I think there's a ghost in my room.
The House, being haunted and other matters.
Sometimes when I feel really bored, I pace around my room a lot and I notice little green specks on my wall. There are yellow crusty streaks but that’s egg yolk from years ago (we don’t talk about that). These green little specks aren’t exactly on the wall per se... they kinda float around like old dust. I like to think it’s mould, especially in the humidity that we live in here... good god. But perhaps it is my mind tricking me into seeing things in the static whiteness of the ceilings and walls around me.
Anyway, I have been having conversations with some Buddhist friends recently about 被鬼压, translated to English it means “to be pressed (downward) by a ghost”. This can apply to one or many ghosts. I think the best way to put it is like sleep paralysis but instead of merely observing the thing of your horrors run around, sometimes you don’t see anything at all... instead, you just feel absolute dread. From the change in temperatures in the room you’re in, to the loud beating of your heart through your chest. My friend has heard them and been literally pressed down and punched. I’ve been let off with a couple of scratches. (I’m not Buddhist by the way I just like to collect religious knick-knacks which probably has contributed to me placing myself in such predicaments).
Also, I need to add in a disclaimer that this experience is not exclusively Buddhist in nature, it just happens so that I have managed to gather a lot of Buddhist friends with similar experiences.
As for the green specks in my room... I think they’re cool... it gives my room a sort of personality like how crusty and dusty everything looks in the original version of Silent Hill 2 (not the remake... I do not stand by the crispiness of it all). I think a hole in the wall literally would make sense with the vibe. I’ve also been obsessed with looking at tile accents... something I feel is lacking in Singapore compared to my boyfriend’s apartment in Köln.
I'm not sure if there is a common narrative of what “this place is dirty” means... but in Singapore or most Asian or Southeast Asian countries, where I grew up, it usually refers to a place being haunted rather than the cleanliness of a place. (I do, however, want to add that it’s become standard practice for me to clean and declutter during ghost month, even whilst overseas). I should have very well written about this in my thesis... something like “what goes bang in the night is mere dust specks of an unclean house” would be an apt title. I love little quips like that. I also love to talk about haunted space. Like postmodernist haunted... and sometimes literal haunted.
Once again, a mid-writing apology, I jump around topics a lot. Anywho, I think about being haunted as an emptiness being filled up... like a container being filled to the brim with water. It consumes and leaves no other space for thought. I think when you’re haunted you hyperfixate on the reasons why you are. Just as when a space or place is haunted it becomes the only thing the space or place is known for. A haunting is a tethering, a parasitic relationship. Without the mind, space or place, a haunting cannot take. When I write of a haunting I do not merely refer to it being in the circumstance of horror, you could use it as an analogy for many other things.
Space and place itself is just intriguing though. “I think there’s a ghost in my room” is something I often hear from people. It’s a niche friend group experience where all of my friends have heard marbles and weird objects being dropped in the middle of the night. I hear them constantly and I think it’s become a daily experience for me. The sound of objects being dropped in the night has it’s ties to the ghost neighbour narrative that made its rounds back when I was a kid. (Never really believed in it but my imagination precedes my unwillingness to care or believe). And sounds leave so much space for the mind to wander. Just as where there is nothing, something must exist. (Which is linked to my obsession with perceived space but we will not get into this should I digress further while writing this text).
I was watching a video on the haunted house a while back from the wonderful Jacob Geller. A comment mentioned how we could stare at a door on a dark and stormy night and be afraid, not at the idea of a ghost appearing but at the possibility of something as we allude doorways to a space of transience where things pass, appear and disappear. (Paraphrased in my own words according to my failing memory at least). This has stuck with me through time and it haunts my mind in the way that I perceive space differently now.
“There is a lingering sensation in the forefront of my brain. I can feel the sinews of wall to flesh writhing around. I am both awake and yet immovable by nature or by force. There is an unseen attachment I have to space and time. There I linger and wait. There I am connected flesh to bone, wall to ground, body to body. I am a body with its mind attached to that of another organism. I am a body attached to its environment.
Discern my outer walls to my inner attachments and you will lift the veil. I am a moving, breathing assemblage. I am body and I am bone. I change, imperceivably, lying in wait till a keen eye discerns right from wrong, haunted from unhaunted, clean from unclean. I am neither new nor old, I am constantly relapsed in my sensibilities of attachment.
I am attached firstly to my flesh and bone, and secondly to the writhing change of the slow-paced ambience.”
I wrote this little prose for a project I did a year ago, heavily inspired by the house as mind and mind as the house, being engulfed and taken over by disease and haunting. I’m not going to get into the intricacies of it all but it came from an amalgamation of thinking of abandoned and forgotten spaces, place attachment and that one prose in the bible talking about the Leprous House.
Place attachment is something I’ve been wanting to get into as well and it shall continue in another writing sometime soon. I think of place attachment as another form of haunting, like an intention placed upon an unwanted thing. Sentiment as well. Sort of like a parasocial relationship but with an object. It fills up the mind and it makes me sick. I think often about my grandmother’s old house because I can’t remember what it looks like. It scares me so much to forget.
Forgetting is similar to haunting in a way. The fog that eats up the mind until it slowly changes into something it is not. A metamorphosis of sorts, except the self as concept clashes over when it comes to forgetting. Perhaps that is why we fear forgetting more than we fear being haunted or being changed. I like to think of the act of forgetting as the Ship of Theseus, a carcass of oneself in a new shell. And perhaps in this scenario, to forget is to be haunted by the loss of self. (In a way this links us back to the idea of postmodern horror, the loss of self).
I’m going to end this text here since I’ve rambled too much. If you’re confused, just know I am as equally confused by what I’ve just vomited out. I tend to write in a way where there is no point, no conclusion and I go in circles discussing different topics in my head that pop up as I go, I do hope you’ve taken something from my ramblings though.
P.S. I can’t seem to work through the kinks of using Substacked. Every time I try to hyperlink the videos I’ve watched and whatnot my Substacked glitches into nothingness. So for now, I’ll link anything of importance below.
Jacob Geller’s Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House:
Clark Elieson’s Fear of Forgetting: