haunted houses (and the like)

* inspired by “on pockets” by ari banias

i’m not sure what it is about houses especially haunted ones
that makes them such a staple in literature especially horror fiction
just the idea of a house, which is something that’s supposed to be a comfort,
suddenly turning to a site of hatred and pain and twisting
and there are so many ways that a house can be haunted, like
maybe there’s a ghost but maybe the house’s walls are just
stained with the trauma of its own being or something horrible
that happened there once long ago, or maybe the architecture
conspires against it and renders the house uninhabitable and it withers
because it no longer has a purpose if no one lives there
or maybe just spiders and the occasional rat build
up new homes within its walls, and does that count as a house
if the thing that lives there is inhuman, like birdhouses must be
houses because they have house in the name, or
a beaver’s den is a house because it’s architecturally complex,
but maybe a spider’s web is also a house, albeit a two-dimensional one,
and also why does a house need to be constructed in the first place
maybe you just find it and decide it’s yours like a hermit crab
who uses other people’s houses as its own, which brings up
the question of whether a snail lives in its shell like a person lives in a house
or a turtle or a clam or whatever else has an anatomical feature so foreign
to the nature of humans that we cannot but construe it as something external
to the being in question, which then leads to the problem of whether or not
we live inside our own bodies, sitting on couches watching cartesian theater all day
i mean some people say your body is a temple and
temples are houses for gods, but sometimes temples are made with purpose
and sometimes they’re just found and chosen at random
and some gods (kami) live in trees and mountains and things like that (shintai)
but really that’s just another kind of body so what you get to
is that houses can be anything and bodies can be anything and bodies are houses
and vice versa and if you want it to a body can be a house
that you make for yourself, and fill with all your coolest posters
and wallpaper and pillows and bookshelves and instant ramen,
but maybe it haunts you or maybe it hates you or maybe you haunt it
because you’re the ghost in the machine at the end of the day
if you want to go back to descartes and all that, which implies that everyone
is haunted unless you’re one of chalmers’ zombies but the whole
point of those is that it’s impossible to tell, just like we don’t know
what it’s like to be a bat and only zhuang zhou knows anything about
the happiness of fishes (debatable) so who knows if a house is haunted
or just mad at you for its own reasons, like maybe you forgot to acknowledge it
as a fellow possessor of a body or soul or whatever we agreed houses
may or may not have or maybe it’s jealous because you can move
houses but you can’t move bodies, except maybe if you could move bodies
you’d become another person in the process so who’s to say
you don’t become another person if you move to another house
or maybe it’s the house that changes after you depart from it and
it’s haunted people that beget haunted houses which is really
very gothic, like i can see why people write about stuff like this
in stories or novels or maybe even in poems