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A haunted house is a memory palace made real: a physical space that retains memories that might otherwise be forgotten or that might remain only in fragments. Under the invisible weight of these memories, the habits of those who once haunted these places, we feel the shudder of the ghost.
The majority of ghosts, Lethbridge concluded, “are no more than mental pictures produced by living people,� and in the burgeoning technology of television he found a perfect metaphor. Ghosts, he concluded, “appear to be no more and no less than television pictures. The television picture is a man-made ghost.�
Writing of New Orleans’s history, the scholar Joseph Roach notes that here “memory operates as both quotation and invention, an improvisation on borrowed themes, with claims on the future as well as the past.� Ghosts are part of the city’s tourism now, like jazz and voodoo, brothels and booze.
We live among the undead, in cities of ghosts. The buildings that used to have meaning and purpose—not only houses but banks and government buildings—have been emptied of what they once meant, and yet they remain, haunting us. Those of us who can, leave, moving on to new cities that we hope are not yet beset by the dead. Those of us who can’t, like the residents of Hillsdale, Illinois, remain behind, haunted by forces larger than ourselves, imprisoned by the folly of the rich who have unleashed some unspeakable dread from which we cannot escape.
This return of the dead happens more often than we think, and often with disturbing resonances. Images of Rehtaeh Parsons, a seventeen-year-old Canadian girl who committed suicide after a campaign of cyberbullying, began appearing after her death online as part of ads that beckoned: “Meet Canadian girls for friendship, dating or relationships. Sign up now!� The algorithm that crawled the Web, grabbed these images, and repurposed them for advertising had no idea—was never programmed to have an idea—about Parsons’s life, her backstory, her death, or how her image’s sudden reappearance could be
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