A Woman's Place Is in the Haunted Home

 

Charlotte Tierney, "A Woman's Place Is in the Haunted Home" in The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Vol. 1, ed. Michael Kelly (Undertow Publications: 2025).

Ghost stories are often stories about underlying anxiety, but Charlotte Tierney’s “A Woman’s Place Is in the Haunted Home” gives vision to devastating threads of anxiety in a most revealing way. The constant worry that something terrible is about to happen and the never-ending rumination, planning, and strategizing to avoid catastrophe is given form in the ghost itself: the ghost as the manifestation of that dreaded consequence.

We hold tight to our worries because they seem to have served us so well in the past, after all, they represent strategies for avoiding bad outcomes; we keep them close. This experience becomes an overwhelming burden that is not only exhausting but isolating. Only the anxious can feel the weight of their own dread, while to other people, those worries are nothing, and they can nudge them away as easily as pushing a shoebox under a bed. But that collected anxiety can, unexpectedly, be slung around your neck and suddenly crush you under its weight.