Here are Part 1 and Part 2 of this lesson case you missed them.
Now that we’ve discussed haunted house tropes and theories about addiction, we’re going to see how these seemingly unrelated topics connect to one another. We’re getting into the nitty gritty here, so grab a cup of coffee and get comfortable.
One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—
One need not be a House—
The Brain has Corridors—surpassing
Material Place—Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting
External Ghost
Than its interior Confronting—
That Cooler Host.Far safer, through an Abbey gallop,
The Stones a’chase—
Than Unarmed, one’s a’self encounter—
In lonesome Place—Ourself behind ourself, concealed—
Should startle most—
Assassin hid in our Apartment
Be Horror’s least.The Body—borrows a Revolver—
He bolts the Door—
O’erlooking a superior spectre—
Or More—
If you have ghosts then you have everything
If you have ghosts then you have everything
You can say anything you want
And you can do anything you want
If you have ghosts then you have everythingOne never does that
One never does that
If you call it, surprise there it is
The moon to the left of me
Is a part of my thoughts, is a part of me, is me
One never does that
One of the ways that I’ve been able to keep my sobriety strong is by getting creative and thinking about addiction recovery using metaphors like haunted houses. But I’d like to clarify—just because you have addiction and/or mental health issues doesn’t mean that you are a haunted person, and that you have some kind of curse that “normal people” don’t have. Folks who have gone through mental health crises are usually portrayed badly in mainstream media, and I don’t want to further cement stereotypes. We’re talking about “haunted” as a metaphor here, so please be kind to yourself as you read this.
This isn’t about criticizing or pathologizing. This is about stories. The story of how you got where you are, and how you want to tell your story moving forward.
Putting it all together.
So how do a haunted house and the concept of addiction intersect? Well, let’s take a look.
Haunted houses, two ways.
Now we’re going to explore this theory using characters who face two different types of ghosts.
First, using Eleanor Vance, the main character in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, as an example, let’s look at how this theory works.
Eleanor is a single 32-year-old woman. She has spent many years caring for her sick mother, and now that her mother is dead, Eleanor’s sister is her only family—and she doesn’t really have a very good relationship with her. She has no friends.
You could give an uncharitable reading of this character, as Stephen King does in his intro to my print copy of the novel, and say that Eleanor is a raging narcissist. And yes, Eleanor spends a great deal of time inside of her own head. But instead of rampant narcissism, I see a woman who is in pain and has turned inward as a result.
“She could not remember being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair. Without ever wanting to become reserved and shy, she had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-consciousness and an awkward ability to find words.”
A few other important bits of context here: At age 12, Eleanor lived through a strange, traumatic experience where showers of stones rained upon her family home for three days straight. The neighbors watched it all happen with morbid curiosity before it ended as abruptly as it started. Eleanor’s mother became hysterical, blaming it on the “malicious, back-biting people on the block who had it in for her ever since she came,” and the two sisters secretly blamed one another.
For anyone who’s had an adverse childhood experience (ACE) within a dysfunctional family, this might sound familiar to you. Not the supernatural falling rocks part of course, but the pattern where something bad happened, blame was placed, then everybody pretended to forget about it and move on, even though it festered forever and ever after.
It's because of this weird childhood event that the “supernatural analyst” Dr. Montague contacts Eleanor to be a part of his Hill House project—which kicks off the whole let’s-stay-in-a-haunted-house plot. Back when Eleanor changed her mother’s poopy bedsheets, she would fantasize about a better life, “waiting for something like Hill House.” So when she gets the invitation she jumps on the opportunity.
As the story unfolds, we get more insights into Eleanor’s distorted thinking. She spends a lot of time daydreaming and finds Hill House to be intriguing and romantic, even though it reeks of evil. She also has an obsessive, self-doubting inner monologue.
Eleanor is a great target for Hill House. She’s possibly telekinetic (she may have been involved in the raining stones after all) and she’s got an increasingly tenuous grasp on reality. Scary stuff happens to her—noises in the night, phrases written on the wall in “red paint” (blood?), ghostly visions—you really need to read it all in Ms. Jackson’s original words to get the full effect.
In the end, Hill House dominates Eleanor’s mind, and when Dr. Montague suggests she leave, she refuses. After all, this is now her home, and it’s way better than being lonely and living with her bitchy sister. Unfortunately, Eleanor doesn’t realize that the house is manipulating her until the very end, and by then it’s too late.
Now let’s look at a character from another novel—Emily Grimes in The Easter Parade by Richard Yates. It contains no supernatural elements, but there are quite a few parallels to Eleanor’s character in The Haunting of Hill House.
The Easter Parade begins this way: “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.”
Emily grows up in various rental homes with her mother and older sister. For Emily, there’s no stand-out big dramatic event like the raining stones or an invitation to Hill House, instead we follow her family through its long, slow decline. Her eccentric mother drinks more and more, and she’s embarrassed herself in front of other people so many times that eventually Emily can’t stand to be around her. Her older sister marries and has children with a man who we later find out is abusive, and one of the ways her sister copes is through drinking. But Emily is smart and determined—she leaves home, goes to college, and forges her own path forward as an independent woman.
However, Emily seems to be cursed. Aside from dating some truly awful men, she can’t seem to get away from the pain and chaos that her mother and sister cause for her. She too, has distorted thinking patterns and views herself as person who has “never understood anything.”
As Emily enters her mid-thirties, she finds herself becoming more and more dependent on alcohol. Sometimes, on dates, Emily finds herself doing shitty things like talking about her sister’s abusive husband in a flippant tone. “When she talked that way with a man—usually half drunk, usually late at night—she would regret it profoundly afterwards; but it wasn’t hard to assuage her guilt by vowing that she wouldn’t do it again.”
Emily doesn’t see her mother and sister for a time, during which they both die. She feels guilty about this. The man she was dating leaves her for a younger woman. She loses her job and starts spending nearly all of her time alone.
“She was in her eleventh month of her unemployment status when she began to fear that she might be losing her mind…she lived in memories all the time. No sight or sound or smell in the whole of New York was free of old associations; wherever she walked, and she sometimes walked for hours, she found only the past.
…she drank enough beer to help her sleep in the afternoons—it was a good way to kill time—and it was in waking form one of these naps, sitting on the bed and staring at four empty beer cans on the floor that she had her first intimations of madness…her dreams had been filled with clamorous voices from the past, and now the voices were still talking.”
I’ve used these two novels as examples because Eleanor and Emily both live in haunted houses—one literally and one figuratively. Both women are running from their families and seem doomed to lead sad, lonely lives. Eleanor’s ghosts try to freak her out by making loud noises and writing on the walls. Emily is haunted by her memories and mistakes.
I also have some things in common with these women. Like Eleanor, I retreated into my head when things around me got too difficult to deal with. I was scarred by events in my childhood that I thought defined me. Like Emily, I felt saddled by the weight of my family, and the dysfunction seemed to bleed into all of my relationships. And like Emily, I drank.
If you have ghosts…
You and I are not characters in a book, which means we have control over the telling of our own stories.
If something bad happened in the past, or your present situation is awful, it doesn’t have to define you. And, if you seem to be haunted for no clear reason, that doesn’t have to define you, either. In this lesson I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the reasons people drink, but if you still don’t know why you drink, that’s ok. We’re not all going to be like Eleanor and Emily, there’s so many variations.
The point here is if you have been living in a haunted house, it doesn’t mean you have to stay there. That’s what I mean by taking control of your own narrative.
Recovery is great, but if you quit drinking (and/or get mental health treatment) only to admonish your life and view yourself as some kind of subspecies of person, you’re not really moving out of the haunted house. You just put up new wallpaper.
I spent a lot of time thinking I was doomed to be haunted forever. First by the things that I drank over, then by my drinking, and after quitting, by the mistakes I made when I drank, and all the failures I accumulated. Essentially, I thought that I was fucked no matter what, and this was not a strong foundation for sobriety or mental health.
Well, today the house I inhabit is haunted by nothing more sinister than a cranky black cat who likes to sleep in my dresser and give me jump scares when I’m looking for a sweatshirt. I still have problems, but I approach them differently, and I sure as hell don’t drink over them anymore. And a big reason for all of this is because I decided that I am going to tell a different story with my recovery.
There’s no rules in the haunted house genre. So if you’re getting sober, you’ve got a brand new chapter to write. Like Roky said, If you have ghosts then you have everything.
Next up in Part 4:
I know, this has been really long so thank you for sticking with it! In the next and last section of this chapter, we’ll talk about how you can look at your own “haunted shit” a bit differently, and like, maybe even move somewhere else.
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