Abstract
The home, and domesticity, is not only central in the Western imaginary blurring the lines between domestic space and individuality, but the home can also be seen as an extension of the self, a scaffold to which we construct and critique our identity, built of mirror as well as mortar. But homes are also inherently haunted, dyschronous and disjointed from time, where the present wavers with ghosts of both past and future. Using the haunted house as a conceptual metaphor, this paper aims to delineate a framework to encapsulate and understand lingering afterlives of violence in both literal as well as conceptual ‘homes’. Exploring haunted houses as both literal figurative sites, we map out the frame of this metaphor using two examples, exploring both the meaning of ‘haunted’ as well as the structural scaffold of the house itself as it relates to afterlives of violence. Reading the Swedish People’s Home as a form of ‘haunted house’, we explore the effects of lingering violence built into the very foundations of this home, now making its return. We also explore how the analytical framework of the haunted house can be used to conceptualise the displacing effects of climate weirding, using the town of Acerado as an example, tracing the haunting effects of solastalgia and its asynchronic relationship with home. These examples are used to illustrate how our proposed framework can be used both to deconstruct the bones of the haunted house, as well as the ghosts haunting it. This does not only provide us with a lens to identify cultural, social or political trauma embedded in actual as well as symbolic structures, but it also allows us to challenge the boundaries of our ‘homes’; challenging deep-held notions of privilege and power, allowing us to identify and dismantle structures of inequality and oppression.
Introduction
Violence lingers. It sticks and attaches itself to place and time, corrupting, distorting. Haunting. Not only can this be perceived in how places echoing with violent pasts seem to come ‘alive with the ghosts of the dead’ (Linnemann, 2015: 530), but the argument laid forward that homeowners need to disclose whether violent deaths have occurred on the property before selling also speaks to the idea that previous violence or trauma can somehow affect or taint spaces in general, and homes in particular (Seidler, 2021). In China, this issue of spectrality and property has made something of a ‘startling comeback’ (Novaretti, 2015: 138). As Novaretti notes, the early years of the People’s Republic were marked by concerted ‘campaigns against ghosts’ and the driving out of superstitious belief. However, a burial presages a return and Chinese society has seen the re-emergence of the revenant in recent decades (Novaretti, 2015). And so there has been a growing interest in haunted house litigation emerging from the swirling connections of folklore and socio-economic development (Novaretti, 2015). These examples may remind us of Žižek’s (2000: 3) contention that to understand a particular period we should attend to the ‘disavowed ghosts that haunt it’.
The home, then, is central to the social imaginary, blurring the lines between domestic space and individuality (Mallett, 2004). More than just an extension of the self, the home is a scaffold we construct, using the building blocks of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class and social status (Fiddler, 2017; Perry, 2013). And, as we both note above and will unpack in the pages that follow, it is key to our understanding of ‘haunting’. In this way, traces of past violence and trauma disjoint time, leading to places that are ‘stained by time’ (Fisher, 2012: 19). These afterlives of violence are our focus. We explore both what it means to dwell, to haunt and be haunted within the domestic. We will set out an heuristic model of a ‘haunted house’ which can be both used to analyse these traces of past unresolved violence, as well as provide a starting point for resolution. Let us turn first to the seeming ubiquity of the spectral in social theory and the ways in which it has come to inform criminology.
The spectral and ghostly
Late modernity is haunted. Place, speech and text are populated with ‘spectres’. While different from the spirits found in paranormal fiction, these ghosts carry similar connotations of loss, mourning and remembrance, invoking a sense of temporal vertigo. As a response to the recent ‘spectral turn’ of both sociology and criminology, a ghost criminology has endeavoured to use spectrality and hauntology to explore this temporal disjointedness (Fiddler et al., 2023). The spectral provides a theoretical vernacular for explicating ‘how memory and trauma become inscribed literally, symbolically, affectively and atmospherically in space and place’ (Kindynis, 2017: 39). The use of ghostly conceptual metaphors, or ‘images to think with’ (Kindynis, 2017: 39), are not only a way to engage with phenomena lingering on the fringes of perceptibility, but they provide a basis with which to respond to the re-emergence of past violence once thought buried.
