Work Text:
The Ghosts That Haunt Us
By Kara Danvers for CatCo
Ghosts have always had better PR than the living. They headline movie franchises, inspire themed cocktails at hotel bars, and lend their names to everything from “ghost kitchens” to “ghosting.” They’re rentable aesthetics now: moody décor, eyeliner smudged like regret, entire TikTok subcultures devoted to “soft hauntings.” For a species supposedly terrified of the supernatural, we sure love to monetize it.
Most of us meet our first ghosts in cliché: flickering chandeliers, slammed doors, the woman in the white nightgown screaming down a staircase. I thought that was the stuff to fear — absence dressed up as spectacle. But the older I get, the more convinced I am that ghosts aren’t about absence at all. They’re about presence. About what refuses to leave.
And in our century, they’re harder to banish. Social media is the most efficient ghost machine ever invented. Instagram preserves a dead romance better than embalming fluid. Spotify playlists become séance candles. A quick scroll can exhume an entire year. Try deleting, blocking, muting — the algorithm inside your body is older and more stubborn than the one inside your phone.
Take Hamlet, reimagined in our century: he wouldn’t be staring at Yorick’s skull. He’d be staring at a read receipt at three in the morning. The ghost of my father? No — the ghost of someone who left me on “typing…”
We live in an era obsessed with deleting traces, but memory doesn’t obey. The body keeps receipts.
I had this revelation in the least cinematic place possible: a deli on 12th. I went in for a clementine and a bottle of sparkling water. The man behind the counter, who reads more bylines than résumés, called me “doc” because of something I’d written. I laughed, grateful, and then someone opened the door.
The smell came first — sharp, green, a flash of vetiver over clean smoke. Nobody’s name was attached, but my lungs recognized the debt. In a breath I wasn’t in the deli anymore. I was somewhere else: a paneled hall, a voice steady enough to pin a room in place, a presence that changed the weather without moving a muscle. The clementine in my hand turned into an artifact.
That’s how ghosts work.
And here is where the column threatens to get me in trouble. Because ghosts don’t need sheets or midnight.
Sometimes they arrive in a dark coat and a steady voice—discipline worn like silk, seams invisible until you’ve watched them fray. A ghost can be alive and elsewhere, walking two steps off your shoulder.
It’s the smell that stops you on a street you don’t live on anymore.
It’s the coffee that suddenly tastes like an argument you can’t replay.
It’s the look your body remembers when your mouth insists it doesn’t.
We move on, of course. We calendar our days, borrow new laughs, find other arms with different strengths. We tell ourselves the volume is the cure, until we notice we’ve only drowned out the signal.
The ghosts aren’t here to frighten us; they are records—proof that feeling happened, and that it changed the architecture.
Fashion has always known this. We joke about clothes as armor, but they’re also reliquaries. Dresses remember more than closets do. A jacket can hold a season in its seams. Perfume clings to fabric longer than it clings to skin, which is why some of us keep clothes we’ll never wear again: because they are haunted, and because we like it that way.
The Greeks knew it too. They staged their hauntings in masks and choruses. We stage ours in couture and red carpets. The toga traded for sequins; the problems are the same. Desire. Power. Consequence. What haunts us doesn’t change, only the costumes.
When I sat through a lecture once — Greek tragedy, Sophoclean irony, the whole marble chorus line — I expected to be bored. Instead, I felt the room tilt. Someone onstage spoke with such precision it felt like a scalpel. It was as if snow had been cracked into the air. I remember thinking, sequins for togas; the problems are the same.
Fashion, tragedy, ghosts — continuity in disguise.
But here’s the part that still undoes me.
Ghosts don’t just haunt places or fabrics. They haunt timing.
They’re in the space between someone’s question and your refusal to answer.
In the pause that lasts too long.
In the way a water glass is nudged one precise centimeter until base and blotter align.
That’s the thing about memory: it isn’t tidy. It replays in fragments. A laugh, a line of citrus, the soft click of a fountain pen cap. Tiny hinge moments that refuse to shut.
I’ve tried to write about moving on. It’s the respectable narrative. New apartments, new partners, new playlists. But noise is not cure; it’s camouflage. Underneath the volume, the signal keeps pulsing.
Which is why I’ve started to make peace with being haunted.
Ghosts don’t need to be exorcised. They need to be acknowledged.
Because here’s the truth I wasn’t supposed to write: I don’t want forgetting.
I’ll carry the weight and call it shape. Some encounters don’t end; they alter the floor plan. Once a door belongs to a name, the house is never the same.
That isn’t melodrama. It’s design. A scar is the body’s blueprint rewritten. A ghost is memory’s version of the same.
Maybe that’s why I work in fashion. We sell newness, but what we’re really trafficking in is continuity. A hemline is just history cut on the bias. Perfume is just someone else’s memory in a bottle. Every collection is haunted by the one before it. And every person, no matter how carefully dressed, carries an architecture redesigned by someone who came before.
So yes, I believe in ghosts. Not the kind that send you running, but the kind that make you stop mid-crosswalk, laugh in a lobby, or write a column your editor will both love and scold you for.
We don’t need sage or tequila to banish them. We need to accept that they’ve rearranged the furniture.
The question isn’t how to exorcise the ghosts. It’s how to live in a house that remembers.