People In Ghost Houses Shouldn't Have Bones

Photo by Dani of churchrummagesale and novembersfire

I am absolutely fascinated with ghost towns.

I shouldn't be, considering I basically live in one, but what I live in is still enough alive, despite its rather tiny size, to be considered a ghost town. When I say ghost towns, I mean genuine ghost towns. Towns that have nearly no population, or towns that are entirely abandoned. I think that's perhaps why Silent Hill is one of the most endearing and enticing video game franchises I've experienced in my lifetime, aside from even their rare missteps. It has nothing to do with the horror, although that's great too, or the awesome design, ranging from sound to visual, but just the concept of a town that is no longer alive or thriving. Now, certainly, Silent Hill (and the town it's supposedly based on if you believe everything you read on the internet, like this blog), are definitely outliers, as they only managed to achieve their emptiness via horrid disasters. When I think, or talk, about ghost towns...I think and talk about ghosts towns that just sort of....emptied. They just, for whatever reason, went away. Everyone moved away, the town was bought and then never developed, or what have you. This is happening, and has happened already a lot, in the bible belt specifically.

But there's something about ghost towns that really hits inside of me like nothing else does. It's watching a living thing still exist without life. Certainly, you could make the same argument for corpses. As a little girl, I used to beg my parents to stop if they saw roadkill so I could take pictures of it, because the concept of nonexistence within physical existence is fascinating to me for reasons even I cannot begin to summise at this moment. But this is different. Towns were never actually living things. And if there are some sentient towns out there, I apologize for saying this about you and I hope we can be friends, because you sound awesome. Towns are only in existence because we made them to live in, we breathed life into a space where human life was not before, and then when we leave, we assume the life does as well. But it does not. Plant life continues to thrive, generally, and animals will take up residence in the homes we once constructed to protect ourselves with from the elements. But we attach the very notion of life to the very essence of humanity so deeply that we assume a ghost town is the literal spirit of a town that had once physically lived.

That's fucking wild, man.

I think this is why haunted houses are so fascinating to me. Because it achieves that sentience we long to give to homes, to towns, to things we built and are therefore us. And yet, we make them evil? I think this says a lot about the human condition, most namely that not only do we only consider existence worth so long as we're the ones experiencing it, but that when left without us, without our humanity, and when achieving sentience on its own, existence is evil.

🐷

Philosophers, and sometimes those posing as such, have often asked the question "Is mankind inherently good or bad?"

I don't think that's the right question. I think the right question is more why do we think that those are the only two options when in fact there's an entire spectrum, but even more than that question, I think the real right question would be, "Why do we think things without us are bad?" Every single movie or TV series that has taken place after humanity dies out or runs thin, from overwraught prime time soap opera zombie shows to a movie about a girl with a punk haircut in a tank, is often depicting the world without us as run down and in ruin. This is often how houses, especially haunted ones, are presented. While there's some truth to it, especially in regards to houses because they do need upkeep as they are not sentient (again, my deepest apologies to sentient homes), why do we also think that's true of the planet? The planet is sentient. The planet is a living being, whether a sadly high majority of that wants to deny it or not. But I'm not here to play politics regarding your poor opinions on why you think climate change isn't real, I'm here to ask why we think something like a living, breathing planet that, in actuality gave US life, would continue to need us after we're gone?

I recognize this is starting to likely make me sound like an environmentalist, and while I am, that isn't my intent. In fact, this entry is not about the planet, it's about houses. But the planet IS a house, really, so I figured it only fair to be brought up within context. Either way, this is about houses. I believe my fascination with abandoned towns or buildings lies within the same realm as to my fascination and adoration of found footage, whether it's real (which is rather rare, at least in the ways we wish it to be) or faked (which is unfortunately most of the time done too poorly to be enjoyable). They're both things that once happened somewhere, and a lot of found footage takes place in abandoned buildings. There's a song by Brian Setzer and his orchestra titled "This Old House", which could invariably be interpreted many ways, as the home in question could theoretically be a metaphor for a person being capable of either needing help or not needing help. Or it could just be about a worn down house that's a fixer upper.

Photo by Dani of churchrummagesale and novembersfire

That's another one. Fixer upper. We call anything that's not up to our impeccably unachievable standards of beauty a "fixer upper" when it comes to homes, even homes that aren't in that much of disrepair. Watch any show on TLC about house hunting and you'll hear it, guaranteed. Why? Because they need us? Have we become so attached to the things that we ourselves have built that we now have given them sentience whether they have it or not?

A few weeks ago, my girlfriend and I were watching a documentary on PBS about bridges, and how they collapse. While I obviously felt for the people involved, especially those who survived because they have to live with what happened, my feelings, not surprisingly at all to myself, fell more along the lines for the bridge, who'd been so neglected and unnoticed in its falling apart that it finally caved in. I have a bad habit of giving unreal sentience to inanimate objects. If I kick something accidentally, I'll apologize. If I drop something too hard, I'll be afraid that I hurt it. Hell, I talked about, in my 2nd entry here, attempting to sell a book on Ebay recently that I wound up being unable to sell simply because I felt it would be so sad to be separated from me.