In order to give shape to the emergent work within this sub-discipline, Fiddler et al. (2023) identified three ‘strands’: the (in)visible, the (in)corporeal and dead and haunted spaces. The first two strands speak to those elements of spectrality that hover between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence. By way of illustration, a key focus is the examination of ghost-like populations – individuals or ghosts who have been forced into invisibility or rendered ‘absent’. Ferrell (2022: 67), for example, points to ‘[u]ndocumented migrants, ex-cons, registered sex offenders, nocturnal graffiti writers, homeless urbanites, freight-hopping gutter punks’. Dead and haunted spaces speak to those locations that have been ‘stained by time’ and where the lingering effects of violence may still be traced. An example for this particular strand can be found in one of the earliest publications constituting this ‘spectral turn’, Linnemann’s (2015) ‘Capote’s ghosts’. In this piece, Linnemann (2015) explored how the murder of the Clutter family in the 1959, as well as the subsequent (re)examination of these killings by Truman Capote (2000 [1966]) in
Fiddler (2019) also explored the lingering impact of harm within the domestic. Drawing on Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytically informed approach to hauntology, Fiddler’s (2019: 467) developed a framework to explore how violence and trauma may be ‘incorporated’ in space and place. Specifically, Abraham and Torok (1972) detailed the act of incorporation as the internalisation of a ‘love object’ that had been lost traumatically and where the loss could not be mourned successfully. The love object could be a place, another individual, a memory or an ideal. As the subject denies the loss, the love object becomes en
Rashkin (1992: 47–48) subsequently explored the ways in which trauma can be buried in text and refers to these as ‘texts-in-distress’. For example, the poem
In contrast to Abraham and Torok’s (1972) psychoanalytic phantom, Derrida’s spectre is more concerned with destabilising temporal distinctions, letting the past bleed into the present and usher in the future. As such, the spectre becomes ‘a figure of clarification with a specifically ethical and political potential’ (Blanco and Peeren, 2013: 7), where spectral encounters entail ‘a productive opening of meaning’ (Davis, 2005: 377). This potential for the spectre to open up or resolve issues takes us Brown’s (2001: 151) argument for engaging with the spectral: ghosts can be ‘made to live in the present or leave the present in a manner that shapes both the possibilities for and constraints upon the future’. Praxis should, therefore, be an important aspect of a spectral analysis. Having identified the ways in which a harm ‘haunts’, what can be done to resolve it? Developing the ideas of temporal disjointedness, and drawing on both Derrida’s and Abraham and Torok’s definitions, Fisher (2012) defined two facets of hauntology; the
Fisher’s key intervention was to focus upon lost futures. He explored the specific aesthetic response to the melancholia attached to futures that have been forestalled or foreshortened. One such example was his analysis of Alfonso Cuaron’s (2006) film
Of course, in these discussions of incorporated phantoms and a sense of nostalgia for the future, a key question we must address relates to the value of such an approach. Using the ‘haunted house’ as a conceptual metaphor needs to offer something more than a simplistic thematic neatness. Firstly, and most simply, an heuristic such as this is helpful to give focus to a body of theory that is – inherently – vaporous. Relatedly, this responds to concerns that analyses of the spectral simply resolve into lists of hauntings that occur in any text, place or concept. Following Murray (2012) and Blanco (2012), we echo that there should be a focus upon the ‘specific: of symptomology and the local’ (Fiddler et al., 2023: 6). It similarly responds to ghost criminology’s call – itself drawn from Matless (2008), Haraway (1991) and Vanolo and Pavoni (2022) – for ‘imaginative engagement with the active presences of the past and future’ (Fiddler et al., 2023: 13). Finally, the purpose of such an approach must be to seek resolution. Following Gordon’s approach in
Constructing the contours of the haunted home
Our approach here is to take the notion of haunting – as detailed above – and locate it within a framework of the home and the domestic. The analytical scaffold of a ‘haunted house’ allows us to explore the importance of domestic space, from Bachelard’s (1958/1994) idealised ‘home’ to notions of a ‘homeland’, through the lens of time experienced as ‘out of joint’. Doing so provides a nuanced framework with which to explore the lingering effects of past trauma, the anticipated harms of future actions, as well as the impact in the present of futures that have been curtailed. The ‘home’ is the locus for the creation of both individual identity . . .architecture, unlike any other art form, allows us to not only express the transcendence of our hopes and the prison of our fears – but also to live in them. That is to say, we build our shelters of mirror as well as mortar.
The home becomes a site for hope and fear, dream and desire, as well as the boundary of these expressions. Let us first briefly explore these aspects of the home before then examining the impact of the spectral upon them.
