury them.

Maybe I do believe in haunted houses.

I’m scared that every house I live in will be haunted. Not haunted by my father, or my mother, or any of the mothers and fathers who came before them, but myself. I am the ghost at the back of my closet, and always will be. I scare myself in the mirror, I thump around in the hallways at hours that make my neighbours despise me. Haunting is what I learned to do best— after all, what better teachers than a pair of ghosts?

I used to think my house was haunted, back when I was a kid.

ghost stories , soleil louise . february 9, 2023

Webweaving request for ghosts or a kind of haunting feeling (metaphorically)? Like the vibes you sometimes get from looking at liminal spaces, or being alone in a usually crowded area. Just being haunted by a lack of something rather than a presence. (iirc this concept is called hauntology)

joy episalla (via @slack-wise) \\ @sawasawako \\ sara pedigo whispering to the moon (2020) \\ john waller haunted wood \\ joy episalla (via @slack-wise) \\ mark strand the continuous life: poems: "orpheus alone" \\ @catilinas \\ jake adam york a murmuration of starlings: "the crowd he became" \\ joy episalla (via @slack-wise) \\ john waller haunted wood

kofi

the fact that i'm no longer the same age as the protagonists of novels and films i once connected to is so heartbreaking. there was a time when I looked forward to turning their age. i did. and i also outgrew them. i continue to age, but they don't; never will. the immortality of fiction is beautiful, but cruel.

Shoutout to my dad for being the funniest person I know

what if thistle had confronted senshi before the story started?

This is for the rotten girls. The girls who think that there is something inherently evil and sinister inside of them. The girls who are fundamentally flawed. The girls who can’t recognise their own reflection in the bathroom mirror at times, and when they do, are repulsed by it. The girls who have something crawling beneath their skin and can feel it when they try to fall asleep. The girls who need to see their own blood from time to time to be reminded that they are human. The girls who always loved ghost stories, because they too feel like a house with unknown corridors and rooms with shut doors that they are too afraid to enter. The girls who get told they say sorry a lot and always answer “I feel sorry a lot”. The girls who feel like they were born inside out. The girls who think there is something from a past life still haunting them. The girls with mothers that tell them they make them nervous. The girls who find peace deep inside the woods or abandoned buildings. The girls who painted pictures in school that scared the others kids. The girls who think it’s in their DNA.

FORTY THOUSAND NOTES OLIVE OSTROVSKY????

Just had to join in on drawing this fucking thing

31 days, 6 prompts, 1 Home Sweet Home ✨🏡🎃🐈‍⬛✨

Happy Halloween! 🧡

i am a tragedy enjoyer before i am human

Buster Keaton - The Haunted House (1921)

There had been small rumors floating around.