A Tiny Haunting

Lisa Horiuchi

A waxing moon hangs itself in the sky over Scottsdale, its silver face dampened by a passing cloud. Anna, Jock, and I greet each other in its sensual glow, commenting on the autumn chill and admiring the lush details of Anna’s garden. The yard is ringed in mature olive trees and white-bloomed shrubs—gladioli, mums, and cabbage roses; in a dark corner a full-bodied elm tree rises from a mound of mulch while sweet alyssum creeps around a stone path across the lawn, the grass showing a vivid shade of green under the lattice of moonlight. It’s an impressive plot of land, if entirely outsized for the house it’s meant to showcase. While stylish and clean lined, Anna’s home is no bigger than a shipping crate, hovering a full foot off the ground on hidden skids. It was prefab and assembled on site, Anna tells us, a product of the tiny house movement … surely we’ve heard of it?

I assure her we have, but Jock only lowers his chin in a partial nod. He’s taking to Anna so silently and so subtly that he doesn’t even seem to be aware of his desire. It is a virile, autonomic thing. He stands between us, macho and stoic, his legs rooted firmly in the grass and hands tucked inside the pockets of his Cardinals hoodie, but it’s clear to me—he’s magnetized. His body inclines toward Anna in breathless increments, and in response she fakes disdain with a coquettish lowering of the eyes—that trope of a gesture, a mating feint, an ugly dance. I’m no more blind to Jock’s romantic lapses than he is to my occasional bouts of envy, but having been business partners for the better part of two years, we’ve learned to tolerate each other’s petty offenses. It’s the pathology of brotherhood, the common abuses of a too-familiar friendship.

Anna Chalmers is also a familiar element, of sorts. Jock and I once shared a homeroom with her back at Saganitso STEM Academy in Flagstaff, where she sat attentively in the front row wearing pinstriped men’s shirts and ballet flats decorated with silver horse bits, her sand-colored ponytail slicked back and resting high on her crown. Though our acquaintance was brief—she was gone before summer—the five-year gap between then and now has made the idea of Anna, a specter from our past, lavishly mystifying. She is a woman now; moreover, a different sort of woman than anyone would have predicted. As she leads us into her home, Jock takes mental note of her physiognomy: her face, faintly anguished; dyed black hair and kohl-smudged eyes; the pallid, tattooed forearms, St. Peter on one and Hellboy on the other, masterful in black ink, the Sistine Chapel in line art. I find the grownup version of Anna Chalmers mildly repulsive. Jock, on the other hand, is cultivating the possibilities. There is a danger in their contrasts—a scorching, sexual danger—and he is wondering what it might feel like to break her open.

To communicate the obvious: the timing isn’t ideal.

Anna’s reached out to Jock and me—the Northern Arizona Paranormal Society—not for erotic theater but for support. She is desperate to rid herself of a ghost.

Anna flicks a wall switch and a family of scattered sconces and recessed overheads comes on, revealing a small but tasteful interior. The entirety of the house is viewable from the entryway, and while hardly capacious, the high ceilings and maple walls somehow create a mood of comfort rather than claustrophobia. This is the essence of southwest living—not in the way of cowboys or New Age but of nesting and contentment, in the sense of a womb in a body, a central park inside a metropolis. Everything Anna could possibly need is within a convenient, thirty-foot reach. There’s a kitchen and what looks like a closed-off bathroom on one end of the house and on the other she’s set up a loveseat and a minimalist home-office vignette: a plain, flat desk with a gooseneck lamp, an ergonomic chair. Above the office is a pull-down ladder leading to a shallow sleeping loft where clerestory windows offer narrow views of the sky. The house smells like breakfast muffins and wood.

“Well, this is a first,” Jock says, “the smallest investigation ever.” The boundaries of the house are tight—in a single step one is suddenly consumed by all things Anna—and Jock is glued to the welcome mat as if he’s not quite ready for such a commitment.

“How’d you hear about us?” I ask, as gently as possible, but it’s a miscalculation; Anna is in no mood for special handling.

“Google search,” she says.