Kaika (2004: 265) notes Heidegger’s understanding of a house as being ‘the most primitive drawing of a line that produces an inside opposed to an outside’. The modern home is defined by dual exclusions that render the ‘undesired’ social and natural worlds as outside and outsider. Lefebvre (1991: 87) also notes how ‘visible boundaries, such as walls or enclosures’, those ‘signs of private property’, suggest a clear separation where there is ambiguity and fluidity. Yet, these boundaries are porous. They are punctured as utilities flow through walls and under floorboards. The interior is inevitably ‘tainted’ by the exterior; ‘the modern home, in a simultaneous act of need and denial, hosts in its guts everything it tries to keep outside’ (Kaika, 2004: 275). In Jackson’s (1995, cited in Mallett, 2004: 70) keen observation, home ‘always begets its own negation’; it ‘may evoke security in one context and seem confining in another’. It is sanctuary and prison. The apparent sharp division of interior and exterior is revealed to be porous.
Our contention is that there is a temporal porousness to the home. It is not sharply of the present. This, then, is why it is such a thematically rich site with which to apply and use the hauntological. It allows us a lens with which to explore self and identity, nation and domestic within a framework of disrupted time. To be ‘at home’ and ‘to dwell’ means to be haunted by past and future. That is, we experience the weight of those that once occupied the space, including our past selves, as well as those who will occupy it after. We will see this later when we come to explore the disappearance and spectral return of the Spanish town of Aceredo. As Lefebvre (1991: 87) observed, the rooms that constitute houses and the dwellings themselves are not ‘empty ‘mediums” in the sense of containers distinct from their contents’. And we might play with the meaning of ‘medium’ a little here too. They channel and conjure past and future selves.
To help illustrate this, Low’s (2004) exploration of gated communities speaks to the ways in which communities have attempted to achieve a sense of community by shoring up these boundaries that delineate inside(r) and outside(r) whilst evoking the past. In a key observation, Low suggests that these material interventions and barriers, are an attempt to return to the ‘emotional security’ of ‘their childhood homes’ (Low, 2004: 90).
Yet, anxiety and security also co-exist with one another. Troutman (1997: 145) articulates this by suggesting that ‘closets, hallways, stairways, doors and windows, attics, basements, eaves and cabinets expand and contract with fear and desire’. Further, those hidden, empty spaces within the home, ‘contain our anxieties’ (Troutman, 1997: 153). They are ‘accommodations of the unconscious’ (Troutman, 1997: 153). In short, ‘fears [and] desires are the inhabitants of the internal boundaries of our everyday environment’ (Troutman, 1997: 145). A powerful and challenging illustration of this can be found in Leo’s (2011) The space wasn’t under my control because someone else had altered it. Entering my own apartment was entering another sphere, a world unknown to me, regulated by rules I had no knowledge of, a world in which I felt completely foreign. . .He was a stranger, and his presence altered my life to such an extent that I too became a stranger, strange to myself, and strange to others. (Leo, 2011: 4)
Of course, it is also helpful to expand the scale of the home, as with Havel’s concentric zones, to consider the lines of connection between the space of the domestic and ‘homeland’. Here, home becomes conflated with the ‘imaginary community’ of the territorial nation state (Shields, 1991: 7). As Sennett (1997: 61) elaborates, ‘if neighbourhoods, cities, or nations become defensive refuges against a hostile world, they may provide symbols of self worth and belonging through practices of exclusion and intolerance’. In this, the border is of central importance. The border defines identity and gives shape to the anxieties that swirl through xenophobia, immigration and homelessness (Masschelein, 2011). As with the collapsing of a nostalgic past with security in gated communities, discourses of the nation state can evoke imagined histories (inter alia. Neocleous, 2005). Spatial boundaries are infused with the temporal.
So, there is a haunting and haunted dimension to the home. Here, we want to draw upon its hauntological dimensions to examine how it reveals unresolved traumas or anticipates future harms. The domestic space is itself rendered other – as we are rendered other to The ghost is a trope that enables one to revisit the past but also to bridge gaps and cross boundaries of only the ones between past, present and future and eventually reinvent a dynamics of engagement with one’s nation and with oneself. The ghost can be ‘unfinished business’ or ‘business unbegun’, it may also herald the possibility of
By extending this and locating it within the wider framework/metaphor of the haunted house, we can explore the spatial dimensions of temporal disorder. We can identify both the business ‘unfinished’ or ‘unbegun’ and begin to map out paths to resolution (see Fiddler et al., 2022).
