Written by Jordan Meyer It seems that we often use haunting to discuss our culture’s social mores and taboos. For example, scholars Colleen Boyd and Coll Thrush theorize that stories of haunting associated with Native Americans are really a means of discussing the social shame held by those who have benefited from the oppressions of […]

Written by Rebekah Hobbs Since the evolution of the genre, Gothic writers have employed subtle language cues to create a sense of uncanniness. In the Western tradition, an unnatural use of language often proves that something is not as it should be, that the reader has cause for alarm. In “The Tomb” (1922), H.P. Lovecraft creates […]

Written By Rachael Heffner Society has an obsession with being scared. We constantly look for scary movies that are playing at the theatre or a haunted house to go to in the middle of October, desperate for that next scare. In E.J. Clery’s book, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, she explores the correlation between the […]

Written By Malorie Palmer In Alice Rayner’s article “Double and Doubts,” she grapples with the idea that the theatre provides a haunted experience. “Theatre, in all of its aspects, uniquely insists on the reality of ghosts,” Rayner explains, positing that ghosts are not merely a fictional element in theatre.  Rather, in each of its facets […]

Written by Kameron McBride “What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber.” This opening narration, spoken by the great Federico Luppi, begins […]

Written by Shelby Hatfield It is common knowledge that our world is becoming more technologically advanced every day. What is considered modern now is almost obsolete in what seems like the blink of an eye. But with all of our machines and technology, there is still one thing that the modern world has never been […]

Written By Ashley Starling “You’ll finish [reading] and that will be that, until a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year, maybe even several years. […] Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you’ll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them at all. For some reason, you […]

Written By Jared Lynch In the introduction to her book Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts, Christine Berthin discusses the findings of French psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. They explain that when haunting is transgenerational, it “takes the shape of a secret transmitted within a family or a community without being stated because […]

Written By Elizabeth Palmer Sigmund Freud writes that the uncanny is a distinct “class of…frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” He goes on to rhetorically ask how it is “possible…[for] the familiar [to] become uncanny and frightening.” What frightens us most are the things which we can almost […]

Written by Brittany Means Spook (2005) by Mary Roach is a detailed investigation into cultural attitudes toward the idea of the afterlife. In her other books, such as Bonk (2008) and Stiff (2003), Roach takes a scientific approach to the subjects of sex and the life of cadavers, respectively. Spook is no different, which Roach […]