And this has nothing to do with how I view myself. I do not give sentience to inanimate objects because I believe something as simple as a water bottle is by and large and extension of myself. I hate myself. I want to see less of myself in things. So I know for me personally that it has nothing to do with that, but I cannot speak on others behalves.

But I felt for the bridge. I felt for how nobody had noticed it cracking, had seen it straining, even if the things that were cracking and straining couldn't be easily seen due to their coverings of concrete, because it resonated so deeply within me my own issues of humanity itself. People work so hard to pretend they are okay. I once wrote in a novel that "a well kept home is the first sign of a very unhealthy person", because to me, cleanliness is next to sadness. It's control. It's the one thing I can control, is how clean something is. I cannot necessarily control how much money I make or how exactly people may respond to me, at least not on a level I am eternally happy with, but I can make the bed every single day. I have control over that. A lot of people are like me.

But I don't think a lot of them know it.

And I don't want that to sound like I think I'm super deep or super important so much so that I can see things other people cannot, especially when I, mere paragraphs ago, said I hate myself. I just know that far too many people let far too many other people put far too much weight and pressure and strain on them for far too long, and don't realize this is why they are not doing well.

And then they break, and don't know why.

🐷

Even when it comes to the most famous haunted houses, Amityville for example, or the most famous ghost towns like St. Elmo Colorado, we cannot just have them be what they are for the sake of it. Except for 1408, the short story by Stephen King, turned fantastic feature film essentially starring one man about an evil hotel room, that is simply put, "just fucking evil". Most times these places have to be possessed by an evil force or evil doings of the past or a tragedy or something along those lines, they can never just be what they are. People can never just be what they are.

Something that the internet has become very attached to within recent years is the concept of self care. Back when Tumblr was no longer a ghost town itself, it was big on the self care idea. To care about ones self is not selfish, in fact, it's more selfish to ignore ones own problems because then you are denying your problems even exist and think instead you are perfect when in fact you are not. But homes, towns, these things cannot perform self care, as I've said. They need us, because, despite my wish to not be an extension of somewhere I live, homes and towns are in fact just that. Extensions of the self. Expressions of the person who made or inhabited them.

You can take a single room, a single rectangular space, and fill it through 50 years with different furniture and furnishings and it will look different every single time, because the person occupying it is different every single time. And sometimes those interests might line up, and sometimes that room might look relatively similar, but for the most part, it will be different. Because a room cannot furnish itself. Because a room did not build itself. And if a room did build itself, then we have a lot more problems to concern ourselves with than this blog post, because that's terrifying, and we should get on figuring out how that managed to happen immediately. Cleaning is even an act of self care, much as I may hate to admit that seeing as I hate to admit that I care about myself in any way, but it is, because by giving yourself a cleaner, healthier environment, you are making your lived experience that much better.

So making the bed isn't exactly what Freud would call therapeutic, but Freud isn't exactly what I'd call a therapist either, so I guess we're all wrong.

I have worked very hard in the last 15 years to actually reduce my footprint. Not in the sense that you'll hear environmentalists talk about; not in the sense of driving a cleaner car or making your home more energy efficient or anything like that. I'm not mulching for god sakes, despite it being a miraculously fun word to say. I'm not even sure that I know what mulching really is, actually. But when I say that I've worked at making my footprint smaller, I mean that quite literally, in the concept of myself. I've shut down old accounts, I've stopped discussing myself on forums anywhere else that aren't my own personal creations, and while my body of work continues to grow, I make certain that the mark I leave on this planet will not, in whatever way I can. When I was a teenager, I'd rearrange my bedroom almost every month, if not more often, if only because I was such an internally disheveled person that I needed to see a physical manifestation of myself as a well maintained and collected individual. Every room I've ever had, probably much like anyone elses, has been smothered in things I bought that I felt expressed who I was.

So if I claim to hate myself, and claim to want to shorten my footprint, why then am I spreading myself across multiple layers as vastly as possible? Especially in regards to physical surroundings? Because I know one day that I will be dead. I know one day that where ever I lived before I was dead will also likely go away. Houses are torn down daily, buildings are bulldozed constantly, but for a brief moment in time, it's proof that I was there, even if being there was painful.

And maybe that's what it really comes down to; the human experience or condition isn't inherently good or bad, it's inherently painful, even if you enjoy it, because pain itself as a feeling. A feeling that a home, unless of course we give it one, will never really feel. A home can only feel suffering when someone who is inside of it suffered. But it's still the person. It's still you. Ghost towns and haunted homes and broken bridges are extensions, and in the cases of bridges quite literally, but they also are their own things. They exist from us, but they exist without as as well, and frankly, despite film trying to paint a world without humanity as a bleak and desolate place, I find ghost towns and empty homes to be the most beautiful and enticing version of the world to inhabit. Whether it's a place nature has once again consumed or a place where everything is dirty and falling apart, those are the most beautiful things, because even the broken are beautiful.

Especially when they survive all they've weathered despite all the effort others put into breaking
them.

Photo by Dani of churchrummagesale and novembersfire