#my blog for horror is @ inmagicmoon although my tags are a mess

[heavenlyyshecomes]

u dont have to answer this but i was wondering if u had quotes or book recs (fiction or nonfiction) about, concerning, or centered around ghosts?

hmm I haven't read a lot about ghost theory bc there's a lot of facets to it like there's different types of ghosts, different types of hauntings (the haunted house, the body itself, also whether the ghost lingers or 'leaves a trace' as leila taylor calls it bc of trauma, grief, loss, memory etc etc) but some readings:

“I think ghosts are memory—memory haunts bodies, haunts places, haunts the narratives that hold our minor and miraculous lives together. Ghosts are that which return and return and return. The body has its own hauntings, too: phantom limb sensation, organ transfer memory, the traumatic self. And others.”

— Shastra Deo, interviewed by Sumudu Samarawickrama in Liminal Mag

Underneath the mask, there is nothing at all, no identity, no face, nothing apart from an uncovered, naked simulacrum. While the ghosts are endowed, undoubtedly, with a kind of form, however uncertain […] becoming-ghost, becoming-haunted is nevertheless a process of becoming formless, of abandoning one’s own form so as to become inundated with liquidity. — Adam Lovasz, ‘Would you like to meet a ghost?’: Repetition and spectral posthumanism in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo, 2018.

We do not believe in ghosts, we are haunted by them. We do not see ghosts. Rather, our senses of vision and perception are brought to a crisis by them. As revenants of things past, ghosts make vivid to us the pairing of memory and forgetting. The ghostly returns even after being shown the door, even after death, just as the metaphors of the phantasmatic endure after scientific explanations seemingly triumph. As Jean-Claude Schmitt shows us, to forget the dead we must first remember them: traditionally, hauntings are the result of an inability to forget, due to an incomplete process of memorialization. As harbingers of the future, ghosts show what we are to become in minatory mode: as they are now, so we shall be

— Tom Gunning, To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, 2013.

One of my favorite explanations for the existence of ghosts is the trace. Some events are so powerful in their violence or anger that it leaves behind a remnant of that death, like the debossed imprint left through the pages when you press too hard with the pen. The ghost hasn’t come back to visit us in the present, rather we are seeing a glimpse of past. I like to think that instead of the spirit invading our space, we have temporarily gained access to theirs. Like the shadows of Hiroshima, it takes an atomic level of anger and pain and fear to leave behind such substantial vestiges, some- thing powerful enough to leave a handprint in a cake, to crawl through the bathroom cabinet.

— Leila Taylor, Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic

What is a ghost?

Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 1997

To Be Haunted, Jessie Lynn McMains

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, Colin Dicky

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson

Ghostly Times in Lake Mungo (2008)

See also: the house has it's ramifications, and ghosts