The odds of Anna finding us, a couple of old high-school acquaintances, are slim. The Northern Arizona Paranormal Society is only twenty months old, with a negligible advertising budget and, until now, largely relegated to the icy highways and honky-tonks of Coconino County, well outside the glamorous perimeter of Phoenix metro. I take it as a sign. This isn’t just an accidental client call, it’s a pilgrimage, an audition for the main stage. I spent a good chunk of the three-hour ride down to Scottsdale in a daydream state, energized by the changing scenery from pine forests to concrete, the presence of my best friend at the wheel, the blank slate of our partnership. I’ll even admit to entertaining visions of our own reality show—The Spirited Southwest, starring the paranormal team of Jock Morgan and Mitch Pacey—bedding down in antebellum mansions and strutting through the swampy hallways of abandoned asylums, Jock flexing his good looks and biceps while I play the cool scientist, demonstrating our Mel Meters and Faraday cages and scrutinizing the EMF readouts with my exacting eye.

“Earth to Pacey,” Anna says.

“I’m listening,” I say.

I suggest we settle into her couch for the preinterview while Jock heads back to the car to unload our gear. Anna starts in immediately with questions of her own, mostly regarding the provenance of her haunting; the house is too new, too impersonal, too neutral, and too modern to birth a ghost. “Too, too, too,” she says, the tempo of her anxieties rising. “Why this house? Why me?”

I explain that she’s right in a sense; haunted houses are supposed to breathe the energy of the past. But time is a mutable thing, and ghosts can attach themselves not only to homes but to unconventional structures, empty land parcels, even people. The phenomena appear to have been triggered not by Anna’s moving into her new home but out of her old one. About a month ago, her mother had been called back to New York by a former employer, and her father, having never left the big city, gifted the home to his daughter to ease the sting of her forced independence. The irony of her long-divorced parents living again in the same city of her childhood has left Anna feeling dizzy and unmoored, and unable to focus on her studies at ASU.

“It makes sense,” I say. “The perfect storm of drama and trauma.”

“So I’m a nut job, is what you’re saying.”

“Tell me about the haunting. What happens? Where? How?”

Anna leans back in her couch, stretching her legs and tapping the toes of her low-top Chucks against each other with a rubber thwack-thwack. She chews the tips of her black fingernails and glances nervously at the front door at the sounds of Jock moving in the night, zip-tying motion detectors to the awning outside. “I never would’ve put the two of you together,” she says. “Not in a million years. And ghost busters? You can’t make this shit up. Don’t you need a third? They come in threes, I thought.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” I say.

“Ghost busters, wise men. Stooges. You know, the trinity.”

“Are there three ghosts here with us now?”

She sits up, leaning forward and resting her hands on the faded denim of her knees, suddenly engaged. “Just one, I think,” she says. “One too many. Shouldn’t we be burning sage or something?”

To put Anna at ease I tell her about the long tradition of haunted houses, and that she’s neither the first nor the last but one of a great many generations of people fortunate enough to be touched by spirits. In communing with the dead, one communes with life, and Anna should consider herself blessed, chosen even, despite the terrors she may be experiencing in the moment. There are four major classifications of hauntings—Demonic, Poltergeist, Residual, and Intelligent—and each is extraordinary in its own way. In demonic possessions, malevolent spirits seize the physical bodies of the pious; poltergeists hurl skillets and table lamps across rooms and down stairs; in residual hauntings, scenes from the past replay themselves like a movie with no end; and in an intelligent haunting, a person as real as Jock or Anna or me dies and refuses to move on, glomming on to a familiar site or a beloved body.

“Where do you think your situation might fall?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Anna says, “but it’s real, anyhow. I hear it creeping in the night. It starts over there, near the kitchen, a sort of scratching, like little fingers on a wall. That’s how it tells me it’s here. I had an exterminator come. He says the place is clean.”

“So we can rule vermin out,” I say.

“It scrapes and claws its way back to this end of the house and it goes up the ladder.” She gestures to the loft. “Where I sleep.”

I realize Jock’s turned off the porch lamp and I imagine him walking the dark arbor of Anna’s immaculate garden, peering through the warm, illuminated windows of her tiny house to see Anna and me leaning into each other in an intimate gesture of nascent friendship.

“And then?” I ask.

She shrugs, as if what the ghost does next is inevitable. “It climbs under the covers, and it cries. Like the world’s ending. Like it can’t get a grip on its sorrow.”

The ghost is sentient, but only barely; based on its behavior, Anna believes it’s a baby. It tugs at the hem of her jeans when she’s at the kitchen sink and flushes the toilet when she’s in the bathroom. Sometimes it strokes her cheek at her desk as she studies, and at other times, she hears it crawling around the floor of her closet, bumping into storage boxes and shoes. It never speaks. Its only willful attempt at communication is its habit of lying next to her in the dark of the loft and wailing, full voiced, like an infant desperate for its mother’s touch.