Crafting the scaffold: Constructing the framework of the haunted house
By using the ‘haunted house’ as our framework, we are able to synthesise the experience of spatial and temporal disquiet and apply it to the lingering effects of violence and trauma. Specifically, we take architectural features as metaphors to unpack our understanding of home(land) in relation to harms. Our framework draws upon Gaston Bachelard’s
Let us begin our tour, but before we cross the threshold, let us take a step back to regard the house and its façade. As Lefebvre (1991) notes, the façade renders much either visible or invisible. Activities on balconies or ledges may be visible to those passing by. Similarly, that which surrounds the home can be observed from the façade. Of course, the façade also hides what lies behind it. This similarly evokes the sense of ghostliness of phenomena that are both visibility and invisibility. Likewise, these frames also suggest a ‘psychoanalysis of space’ of things visible and occluded (Lefebvre, 1991: 99). We will see this developed most explicitly when we descend into the subterranean elements of the house, but first let us cross the threshold and enter. For Bachelard (1958/1994: 211), ‘[o]utside and inside form a dialectic of division’. We similarly see this in Ruskin’s (1891) text
As we enter the living spaces of the home – the kitchen, bedrooms, living rooms – we see the development of the ‘modern’, post-industrialisation home. As Mallett (2004) notes, pre-industrialisation, home was a site of and for labour. Household, consisted of both family and non-family members, as well as borders (Mallett, 2004). As such, the spatial organisation was ‘predicated on sociability rather than privacy’. Across this, any romanticised notion of home, typified by Ruskin and Bachelard, ignored the largely gendered lived experience of abuse and violence. It was second-wave feminist authors who detailed ‘home as a site of oppression, tyranny and patriarchal domination’ (Mallett, 2004: 75). It is useful to also map this onto the depictions of domesticity in the Gothic literary genre. Ellis (1989: ix), for example, describes the ‘failed home’ in Gothic literature as being ‘the place from which some (usually ‘fallen’ men) are locked out, and others (usually ‘innocent’ women) are locked in’. As the home traditionally has been constructed as a feminine sphere, considering women not only an inherent part of the home but where the home is an inherent part of women (Boylan, 2006), domestic violence inhabits a very particular position in discussions of the home, with the potential of becoming a haunting entity of itself (see Henze-Pedersen, 2022). Indeed, not only is the haunted house a particularly appropriate metaphor for experiences of domestic violence, where the presupposed safety of the home inverts, turning into a unhomely prison of fear, but as Boylan (2006: 21) argues, it is also an especially fitting metaphor for the subjugation of women; ‘[. . .] reduced to guardian spirits of the home, with no agency, no personality and practically no body of their own.’
Ascending to the attic, the upmost place of the house, it is at once where lofty dreams may take refuge, but also the place for the ‘madwoman’; now a symbol of both female confinement and feminist critique (Frederico, 2009; Gilbert and Gubar, 1979), highlighting the gendered and intersectional dimensions of the house. As Grider (2007: 153) notes, it provides ‘tantalizing hopes for escape and reunion with the outside world and reality’. The attic may be a space of respite, or of hiding, but it may also be hiding ghosts in turn. Descending from the attic is the staircase. This is a liminal space within the home, joining the private with the public, conscious and subconscious, known and unknown. These are ‘places of crisis’ (Jacobs, 2007: 27) or sites of ‘clandestine surveillance and voyeurism’ (Fiddler, 2017: 546) These are joined by other interstitial places: the hallways, the crawlspaces, the spaces behind the walls, running like veins through the heart of the house, present but unseen. Likewise, the doors and windows, the apertures of the house, provide ‘ambiguous bridge[s] between inside/outside, private/public, and seen/unseen’ (Fiddler, 2017: 544). Intruders are fathomed behind warped glass, implying memories of past trauma, hinting of possible violence yet to come. The domestic is distorted. This distortion may spread to the more intimate rooms of the house, the kitchen, the bedrooms, spaces defined by their domesticity. As Skott and Bengtson (2024) argue, such corruption of domestic space can be read as reflecting the cultural trauma of domestic violence, ‘projecting the experience of domestic violence as inescapable, confining and haunting’. Further, the bars placed across the apertures and thresholds of the house presage future harms and anxieties. Taking an example referenced earlier, we can see in Leo’s description of her domestic space between ‘altered’ and made strange. This strangeness is also experienced as the past irrupts into and punctures the present. Traumatic events are re-experienced in the now.
