Haunted Places
For ghost stories, ambiance is king. The creepy hallways, the dark and silent woods, the seemingly empty waters, a good ghost story is often preceded by a still and absent setting rife with potential to be filled by something. Ghost stories attune listeners and readers closely to their environments. The excitement comes from the potential of an encounter with the supernatural.
Ghost stories are an invitation to pull back the veil of reality, in turn offering an opening to encounter closely the ideologies that form an understanding of space. These following ghost stories are classic figures from ghost lore or classic Chicago tales. In these specific tellings, I’ve drawn out the environment they take place in and attempted to amplify how these ghosts create haunted places and provided some context on ghostly figures and archetypes as well as how they become baked into new, hyper-local stories.
Place in Ghost Lore
Setting is crucial in telling a ghost story with a few prolific setting types staging a numerous range of stories. These sorts of settings are notable for their differing representations and associations in the long history of ghost stories and folklore tales.
Wilderness
Wilderness is the opposite of ordered society in many stories. Where there is civilization there is not wilderness, that is the thing which circles and lives on the fringes. Wilderness is always present to find oneself immersed in it is to be in a place of danger where the rules which govern are no longer applicable. Ghost stories taking place in the wilderness are often spirits connected to the landscape, those who have not been buried properly or are otherwise cursed to wander.
The wilderness does not always mean a deep, dark woods. Cemeteries, empty fields, even vacant industrial sites can be treated as wilderness. These ‘hinterlands’ operate as places where once can feel disoriented or removed from a familiar world, the sort of space perfect for experiencing a haunting.
Familiar Themes?
Ruins
Ruins are the gray area between wilderness and society, places and structures that once stood as symbols of one and which now are sliding into the other. The haunted house story, haunted castle, old farm house, and many others fit this type of setting. Similar to wilderness, a ruin does not necessitate a crumbling stone structure, but rather refers to a place that has been stripped of its original purpose or spirit.
For ghost stories, ruins represent a fissure or chasm between past and present. What the past was is evident in a ruin such as the old foundation of a building or old blueprints from a remodeled house, but that past is incomplete and no longer visible nor inhabitable as a whole. The present is obscuring and creeping over the past, presenting a new vision of what that space is and what it is inhabited as. These conflicting stories create the perfect avenue of conflict for ghosts.
Many of these common ghost story settings overlap in what they come to represent. Destructions of the known, questioning of history, and making visible a narrative from someone who has been lost or not listened to are all staple aspects of ghost stories. The power of the ghost story rests in its ability to peel back the veil and attune listeners to that which has been hidden, destroyed, or buried.
Have YOU ever seen a ghost? Do you know any good, local stories? If you’d like to be interviewed for this project, contact me here.
Water
Water is a popular ghost medium but unlike ruins or wilderness, water often operates in the background environment. The dripping of an old faucet, the creaking of pipes, and the out of sight rushing of a river sets the stage to many an old tale. Water sounds and its presence simulates a balance of familiar and unfamiliar, serene and creepy which attunes a listener to other subtle elements of a story. Water in the background of stories shapes them as belonging to an older time, when villages bordered rivers or when people traveled through mountains. But water can also take center stage. Ghosts formed through a storm, drowning, or other water-related death are a common form of story.
In addition to ghosts, many folkloric entities call a body of water their home from the Inuit Qallupilluk to the Scottish Kelpie and West African Mama Wati. These water entities vary in personality from wise helpers to trickster sprites to malevolent jumbees, perhaps demonstrating the range with which water and story can take together.
Photos: Eliza Marley and Adobe Stock