With baseline sweep completed, it’s seventy-three degrees indoors, EMF is at .1 milligauss, and my sixth sense is on high alert. I’m stationed at base camp, which we’ve set up in the home office, while Jock and Anna prepare for an EVP session on the other side of the house.

There are, of course, any number of natural explanations for a so-called “crying baby” haunting. Foxes, mockingbirds, and bobcats in heat all vocalize like infants, and under the cover of darkness, their cries can be frightening. But there are no easy answers for Anna herself. Though my memory of her is vague—we weren’t well acquainted during her single year at Sag—she fell squarely into a conspicuous category back then. Saucy, urban transfer, a fair-haired dispenser of double-edged snark, doing time in Flagstaff grudgingly while counting down the days to Act Two of her life as a genteel coed at Dartmouth, Wellesley, or Yale.

But the person with us now is not that person.

I’m trying to concentrate on the IR video monitor in front of me but it’s not easy with the three of us investigating this small, open space. On the other side, Jock and Anna are sitting together on the linoleum floor of her kitchen. He’s showing Anna his digital audio recorder, turning it over in his hands like an artifact, and advising that her haunting is probably intelligent, meaning the ghost was a living, functioning person once, a person who’s been, in his words, blindsided by death, sacked at the line, refusing to believe the play’s over.

“Luckily,” he’s saying, “there’s a ton of ways to help them cross. Electronic Voice Phenomena is the most basic. EVPs. We ask them questions. They answer.”

“But my ghost is a baby,” Anna says.

“Souls are, like, universal when they die,” Jock says. Then, with more conviction, “In the afterlife, you’re transformed. You can move without legs. You can solve physics equations and feel colors and … taste emotions. Like every part of you is part of something bigger. You see everything, you know everything. You grow wings.”

Anna responds in a small voice, with something that sounds like That’s poetic, but I’m not getting a read on her sincerity level.

We spend the next half minute or so, the three of us, without speaking, surrounded by the buzz of silence. Just as I’m about to break the spell, Jock gives Anna an aggressive command to shut down the lights.

“We’re going dark,” he says.

Anna produces a miniremote from her jeans pocket and presses some buttons. It’s a theatrical affair, the overhead cans and sconces dimming by degrees until we’re sitting in total blackness, the unseen room suddenly powerful in its invisibility, encroaching on us. In the dark our machines are king: the steady red blink of Jock’s audio recorder; the amber flicker of a REM pod on the couch; the green, underwater glow of my base-camp monitor showing a grid of six infrared feeds placed strategically throughout the home. All this technology is meant to shed light on the unknowable, to deliver revelatory, physical evidence we’re incapable of acquiring on our own, but so far it feels like we’re just three kids in a trailer, waiting in the dark for a jump scare or a romantic grope or some other excuse to believe that things aren’t exactly as they are.

After a few seconds of meditative silence, Jock fills the room with his voice, intoning slow, deliberate questions into the recorder and leaving the three to five textbook seconds in between for the ghost to respond, if it’s so inclined.

Are you the baby who’s haunting Anna?

Would you like to give her a message?

We’re here, we’re listening. We want to help.

What is your name?

Is there something you want to tell us?

He does a quick playback to check for unexplained voices we might not have heard. Nothing.

“Just one more,” he says.

Can we help you get to the other side so the living may carry on in peace?

This is more than a small misstep: most ghosts don’t even know they’re dead, and such blunt allusions could send them spinning into a cyclone of confusion and sadness. This is a question to work up to, and treat with delicacy and respect. For a moment I feel pity. Not for Anna, but for her ghost.

“Kitchen’s clear,” Jock announces.

They’re on Camera One on my IR monitor, huddled next to each other like doomed characters in a teenage slasher flick. She mumbles something about feeling sick to her stomach and Jock places a hand on her tattooed arm.

“You’re not alone,” he says.

It’s midnight and a shard of moonlight filters in through the blinds of Anna’s office window. It occurs to me that it’s brighter out there than it is in here, but this is no different than any other haunting: a small, vibrant moon in the sky, a quiet home, and Jock and me, calling out to spirits in the dark. Maybe it’s the size of the house that has me on edge, or maybe it’s the client herself, who is both a known and an unknown; the more I think I’ve pegged her to something, the quicker my idea of her slips away.