Sinking down through to the dark ‘entity’ of the house, we finally reach the basement and, beneath that, the metaphorical ‘unconscious’ of the domestic: the house’s foundations. Bachelard (1958/1994) observes that the basement is ‘of the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces’. There is an essential chthonic dimension to the basement. Basement walls ‘have the entire earth behind them’, evoking suffocating images of being ‘buried alive’ (Grider, 2007: 153). How do the foundations of the house reveal upon whose land they were sunk and how might this re-emerge in the present? Upon whose histories has the house been built? Whose graves? It is here where we might also locate the construct of Abraham and Torok’s ‘crypt’. This is where the dead might be buried and await return. What is more, this also suggests that the violence was
Across these various domains of the home it is helpful, then, to consider how a ‘haunting’ might be experienced within this framework. To put this slightly differently, how is home experienced when time is ‘out of joint’? We can think of it as housing phenomena of the past that linger or evoking ‘lost’ futures. Let us discuss differing types of haunting as mapped out by Abraham and Torok, Derrida, Gordon and Fisher. Firstly, we may attempt to trace a spatial phantom – that incorporation of traumatic loss that takes its inspiration from Abraham and Torok (cf. Fiddler, 2019). As with Fiddler (2019), we may look for spatial repetitions or tics that see the phantom reveal its repetition of the traumatic loss. This takes, for example, the form of repeated actions, spaces and decorations of a site-specific art piece in London’s East End (Fiddler, 2019). These reveal that this is a ‘space-in-distress’. Secondly, following Derrida, we may look for phenomena within this haunted house framework that hover between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility. Echoing Ferrell’s (2018) ‘ghost method’, as well as Armstrong’s (2010) spectral ethnography’, these enable us to ‘see’ those who are no longer there. This, then, requires ‘engagement with the traces and residues of the ‘absent [. . .] before looking for the missing ‘authors’ of these locations’ (Fiddler et al., 2022: 11). Such an approach then is looking at the material culture, the affective traces that have been left behind, the analysis of which can allow us to unpack the ‘aftermath and absence’ of the previous occupants. Relatedly, Gordon’s focus upon the disappeared and absent, the redacted and expunged can similarly be used foci for tracing the absent. Finally, Fisher (2012: 18) similarly explored ‘broken time’. Kindynis (2017: 39) describes a framework for the ‘(re)connection of the past, through the present, with lost ‘futures’. And so a haunting presence of the future or a sense of a future being curtailed or foreshortened.
Having taken this ghostly walk through the construct of the haunted house, we will demonstrate how this framework could be utilised, using two examples. We will look at the ways in which spaces and groups have been rendered ghost-like, temporally ‘other’ and uncanny. Firstly, we will read the Swedish People’s Home as a ‘haunted house’, as a home built upon foundations of violence which are now making their return, resulting in a haunting. Secondly, by using the (un)submerged town of Aceredo, we will explore how our analytical framework of the haunted house can be used to conceptualise the displacing effects of climate weirding, tracing the haunting effects of solastalgia and its asynchronic relationship with home.
Foundations of violence: The haunted house of the Swedish People’s Home
There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart – an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it – I paused to think – what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? (From
The Swedish welfare state is often synonymous with the concept of ‘the Swedish People’s Home’, a construct now deeply ingrained in Sweden’s political and cultural identity and firstly used by the social democrat Per Albin Hansson in 1928 to denote a Swedish society made for everyone, aimed to inspire warmth, safety, trust and security (Hansson, 1928). After a longer period of poverty, emigration and class conflicts in Sweden, the Swedish People’s Home was a metaphor meant to encourage unity, binding the Swedes together as one people, in one ‘home’. As such, the Swedish People’s Home can be regarded as a scaffold for people’s national identity in Sweden, defended on both sides of the political spectrum. Yet, there is more to the construction of the Swedish people’s home than the façade lets on, and this is felt as a haunting; a wavering presence in the present, a temporal disquiet, hinting both of violence no longer and violence not yet (Fisher, 2012). The ghosts of the violence no longer haunt the Swedish People’s Home through a vertiginous sense of loss; loss of a nostalgic past where Sweden was both safer and more equal. This ‘spectre of safety’ (Nyhlén et al., 2024b), looming over the spaces and rooms at the heart of the Swedish People’s Home, does not only undergird increasing punitive populism (Nyhlén et al., 2024b) but this haunting also manifests from nothing, from something that never really was.
