It’s October, which means all my friends and family are either planning a costume or paying $40 for jump scares delivered by out-of-work actors in an abandoned warehouse in Canarsie or a defunct Panera. I respect both. But my favorite kind of scary has never been the kind that jumps out at you.

It’s the kind that’s been waiting in the attic for forty years.

Why gothic gets me

Gothic horror is about houses, and the families inside them, and the things those families must never talk about. The terror isn’t that something will get you. It’s that something already happened, a long time ago, and the walls remember. The evil is insidious and implacable and cannot be reasoned with.

Inherited trauma, basically. Which is so real. Gothic horror might well have been invented by writers trying to make sense of inherited trauma, something poorly understood  in the past, and perhaps only somewhat better now.

Which is why it endures.

And there is no end to the kind of trauma one can inherit.

My gateway was the classic: Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier. A shy young woman marries a rich widower and moves into his legendary estate, Manderley. His first wife, Rebecca, has been dead for a year but is somehow still running everything. Her monogram is on the stationery. Her rooms are kept exactly as she left them. The housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, tells our heroine plainly that she will never measure up to Rebecca. There’s no ghost. There doesn’t need to be. The dead woman has more power in that house than the living one. Is she alive somewhere? A ghost? Locked in the attic (oh, how gothic writers lurrrveee attics)? Read the book and find out!

I’M OBSESSED. The tension is endless, inexplainable, inescapable.

Which brings me to another reason I love this stuff: I fully believe in ghosts. In fact, I have seen one.

I was in fifth grade. My friend Kathy and I were exploring the woods behind our homes. Thick trees, a creek full of frogs and insects, lots of very earthy smells, some nice, some more like rot. It was winter, around six-thirty, cold and dark under the trees. This was Northern California, so while it was cold, we are not talking snow or freezing here.

Some of the older boys we knew used to go down there to the creek to smoke and look at Playboys they’d stolen from their fathers. We knew whose fathers, too. We found mailing labels tucked into the magazines. Bookmarks, apparently. TRUE STORY.

We were by the creek, distracted by some of the boys’ abandoned stuff (incidentally the first time I ever saw a skin mag! Shocking!), when a large shrub shook.

A frog, we thought. There were frogs everywhere.

Then it shook again. Hard.

Okay. One of the boys was hiding in there, trying to scare us. Kathy went to investigate.

As she did, a shape slipped out the other side. It looked like a man crouching over, outlined in green. But it was too flimsy to be a person.

I screamed. Kathy vaulted out of the shrub. I pointed, and she saw it too. It disappeared farther into the woods.

That was it. No message from beyond. No explanation. But afterward, when we compared what we’d seen, we described the same thing, down to the green.

WE BOTH SAW IT.

How many cultures have legends of wood sprites, forest spirits, things that live among the trees? The woods, people. That’s where they live. THEY’RE IN THE WOODS.

But don’t take that to mean I don’t love a spooky, decrepit old house. I do. If you tell me you saw a ghost in an abandoned mansion on the edge of town, I believe you. I’m just relating my personal experience.

So, if you want to expand your gothic repertoire this October…

… which I highly recommend!

Flowers in the Attic, V.C. Andrews. If you’ve read it, reread it as an adult. It’s worse. In a good way. What shocks me most keeps changing every time I go back. Now, it’s the mouse who gets me. The poor little mouse. So trusting.

What Moves the Dead, T. Kingfisher. A lean, nasty retelling of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” with fungus. So much fungus. Kingfisher is funny, so funny, and funny people know exactly where to put the knife. Read it.

A House with Good Bones, T. Kingfisher. A woman moves back in with her mother and notices her late grandmother’s perfect garden is a little too perfect. Grandma was not a nice lady. This one is cozy right up until it isn’t.

Wakenhyrst, Michelle Paver. A girl, a tyrannical father, an isolated house on the fens, and a medieval painting he becomes obsessed with. It’s slow and suffocating, and it gets under your skin and stays there.

Your turn

Have you ever seen a ghost? If so, where? I gave you my story. Now I want yours.

And do you find haunted house attractions scary? I don’t. I find them annoying and weird. Possibly I’m still holding out for another shrub.

Tessa