Anna is leading Jock to an alcove near the kitchen, to a closet where she hides her clutter and where the ghost occasionally makes an appearance. When they slide the door closed behind them, my chest thumps, once, hard, a warning strike. There is every reason for the two of them to investigate the closet; there is, even, every reason to shut themselves in, but sometimes the body knows things before the REM pods and Mel Meters do, and it’s my job to keep my partner safe and the investigation aboveboard.

I grab my phone and text him, trusting Jock to keep the message to himself despite the close quarters.

Be careful, I write. Something odd re this haunting just saying.

There’s a muffled chime from the other side of the house as Jock receives my message. He mumbles something to Anna and in a moment a text lights up my phone.

What do u mean?

Just be careful, can’t put finger on it.

OK, Mom, he writes back.

Before I can overthink it, my thumbs are keying in a last, perhaps recklessly brash message.

Keep little poltergeist in pants.

It’s a joke, mostly, a playful attempt to remind him of our mission, but in any case, Jock’s phone dings and it’s dead quiet on the other end of the house. I stare at my own phone as a tickle of casual remorse grows into full-blown dread. After an excruciating minute, I get his text: Not funny.

Across the way the closet door slides open and Jock’s shadow appears, looming and cocksure, it seems, with the advantage of the moral upper hand. Anna’s shape, black on black, sinks into the space behind him.

“We’re going to the loft,” he says.

The red light of Jock’s audio recorder bounces as they navigate their way toward me on uncertain footing, their bodies bumping things in the dark. Anna appears to be pressing into Jock, maybe clutching his arm, I’m not sure, and I’m struck by how their two figures have molded into one in the passageway, how monstrous they are without the benefit of light, how anything and everything can be made to appear frightening or innocuous given the flip of a switch, a shift in perspective. Their shadows draw forward and lighten in the gentle blush of my monitor, and they manifest in front of me, the faces of Jock and Anna of the single torso, the accidental high-school chimera, and yes, they are holding hands. I know instantly the loft session, though a high point of our investigation, isn’t meant to include me.

“Hey, guys,” I say, mustering up a generous serving of tonal contrition, “not enough room for the three of us up there. I’ll hold down the fort.”

Jock ignores me and mounts the ladder ahead of Anna, the softwood rungs creaking behind me as they climb to the loft. I keep my eyes focused on the monitor. So far, there’s been no activity to speak of—an air vent rustling the leaves of a potted ficus, a gnat illuminated like a ghostly orb—and now on Camera Four Jock and Anna appearing in the green wash of the full-spectrum IR, fussing around each other, all heels and elbows and rear ends, crouch-walking under the low ceiling before taking their places in the loft, lying side by side at a respectable distance, a narrow canal of pale mattress between them. Anna’s disembodied voice from above is hushed and bedroomy and out of sync with the choppy video feed before me.

“Why do ghosts only come out at night?” she asks. “Why not during the day?”

It’s a good question. All the research says it’s we who are open to ghosts after dark; darkness scorches the nerves of the perceiver, puts him in a heightened state of awareness. Any fierce emotion—anxiety, terror, even love—opens us up, widening our parabolic antennae until we can hear the voiceless, see the unseeable. I am eager to hear Jock’s take on this phenomenon.

“It’s cozier in the nighttime,” he says, as if he’s forgotten everything we’ve learned together. “Ghosts like cozy, I guess.”

“Mm,” Anna says.

I open up my own receiver and watch their bodies line up next to each other on my monitor. In the green flush of the IR cam, her skin is lighter than his, blanched like sea foam, her dark hair spilling behind her in a sinuous crown. He is as stiff as a figure on a trophy, always vigilant, always stately, even in repose. They turn their heads toward each other and something—something intimate—seems to pass between them. Then, with sudden realization, Jock sits upright and faces the camera with milky night-vision pupils, as if he only now remembers he’s being recorded.

“Hey, Pace,” he says, with a sloppy wave.

“Hey,” I say. “Don’t worry. Just surveilling. Not spying.”

They don’t laugh, or react at all, except to look away from the camera and by extension away from me. She says something indiscernible, and on the video monitor I see Jock crawling toward the edge of the loft to talk to me. Instinctively I jerk away and pretend to occupy myself with the closest object I can find, which happens to be Jock’s recorder, lying in a corner of the desk where he’d set it down before climbing up. Its red LED pulses on standby. I tap on it, press Playback, busy myself with the controls.