The very foundation of the Swedish People’s Home is built upon problematic, if not violent, policies. Racial purity was one of the keystones of the Swedish People’s Home, generating a range of different policies aimed to uphold imagined ideals of ‘population health’, including cultural assimilation programmes and sterilisation policies that were in effect up until 1975 (Broberg and Tydén, 2005). These policies were particularly damaging to already marginalised groups, including Roma and travellers, the Sami population and Tornedal Finns (Broberg and Tydén, 2005; Catomeris, 2004; Hübinette and Lundström, 2014). As such, the nostalgic memories of the unimpeachable greatness of the Swedish People’s Home are nothing but ghosts; spectres of lofty dreams of equality and justice locked away in the attic, reminding us only by the rattling of their chains, by the ‘rumbling sound of ghosts chained to ghosts’ (Derrida, 1994: 3). Violence and oppression are built into the very scaffold of the Swedish People’s Home, steeped into its very foundation. Carried through the beams and rafters, it upholds the idea of the Swedish home(land), constructing a frame for some by the exclusion of others. As stated by Nyhlén et al., 2024b ‘[t]he shadowy downsides of the dream of welfare in Sweden is haunting; its hidden violence emerges in the politics of punitive populism’.
This haunting dream houses not only violence of the no longer, but also of the not yet. As argued by Nyhlén et al., 2024b, populist narratives harking back to the nostalgia of the Swedish People’s Home render certain racialised groups into perpetual criminals, their inevitable violence haunting the presence in advance, democracy becoming the ghost of the ‘
This haunting is felt not only in populist discourses causing temporal disquiet, but in the liminal, interstitial spaces of the Swedish People’s Home; in the cracks between policy walls, in the shadow of neglected strategies, trapped in crawlspaces of restricting politics. Here, we find the people who are built-out, left behind, forced outside of the parameter of the Home, their pains and sufferings bricked up tight behind walls of silence and denial, hidden deep underneath the surface, including people without homes or from Roma and Sami populations (Nyhlén et al., 2024a, 2024b). It is the invisible, unseen, yet palpable, corporeal part of the Swedish People’s Home, that has been buried alive within its ‘dark entity’ (Bachelard, 1958/1994). As such, it is deep within the foundation of the Swedish People’s Home, deep down in the basement of the haunted house where we can uncover the beating heart of past violence buried underneath the floorboards. Violence did not irrupt into the Swedish People’s Home by alien others, as populist rhetoric would suggest (Nyhlén et al., 2024b), but it was always and already within, built into the very structure of the Swedish People’s Home, revealing a foundation of violence.
Here, the metaphor of the haunted house also allows us to challenge certain boundaries of the Swedish People’s Home. A haunted home is not only a place where past, present and future bleed together, but it is also a site where boundaries blur, ipseity dissolves. The conjoining of the self and other occurring in haunted homes does not only unsettle the borders dictating who to keep
As we move down through the structure, descending from the lofty dreams of equality and justice to the chthonic realities of the peoples hurt by the Swedish People’s Home, we are not only bridging the known and unknown, but opening up new pathways; allowing monstrous truths to ‘br[eak] out of the subterranean basement or locked closet where it has been hidden and largely forgotten’ [Freud, cited in Kearney (2003): 35]. As such, by conceptualising the Swedish People’s Home as a haunted house, we are not only able to tease out violence of both past and future, haunting the present state of this home, but we may also, much like the House of Usher, ‘crack’ open the house; letting light shine through the fissures, exhuming past violences that has been buried, enabling an exorcism of its spectres. As shown above, ‘cracking’ open the structure of the Swedish People’s Home also allows us to challenge and unsettle its construction; turning some of its logics on its head to demolish building blocks of privilege and exceptionalism that has always and already been part of its foundation. Only by dismantling the obscuring structures of power and oppression, letting their ‘mighty walls [rush] asunder’ (Poe, 1839/2003), can we build a new foundation for change.
Our application of the ‘haunted house’ to the Swedish People’s Home has focused upon irruptions of the past into the present, as well as the intersection of home with national identity. Our second case study, looks instead to a present that is haunted by lost futures, as well as lingering harms. Further, it narrows focus to the home itself. For this we are taking a broader definition of domicide than that proposed by Porteous and Smith (2001). Their framing describes a ‘planned, deliberate destruction of home causing suffering to the dweller’ (Porteous and Smith, 2001: 19). In the next section, we emphasise the harms associated with Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) within a reading of domicide. Rather than planned and deliberate, this sees the home ‘let die’ (Mbembe’s, 2003).
