Join us for a special conversation about Homes, Hauntedness and Belonging, exploring what happens when the spectral enters the domestic and what haunted houses reveal about the worlds we inhabit.
Together, Caitlin Blackwell Baines, Essie Fox and Leon Craig will discuss how spectral encounters, genre expectations and historical accounts can all be analysed to consider who belongs and who is left out. From Catherine’s clever feminist retelling of Wuthering Heights, to The Decadence’s hedonistic nightmare holiday ensemble, and How to Build a Haunted House’s erudite non-fiction journey from Strawberry Hill to Himeji Castle in Japan, these works interrogate familiar ideas of hauntedness and the stories we tell about our homes. Whom do we exclude and whom do we welcome inside? How can the past and present coexist?
At heart, haunted houses are never just about ghosts. They are also about ownership, power, memory and the cultural anxieties of the places and times in which they appear. Gather round for troublesome ghosts, gothic drama and pre-Halloween atmosphere.
Leon Craig is the author of queer haunted house novel The Decadence (2025) and gothic short story collection Parallel Hells (2022) Leon’s work has also featured in Hazlitt, Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and Berlin Babel anthology and her non-fiction has been published in the Sunday Times, the TLS and the Telegraph. Born in North London, she now lives in Berlin.
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