“Go do a sesh in the head, will you,” Jock calls down, “and close the door behind you? It’s supposed to be active in there.”

“Copy that,” I say, but I’m immobilized with a kind of numb incredulity. They—he—would never think to break protocol, would he? Not on a job, not with me in the room, and not with her. My irritation has no target or, rather, too many marks to take aim at, and I’m left only with a childish, throbbing, bodily sensation of maltreatment. I stare down her image on the monitor as if to make her feel my rage. Anna, our client—victim, thief.

I get up from my chair and do as I’m told, but not before clamping a mic onto the low beams of the loft overhead. I strap on a headset and summon up a phony coughing fit to cover up the noise, then stumble around Anna’s couch and welcome mat and palm my way to the bathroom, the short passageway lit up by the standby signal of the recorder in my hands. I can feel them behind me, their bodies suspended in the shallow tomb of the loft.

I pull the handle of the bathroom door and let myself in, and for all my wait-and-see optimism it’s hard not to feel pushed out, or, more precisely, pushed in, into this four-by-three box lined with porcelain and smelling of Tilex and seasonal hand soap, cinnamon and allspice. Hunkering down on the pot, feeling one part angry chaperone and one part dirty voyeur, I peer across the length of the house for a sign. But from the bathroom, with little light and from my low vantage point, the loft is hidden from view and there’s nothing to see, just the sense that they’re up there, the two of them, adjusting their bodies in the tight gap between the ceiling and the mattress, the plywood platform making light groans, their barely audible voices amplified to whispered cotton in my ears.

I hear Jock’s voice first, low but clear: “Why’d you have to leave Saganitso without saying goodbye?” Then, with a sugary drawl of uncertain origin, born perhaps of an ancestral lothario buried in the uppermost branches of his family tree, he adds, “I missed you.”

“Bullshit,” she says.

I max out the volume on my headset.

“I was there for you, wasn’t I?” Jock says.

“‘Paying’ and ‘being there for me’ are two different things,” Anna says.

“I told you I’d go with you or whatever.”

“I did it in New York anyway,” she says. “Like you cared. At all. Whatever? Whatever.”

“Arrow through the heart, girl. Hey. Look at me. There’s always now.”

“Now? As in ‘you and me’ now? Bull. Shit.”

“Anna,” Jock says. “Don’t be mad, all right? But is this ghost even real?”

Waiting for her response, I feel us breathe, Jock and me in unison, though out of each other’s line of sight and at separate ends of Anna’s house, with me relegated to the shitter and locked up behind a door.

“Fuck,” she finally says. “You. Fuck you. Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou.”

They erupt, both of them, in vicious whispers with chilling, accusatory inflections, and there are murmured defenses and scattered curses until Jock makes a weak, final appeal and Anna, exhausted by her ire, breathes her hard breaths and pushes up against his corny promise—It’s been a long time but I’ll make it up to you—and in all of this, the ghost baby begins to take shape. In the blackness of the bathroom I conjure her, Anna, not the hardened pseudo-Goth variant lying next to my friend tonight, but the straw-haired, gullible model of yesteryear with her inflated sense of urbane authority over a hick like Jock in a place like Flagstaff. I see him throwing her a toothy smile at the JV tailgate and a well-rehearsed line at the after-party, earning her secret admiration by brandishing his beer-bonging prowess and mad karaoke skills. I see them mashing behind a pile of fly-ash bricks on the gym field, his hand under her skirt, Anna foolishly convinced he’s the conquest. I see one proper date, a chick-flick at the Harplex Eleven, a shared tub of popcorn, and a clumsy after-hours break-in to Anna’s bedroom while her mother romps and rolls in her Ambien-fueled fantasies upstairs. I see Anna spot Jock in the hallway as the eight o’clock bell rings and bodies disappear into classrooms and he too is gone, and after school I see her alone and panicked at their erstwhile rendezvous, spring showers misting over the mud of the athletic field, a single grackle with slick onyx wings tilting its head to question her business, and I see the fog lift around Anna’s delusions. I see her a month later confessing her sins to her parents, flying out to stay with her father in New York, or driving down to Scottsdale in her mother’s SUV; either way, Anna cries in her basement bedroom to a John Mellencamp song.

My interpretation of their story might not be strictly literal, but after two years of ghost hunting with my best friend and studying the masters of parapsychology, I know I am close. I can feel the colors of Anna’s haunting, the textures of her pain. I am hooked up to our audio system but plugged into something bigger; I’m hearing the stripped-down words and protests and apologies but listening harder to their undertow. I am hearing something ending, and I am hearing it begin. Jock and Anna’s labored, postbrawl breaths slow with each counted second, capsizing into each other and plunging into a sad, molluscan, sucking wetness.

Back in the formative months of our professional relationship and in an ill-conceived bid for credibility, Jock and I once brought a third partner into the fold. Brock Chen was a self-proclaimed psychic who also happened to be a second-degree black belt in Brazilian jujitsu. It didn’t take me long to realize that “Brock and Jock” were a more obvious pair and for all my intellectualizing and research and dedication I was clearly the third wheel. It was what Jock seemed to want, so I kept my mouth shut through the entire affair, even when our investigations started feeling like world-wrestling events, with the Ock Brothers introducing cuss words to EVP sessions and spraying every room with the stench of their testosterone. Things came to a head one night at the Hotel St. Michael, where the two of them were placing microphones in the haunted guest rooms while I set up base camp in the lobby. Through my audio feed I overheard Brock calling me a “dipshit poser” whose only concern was the “teenage crush” I had on Jock and saying that we needed to rethink our brand going forward and how we wanted to project ourselves to the ghostloving public. When Jock’s voice came on, it was loose and jovial, saying I was cool and I knew my way around an investigation, and that he’d got me all wrong—I wasn’t into blonds. When I woke to find Brock Chen gone before daybreak, Jock attributed his departure to creative differences and insisted with his signature boorish indifference that “duos are way more epic anyway.”

A guy like Jock makes a unilateral impression. It can’t be helped. There are people who take up space in a room, and people who don’t. Sometimes an act of providence will bring them together, the finely rendered and the invisible, united in a single mission, moving in the same orbit around a common source of light. Jock draws me line by line until I’m seen and, sometimes, even he sees me. When he doesn’t, I’m still here, speaking questions into dead air, hoping for a response.

As I step out of Anna’s tiny home and down into the night I realize I’ve been holding my breath in anticipation of this gulp of earthy, outdoor air. As I’d imagined, it’s brighter outside than in, a rust-colored vapor of particulates and city lights hazing over the rooftops and desert willows, a cool, late-summer night, sixty degrees and shifting languidly into fall. A baby wails in the house next door, a real baby, and a TV comes on. Tinfoil laughter tumbles out of an open window and unravels into the night as I walk across the stone pavers of Anna’s garden. I find a woven hammock hanging from a low branch of the elm tree and drop into the soft yarn, the frameless structure yielding too readily, too extravagantly, dragging my body down into an awkward, fetal pose until I’m gazing forcibly into the orange smog.

I wonder what Jock will tell Anna about her haunting.

My guess is that instead of accusing her of manipulation or vengefulness, he’ll tell her that a ghost is like an image that appears in that groggy, half-dream state just before waking—filmy and ephemeral but stubbornly there, cinched firmly between darkness and morning, emphatic in its insistence on being seen. It isn’t one thing and not another, a haunting is not something one can unbraid and explain away—he might say.

He might explain again the four major classifications of hauntings—Demonic, Poltergeist, Residual, and Intelligent—and clarify that while some cases fit easily into a single category, the overwhelming majority have elements of all. In demonic possessions, the chaste and noble are overcome by their gruesome passions. In poltergeist hauntings, an adolescent girl is said to channel the fury of the dead, a phenomenon driven more by the emotional tempests of the victim than souls from beyond. In residual hauntings, tragic events play and replay themselves throughout eternity like a video on a loop. And in an intelligent haunting, a once-living person, as real as you or me, dies and refuses to move on, attaching itself to a familiar site, hoping to make contact. To the ghost, the house is still a home. It remembers: an aging dog, a lap, the winter hearth, a wood spoon knocking butter into a freshly seasoned pan. There’s a sense of ethereal belonging, a blurring of time and distance, everything blanketed in a velvet shroud of unconditional affection. We fear the spirit, but for the spirit the haunting is nothing short of a miracle. Let me linger, it thinks, let me stay for one more moment. So it lives inside the walls, it tugs at apron strings, it burrows into the living in the palace of their dreams. One wonders, almost, if it isn’t an act of violence to ask it to leave.