Deena Helm is the author of Our Cut of Salt, out today from Tor Nightfire. Below, she discusses the relationship between haunted house stories and haunted history.
Haunted houses are alluring, in part, because we want to know why. It’s a terrifying concept, to live your life in one place for so long, to make and build a home, only for it to become murderous, or ghostly, or make strange noises in the night. We want to uncover its trauma. A terrible thing had to have happened in the past — an excruciating reason — for the house to bring its history into the present.
The past, in this way, becomes alive. There is not only a haunted entity within four walls, but there is a recurring history that is itself haunted. In Our Cut of Salt — my novel about a haunted house in Palestine – the lived history is an integral piece of the recurring horrors. What do houses, older than occupations and wars themselves, witness? What must they feel in their stones and rafters, and how does it manifest? There aren’t just ghosts in the walls — they exist in memory, too.
As we build our lives and ourselves in our homes, these places of love can become bitter in witness to real-life horrors. We each carry the trauma of the past with us, whether we realize it or not. There is pain in breathing life into the past. These events are pulled forward, again and again, into the reliving; there is an ache in the meeting of past and present. The memories may be from long ago, but the wounds are real now. The hauntings are alive in the past and the present — each a continuation of the other.
