I was reading Chloe Schama’s New Republic piece about the return of the haunted house as a “character” in modern literature, though the spooky homes are in a different form. During the age of foreclosure, the houses aren’t even often completed–the ghosts are the homes themselves, nothing within them. And what’s scarier really: things abandoned when half-built or fully built? I’d say the former.

With completion comes possibility–for good as well as bad. Every new Frankenstein is frightening, whether it be electricity, the telephone or the Internet, because it will upend certain parts of our lives. But with these upsetting inventions come progress. Without their completion, no “monsters” are unloosed, but we are stunted and stifled. The half-built is stillborn. From Schama’s article:

“What makes the new literary haunted house different is that dreams dry up more quickly, sometimes before they even take root. Modernity means speed, even when it comes to malevolent spirits. These houses are the shells of prematurely stunted hopes, laced with traces of bitterness and regret. Perhaps at no other moment in America’s history have so many of our towns and cities been filled with these kinds of structures, and pulp has put them convincingly on the page.”