Solastalgia, the haunted home and climate weirding
In 1992, a Spanish local government built a reservoir leading to the flooding of the town of Aceredo that sits on the Spanish-Portuguese border. The town was submerged and sank beneath the water. In 2022, the region of Galicia suffered an intense drought. Nearby dams were closed in order to generate power for electricity and irrigation. The water levels of the reservoir fell. And Aceredo re-emerged. Cherner (2022), in a piece for
A hauntologically-informed approach is well-positioned to inform our understanding of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) since it is an inherently temporal phenomenon. The approach outlined here is not simply a new way in which to document the harms associated with climate catastrophe (cf. Wainwright and Mann, 2018). Rather, its importance lies in offering a framework that places considerations of temporality and justice at its core. It does so by focusing upon irruptions of past and future within the present. It acknowledges that we experience time in a disrupted, non-linear manner. As Maddern and Adey (2008: 291) emphasise, the ‘twenty-first century has so far transpired as a century of haunting; of irregular, unexpected and (un)anticipated events that appear to be ‘beyond the real’’. Aceredo (re)emerging from the reservoir is one such example, but there are an ever-increasing number of others. We might include in this list the otherworldly sight of the skies above San Francisco turning orange as a result of the wildfires that coursed across the western coast of America in 2020.
In order to explore these events that are ‘beyond the real’, we are drawn to Vanolo and Pavoni’s (2022: 6) contention that ‘[o]bjective realism and linear historicism are dramatically unequipped to account for the fermentation produced by the multiple spatialities and temporalities’ caused by the ‘uncanny forces that past and future violence and desire exert over the here and now’ (Vanolo and Pavoni, 2022: 6). Unusual times (and temporalities) require an openness to approaches equipped to respond to the uncanny and disrupted linear time. It is within that spirit of open intellectual enquiry that we put forward this framing of the ‘haunted house’ to explore the effects of time being ‘off its hinges’ as it connects to harm. Relatedly, it is perhaps more helpful to use the phrase climate
The ‘malaise’ of solastalgia is a melancholia related to nostalgia. Yet, where an acute nostalgia might be one of the harms suffered by displaced populations, solastalgia occurs at home. The harm associated with solastalgia is ‘the pain or sickness caused by the loss of, or inability to derive solace from, the present state of one’s home environment’ (Albrecht, 2006: 35). The occupant is dislocated whilst at home. If we take ‘home’ to be a layered ideological construct at the nexus of multiple social relations, then a threat to it would provoke a ‘[deep] ontological anxiety’ (Askland and Bunn, 2018: 20). This places emphasis upon the temporal nature of ‘home’ and its present relationship to past and future. To think of ‘home’ as a site of dwelling is inherently temporal. It places home as part of a lineage that extends back into the past and forward into the future. It was home for generations that came before and, for some, there will be the hope that it will remain so for those that follow. Solastalgia represents ‘the loss of value of the present’, as the temporal ties that extend into the past and future are severed (Albrecht, 2006: 35). And ‘home’ becomes uncanny when the time is weird. We find ourselves in an asynchronic relationship with home. We are in the right place, but at a weird time. And the time is weird when the weather gets weird.
Within this framework, what does it mean for Aceredo to be ‘haunted’? Further, how does our framework of the haunted home bring fresh insight to this and other locations that have suffered the harms of climate weirding? Albrecht’s notion of solastalgia, a sense of dyschronia in and of the experience of home and homeliness, can be folded neatly into our discussions of haunting. As an experience of ontological dis-ease, it provides further nuance to this sense of alienation. The ghost is us. We are in the right place, but at a disjointed time. The sense of solace and comfort provided by dwelling is no longer possible when the home is severed from the past and future. And yet, within that severing the past ‘haunts’ the present. Its absence is felt keenly, as evidenced by the voices of former residents of Aceredo. Curiously, Aceredo had returned before. In 2012, the reservoir’s water levels fell and visitors, including families that had been evicted decades before, returned. As one former resident, Francisco Villalonga, stated in an interview with La Región, ‘I can see this might be interesting for visitors from elsewhere, but for those of us it is about a sense of disempowerment, by which it is no longer those who for decades have resided and imagined their future in this place that will determine its destiny; conversely, it is forces related to national and global politics and markets that determine its future.
