The ghost is tired of hearing it doesn’t exist. It will show them, it will show all those living people what an appearance is when it really appears. The ghost is melancholy. It no longer has a good sense of where it ends and where it begins. Is the ghost on the right or the left? The ghost doesn’t care. It is from the beyond. The ghost despises rotten feelings. The ghost likes emptiness, and sometimes, the ghost has had enough of all this. But most of the time, the ghost is amused. It leaves to humans the mirage of believing in reality.1
I am writing to you from a cafe in Mid Wilshire. It’s empty, save for one guy on his computer drinking an iced latte. The cafe is in a strip mall, between a nail salon and a place offering same-day loans. It is the kind of place that falls just short of permanence. Like many liminal spaces, you might walk by and not notice it’s there. A series of storefronts become conjoined quintuplets, blending into a peripheral neon glow. Like parking spaces or bus stops, they are invisible until you need them, and then they are everywhere you look.
Recently, I’ve found myself dwelling on a different kind of liminal place. Those places where I have spent significant time but, for one reason or another, will never see again. When you start to catalog these spaces, you realize just how extensive they are. You have a repertoire of desertions: your childhood home, your old elementary school, your math tutor’s kitchen, your freshman-year dorm. Sometimes when I am visiting home, I get struck by the urge to go walk around my old elementary or middle school. What would those hallways feel like in a bigger body? How does the decade-old map in my brain hold up? What kind of changes might feel unexpectedly devastating?
The longer you live, the more places join this archive of former occupancy, and the more likely it becomes that you will run up against them. During the pandemic, my university started using the same brand of hand sanitizer that was available in my high school dining hall. I was suddenly surrounded by a place I hadn’t even made a conscious effort to archive. I find myself transported by laundry detergents, perfumes, and incense to spaces I no longer physically occupy, but that find ways to possess me nonetheless. Music has a similar effect, although it feels less tethered to physical space and more to periods of time.
The fact that these former places can revisit you is both comforting and uncanny. At any given moment, you might be relocated without moving; forcefully displaced from the present, and made to gather yourself back together. I’ve never been particularly attuned to the paranormal, but I am often struck by this kind of temporal dislocation. I can’t help but feel I’m being haunted. Memory itself is uncanny, even more so when you find you have been embedding something all along, without even realizing it. These collisions with memory disrupt the sense of cohesion that forms when you are moving steadily through the present; it’s a reminder that we did — and in some ways still do — reside in the past.
So is this kind of haunting reciprocal? It feels strange to think of a ghost as a non-being; a place acting as an apparition. This kind of visitation is at odds with how we understand haunting: ghosts are people who haunt places.
In 2021, I moved from an apartment on the corner of Sherbrooke and Saint Dominique further into Montreal’s Plateau neighborhood. The apartment had a host of problems; It was closer to the university, meaning it was louder, generally uglier, and more expensive. Also, my roommate didn’t have a window in his room. Still, leading up to the move I felt hesitant about leaving. On one of the last nights in the apartment, I wrote this in my journal:
In a week I will never return to this balcony. It is a different kind of grief. Buildings stacked on each other, the feeling of being in the heart of a city. I have memorized specific balconies, and they will stay preserved somewhere in this brain. I despise change but find myself at a crux in my life where I relentlessly encounter it. I am working on finding a way to be at peace with it. To feel held/seen by some moment that is being watched from beyond the now.
Living anywhere, especially in your early 20s, necessitates a kind of cognitive dissonance. You paint walls, put up shelves, carry furniture up the stairs…all with the understanding that these actions will need to be undone. You will have to make it as if you were never there. The apartment I moved into in the Plateau was full of evidence of its prior inhabitants. In the living room and my roommates’ rooms, the walls were covered in drawings and scrawled notes, barely concealed behind a thin layer of paint primer. My favorite scribbled excerpts included: “clitovis”2 and a crude drawing of a devil (can’t find a photo, unfortunately). My roommate’s room was plastered with Harry Potter quotes. A hastily installed plywood wall separated my room from another that we called “the gold room,” named because portions of the wall were decked out in gold paint.
In our time living there, we curated the space to our liking but hesitated to make any changes where the effort would outweigh the benefit. Sure, we embedded ourselves, but when the time came to uproot again, we knew we’d have to unravel the space we’d built.3
Leading up to the move, we were selling a lot of our belongings on Facebook Marketplace. At one point, a girl showed up who recognized the apartment. She’d known someone who lived there from a few tenants back. According to her, the person who had lived in the gold room had felt she was being haunted. My roommates and I were surprised; we’d never felt the presence of anything in the apartment but a handful of persistent mice. It was strange to think that we might’ve lived there for two years alongside a dormant ghost. In discussing this story with my roommate, she reminded me that there were other factors at play. A situation we couldn’t hope to understand; distress compounded by a windowless room. It makes sense that the language of haunting might have come to represent something more complex.
The more I think about it though, the more I believe that the apartment was haunted. The more I believe that every apartment is. After all, there was the ghostly writing on the walls. The fossilized handwriting of former tenants. When we moved in, we’d scrubbed off oil, dust, and stains from surfaces, but there was no moment where the apartment did not feel lived in in a way that preceded us. It’s hard to imagine living somewhere for that long and not leaving behind some kind of ectoplasm.
I still follow one of the tenants who moved in after us on Instagram. They and their roommates bought most of our furniture when they moved in, and they sometimes post photos where the living room is visible in the background. It’s like looking in a funhouse mirror: I recognize elements of this place where I spent so much time, but it rings uncanny. The base of the light fixture, the shape of the doorway, and the gaps in the hardwood floor are all the same. But the art is different, the couch is pulled away from the wall, and everyone who steps through the door is a stranger.
It’s selfish to expect a place to retain your presence once you’ve gone, but it also feels impossible that you have left nothing behind. I find myself squinting at Instagram stories, looking for ghosts. Looking for any evidence that I was there. I slept, and ate, and got too drunk, and threw up just past the toilet bowl, and spread butter on toast, and wept, and had sex, and shed skin cells, and opened every window in that apartment! But I will never go back.
The move is a simple loss. I’ve come to know the contours of a new space; I can find my way from my bed to the bathroom in the dark. I’ve placed my belongings in new crevices and chosen new closet corners and trunks to squirrel away the miscellaneous. Still, in the back of my head I wonder what would happen if I walked up the stairs to my old front door. If I knocked and someone opened, what authority comes from “I used to live here!” Would I walk into a stranger’s home, uncanny yet familiar, and feel the distance stretch between iterations of myself? The one that belongs here, and the one that doesn’t.
I am still adding to the roster of lost spaces. Haunted and doing the haunting. Soon, I will move again and settle somewhere new, temporary but indefinite. Until the lease is up. ☞
Postcard from a Ghost, Robert Malaval. I lifted this quote from the introduction to The Ecstasy of Communication by Jean Baudrillard. Easily the most readable portion of the text.
Funny to know the handwriting quirks of the person who occupied a space before you; weird unearned intimacy in knowing a stranger’s r’s resemble v’s.
Special thanks to Hannah and Reed, who sent me apartment photos and also lived with me for almost 3 years <3