Haunting

Earlier this week, I attended a writing webinar taught by Carmen Maria Machado. The title of the webinar was, “Every House is a Haunted House.”

To begin, let me note two important points. One, Ms. Machado is a wonderfully dynamic teacher. Her enthusiasm is contagious, and her knowledge of the subject matter is obviously wide-ranging.

Two, I clearly misunderstood the topic. I assumed she would be talking about the notion of something haunting a character in a more psychological sense, such as visiting their childhood home and being haunted by the memory of a mistake, a lost love, a missed opportunity. Instead, much of the webinar focused on horror (or horror-adjacent) works involving haunted spaces. For example, the writing exercise involved making lists of five times when we experienced a haunting (including metaphorically) and five times when we should have been haunted, but weren’t. Then, we were to spend five minutes writing about one of these times. Unable to come up with such a list—especially on the spur of the moment, and without any real understanding of what she meant by “haunted”—I checked my email instead.

I’ve never shied away from incorporating fantastical or supernatural elements in my work if such elements serve the story. The fact that I’m working on my third novel involving Santa Claus is proof of that. Long ago, when I was working on a fan fiction story and had written myself into a corner, my writing partner suggested that the character needed a miracle. While the use of deus ex machina is soundly scorned in literary circles—and rightly so, since it usually results in a contrived and unsatisfying solution to the problem—as soon as she suggested it, I knew how the story should end. More importantly, I knew how my characters could earn that miracle so that it would not only be integral, but inevitable and well-deserved.

One of my favorite movies is Truly Madly Deeply which (spoiler alert) involves a more literal type of haunting. At the beginning, Nina is grieving the death of her beloved Jamie. She mentions to her therapist that she sometimes seems to hear him, but she (and we) dismiss this as imagination fueled by grief. Except suddenly, there he is, back from the afterlife. At first, Nina is overjoyed to have him back, just as he was, including with an actual body she can kiss and make love with. As the movie progresses, though, we begin to understand how much Nina has grown since Jamie died. She begins to chafe at the demands placed on her not only by the need to keep Jamie’s ghostly presence a secret, but by the seemingly innocuous ways he tries to exert control over “their” home, including inviting ghost friends to hang out at all hours, criticizing her décor, and rearranging her home. Finally, after she’s blown up and all the ghost friends slink out the door, she asks Jamie directly: “Was it like this before?” We see that despite her love for him, Nina is ready to put her time with Jamie behind her and move on. In other words, she has chosen to end the haunting.

When I think of haunting, I don’t think of it as a supernatural phenomenon involving a specific location, such as one of the myriad of haunted house stories, movies, or television shows. Not that I have anything against that notion: I’m an enormous fan of the television series, Ghosts, where a young couple inherits a mansion inhabited the colorful ghosts of people who have died on the property over the past several centuries. Rather, I think of haunting (the non-supernatural kind) as involving those thoughts, ideas, beliefs, or memories that will not let a person go. One might be haunted by a trauma that hovers over them long after the actual threat is gone, invading their sleep and coloring their views. A combat survivor may be haunted by unspeakable experiences. Even something as comparatively benign as an embarrassing gaffe may haunt a person long afterward.

Viewed this way, haunting is ripe for use as a literary device. In this construction, the character is haunted until the underlying issue is resolved, or at least as close to resolved as it can be. Whether we’re talking about the spirits who visit Ebenezer Scrooge or Hamlet’s father urging his son to avenge his murder, the ghostly presences are generally designed to goad the characters they haunt into change. In Truly Madly Deeply, the haunting—Jamie—continues until Nina admits that she is ready to move on. If the haunting is less explicit, such as where a character is haunted by memories of an event, they may learn to manage its presence, possibly by compartmentalizing it or putting it in its place so that they’re able to resolve the story’s conflict and craft a reasonably manageable life.

As a literary device, haunting is useful because it presents something outside the character’s control. After all, when the main character controls everything (as may be the case at the beginning of the story), there is no reason for conflict. Conflict requires a disruption, unexpected and uncontrollable, that upsets the main character’s smooth, controlled world. The disruption may be anything from the surprising arrival of a houseguest (preferably unwelcome) to bad news about a financial investment or a medical test, as long as it knocks the main character off their placid path and forces them to struggle. If the main character finds themself being haunted, whether by a spectral presence or the memory of an earlier time, the conflict will increase until the main character figures out a way to resolve it. And that, my friend, is what makes a story about a haunting worth reading, at least in my opinion.

The second half of the webinar will take place in two weeks. One of the handouts Ms. Machado provided is an essay by Sigmund Freud entitled, “The ‘Uncanny’.” I didn’t have time to read it before the first session, but I’m interested to see how this essay ties into either Ms. Machado’s view of haunting or my own—or possibly both. We’ll find out.