To dwell is to be in place: to be tied to a lineage that extends into past and future. The loss associated with solastalgia is doubled. It is a loss of what was and what will no longer be. We can be reminded here of Botting’s (2008) notion of pervasion as distinct from invasion. The haunting that is entwined with solastalgia pervades the home and the self. Here, the haunting elements of the ‘haunted house’ has overtaken the home, possessed it, until it is home no longer. What remains of the town of Aceredo are only ruins, skeletal remains, which does not only dissolve the ‘dialectic of division’ between outside and inside (Bachelard, 1958/1994: 211), rendering these homes unhomely as they ‘ceas[e] to be home[s]’ (Ruskin, 1891: 87), but they are also ghostly reminders of both the past and possible haunting futures. Many of the structures making up the homes have vanished. There are no attics remaining, no place for lofty dreams, respite or even hiding; like the bared bones of the ruined houses, all insidious failings to save these homes are exposed. Similarly, the interstitial places, the crawlspaces, the spaces between and under walls, the veins of the house, are hollowed out much like the lifeblood of the earth, resources and ecology exploited by the exsanguinating power of capital in the name of ‘progress’ (Gan et al., 2017). Here, the heuristic of the ‘haunted house’ is not only an appropriate metaphor for the haunting harms of the Anthropocene, proving as stated before that horror is an affective mode when considering ecology (Haraway, 2016; McClanahan, 2020), but our model also brings attention to the self-incriminating foundations of this haunting. The seed to our own unmaking remained in the submerged ruins of Aceredo, buried underneath murky masses of water, awaiting its return, revealing to us that the forces of destruction was always and already within.
Yet, as with other hauntings, this opens up space to imagine alternative futures. As Campbell (2022: 257) notes: the spectral lingers as a signifier of unfinished projects, unresolved conflicts, and unrealized ambitions and beckons to an uncertain future that is yet to come, it also stands as critique and opens up a critical space for politico-ethical engagement.
So, we might use Aceredo to imagine lost futures. When we see the remains of the town emerge from the waters of the reservoir, it offers a vision of a world – without – us. Or, we might imagine a ‘not yet’ that is inspirited by a desire to remedy the harm. As we have argued, justice is temporal. For ecological harms, we must consider both the (forgotten) past citizen
Discussion and conclusions
This paper has explored how haunted houses, as both literal and figurative sites, can encapsulate the lingering of violence and help to ensure justice in relation to these ever-living afterlives. Building on the conceptual metaphor of the haunted house, we have mapped out the frame of this metaphor using two examples, exploring both the meaning of ‘haunted’ as well as the structural scaffold of the house itself as it relates to afterlives of violence. Conceptualising the Swedish People’s Home as a ‘haunted house’, as a home built upon foundations of violence that haunts in its return, we are not only able to tease out violence of both past and future, but we are also able to ‘crack’ open this house, illuminating its very bones, disentombing past trauma. We have also explored this analytical framework to climate weirding and solastalgia. Here, we used Aceredo as a case study to demonstrate how the harms of climate catastrophe haunt domesticity and its past-present-future inhabitants. Our first example focuses on the metaphoric power of the architecture of the haunted house, demonstrating how the use of this framework allows us to both unearth built-in structures of past violence and turn this structure on its head. The second example focuses on the occupants (and non-occupants) of such haunted houses; the ghosts doing the haunting. As such, the proposed framework can be used both to deconstruct the bones of the haunted house, as well as the ghosts haunting it. This does not only provide us with a lens to identify cultural, social or political trauma embedded in actual as well as symbolic structures, but it also allows us to challenge the boundaries of our ‘homes’; challenging deep-held notions of privilege and power, allowing us to identify and dismantle structures of inequality and oppression.
As such, the framework proposed here can be conceptualised as a form of hauntology focused not on individual trauma using psychoanalytical methods (Abraham and Torok, 1972), but using the conceptual metaphor of the haunted house as a lens to identify cultural, social or political trauma embedded in actual as well as symbolic structures, and to challenge and undo the inequality structures underpinning such trauma, ‘cracking’ open spatial and symbolic crypts to find paths towards resolution.
A recent example of the approach outlined here can be found in Thompson’s (2024)
Our framework, then affords us to trace these afterlives and examine lost futures. Looking beyond confining inequality structures to deconstruct and pull apart existing materialities, inscribing new, collective meaning onto the ruins left behind, withstanding the ‘shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters’ (Poe, 1839/2003) as they collapse and turn to ash. This would not only tear down walls and barriers designed to divide and diffract, but would also clear the space to inscribe new meaning to stone and mortar, as voices, old and new, break through the tomb, ‘cracking’ open the construct of the haunted house, building new foundations in the rubble.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
