It’s a common enough theme. A horrible event takes place: a particularly bloody battle, a man rapes and murders a girl, a mother murders her children, etc, etc, etc. And suddenly, wherever the event took place becomes haunted. I’m fascinated by this idea. Why are we tempted to believe this? That places become scarred by the evil that takes place there. Surely, the place had nothing to do with it. How can we blame the house for the sins of the family? But we do.
Humans have a short life span in the realm of things. We stick around, usually staying around the same place, for seventy-some years. Some people might live in the same town all of those seventy-some years. And they know that others, many, many others, have lived there before them. And that, presumably, many, many others will live there after them. The place where we live transcends time in a way that we are unable to do. So we’re obsessed with finding the history of the place. Towns take pride in the famous people who lived there in years passed, and towns remember the most gruesome events that happened there, keeping them alive through ghost stories and haunted houses. People like all ghost stories and all stories of haunted houses, even if they’re about places far away from where they’re living. But there’s a special allure of local horror stories. We want to be able to tell stories about the place on Buffalo Ridge, for example, so our audience knows exactly where it is. The history of the places we live haunts us. Imagine you’re all ready to buy your first house with your spouse and a kid and the next one on the way, and you find out about the last family to live in the house you’re excited about. You find out that the son killed the rest of the family. Do you still want to buy the house? It’s the beginning of every haunted house movie. They always buy the house and the audience is always internally screaming at them not to do it. They, and we, tell themselves that it’s illogical to care about what happened in the past in a particular place and yet we can’t help it. We feel that the place must be scarred somehow.
Or, I believe, we want the place to be scarred. We want to know that gruesome acts of evil cannot happen without some result. If that can happen then the world is not balanced. We want to believe that the places will be scarred by evil just as much as we are. We refuse to believe that evil can just happen, unnoticed, with the world continuing, unaffected. Plus, we want to blame the evil things that people do on some larger force. We want to blame the place for driving them to do it. (Like The Shining). And so the place, as a victim of earlier evil, becomes scarred and so later lashes out as the villain. The scariest thing is that we don’t even know what kind of horrible scars a place has acquired through its long, long life. We are afraid of the mystery of place’s ancient histories.
1 comment:
I think that part of our fascination that comes with a place where something once ocurred has to do with the act that the place is the only tangible thing left of the event. We like concrete, hands-on sybols that commemorate events. We put headstones up in graveyards, we build monuments to battles, we like having some way of seeing what can never be seen, of capturing what has come and gone. I think that places so often become identified with what has occured there once due to our need for memory and that arbitrary assignage is how we do it.
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