(Un)mapping Phasmatopia, Part 1

The house that haunts us.

This is the first post in a series that will explore the concept of “phasmatopia,” which is not just the name of my SubStack: it’s evolved into a gestalt term that covers both the genre of stories I’m interested in (reading and writing) and also a particular orientation toward reality. I first started tinkering with “phasmatopia” in this post from April 2023, where you can find a preliminary sketch of some of these concepts. This series will be a more expansive explanation of what the concept means for me and how I find it useful.

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In my mind, there’s an image of a house.

It’s been stuck with me for a while now—so much so that it's shown up in other essays I've written, and an entire short story sprouted out of it¹.

This house in my head is familiar: you can see houses just like it across upstate New York, where I grew up. There are more and more of them every year. The rural towns where the trains used to run are full of them. They’re cropping up in the suburbs. These houses are relics of the past, or harbingers of the future, depending on how you look at them. But they’re not part of the present.

The house in my head has white vinyl siding. 

It’s hard to tell what color the shutters might have been, before they were covered over by the weeds reaching up from the overgrown lawn and the curtain of spreading vines dangling from the roof. The door was kicked in by scrappers long ago; it lies somewhere in the hallway, lost under drifts of dead leaves.

But the siding is definitely white. There’s something striking about its doomed optimism, amid the tangle of vegetation consuming it. Somebody thought they were building a house that would last forever, once. “Vinyl is final!” said the salesman on the day it was purchased. “Needs no maintenance, no painting. A hundred years from now it’ll still be as white as it is today.” And it does still gleam, underneath those leaves, like bleached bone or broken china, still shining in the last rays of sunlight filtering through the rustling canopy above it. Might still last a hundred years. Except nobody will be able to see it.

There’s something about the way we build houses now that makes them look even more empty when they’re finally abandoned.

Houses built in centuries past died with dignity. When their time came, the paint peeled and the wood rotted and the single-glazed windows weathered into sand. Those houses settled back into the earth with a sigh—or else they were built like small mountains, miniature megaliths, rocks heaved and hewn into other rocks, forever altering the landscape where they stood. Those houses were designed by people who remembered hard times: either spare enough to be abandoned quickly in advance of the next disaster, or fortress-thick, ready to stand until the last defender fell.

Not this house.

This house dies hard. It was built for the End of History, when the sun would never set on the American Empire. It is Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. It was spun out of department-store tinsel and easy credit. Its deathless white siding makes it look like a casualty of plastic surgery, taut and pinched and shining, imagining itself young under the mossy growth of time. 

Any day now, the neighborhood will come alive again, it seems to say. Any day now, the jobs will come back. Any day now, this old fixer-upper will welcome a bright new family into its empty rooms, and with just a little elbow grease, it will all be as good as new. 

Any day now.

If you want to gaze into the abyss, come sit here in the moonlight, where the living room used to be, and imagine all the dreams that died here.

Every house is a manifestation of hope. The planners drew this house up in their minds, and captured it on drafting paper in gleaming offices, thinking about their own houses, their own careers, their own families. The builders hammered it together out of fresh lumber, humming in the sunlight, breathing the cut-forest smell of new construction, looking forward to a cold drink, driving home at the end of the day. The people who bought the house saw it as a gateway to a better life: even if it wasn’t their dream home, it was a new opportunity, a place to bring a mate, find a job, maybe have some kids, be a part of the life of a place.

Those planners and builders are old now, with more disappointments piled up behind them and fewer hopes ahead—if they’re still alive at all. The people who bought the house didn’t find what they were looking for; they moved on, or fled, or died. Nobody else’s dreams found purchase here.

It’s hard to hold onto those good memories in this empty house. It’s hard to see it new, to see the promise that the planners and the builders and the buyers first saw in it. The good times fade along with the wallpaper, while the cobwebs and shadows and neglect weave filaments around the bad memories—the arguments, the disappointments, the despair, the deaths, the final decision to seal this place up like a tomb and let it fall away from life. Maybe that’s what we mean when we talk about a house becoming haunted: the bright pastels of new life washing away, leaving only the rust stains and chiaroscuro of everything that ends. A haunted house has nothing but bad dreams left.

And if you step out into the chill night, through the portal where the front door used to be (where the wreath once hung at Christmastime) you’ll see houses like this all along the road, wrapped in their own shadows. The same thing that happened to this house is happening to the whole place. The lights go out one by one, in stores and diners and factories, and don’t come on again. Wind blows through broken glass. Headstones in the cemetery disappear beneath the weeds. Whoever first coined the term “ghost town” knew what they were about: it’s a town full of ghosts, and also the ghost of a town—the shade of something that used to be alive.

In one sense, these places are failures of human dominion. 

This empty house with its white vinyl siding was built to last forever. The people who made these places never thought that it would all end like this. These towns, before they were ghosts, were supposed to keep growing, expanding outward and upward, reaching toward the fantastic future for which they were destined.

Property values would keep going up, and up, and up, they said. This is a sure thing: buy now, sign here, get in on the ground floor, while prices are low, before the rush starts, and ensure your family’s fortune forever. Your grandchildren will look around with tears in their eyes and marvel at what was built here, carved out of this godless wilderness by a new breed of pioneers. “We never had to repaint the siding,” they’ll whisper, shaking their heads in wonderment. And then they’ll tuck into a nice lunch made by their chirpy robot maid.

Those promises broke like the glass in the windows.

That’s why we’re always trying to keep the machines running. Keep building, keep hustling, keep the lights on, keep the economy going at all costs: we can’t stand the sight of these empty shadows, because it means we failed. We failed to live up to what we could imagine. It means we couldn't control everything. No matter how much we build, time catches up with us, as it always has.

All this can easily turn Gothic. The horror in the Gothic genres always comes from modernity confronting something it can no longer manage. We could broadly define it as the fear of failure within a utopian vision. The house—along with the town—was meant to be part of a beautiful future; now it lies in ruins, its promise unfulfilled, plagued by the figurative and literal ghosts of the things its occupants were unable to control—the elemental forces that we can never outrun, despite our technological prowess. We’re afraid of these places because we’re afraid of everything outside the eternal present within modernity’s fortifications. We’re afraid of the world outside The Wall, where human dominion has crumbled into something wilder.

Still—it’s only a horror story from the point of view of modernity. The fear comes from the finality of our linear perception: there is no afterlife, and once things fall out of the present—people, houses, towns, civilizations—they’re gone forever. They exist only as bad memories. They’re the ghosts that can’t be banished, without bulldozing the ruins down to bare earth. And even then, the things we try to bury have a way of coming back to haunt us.

If we foreclose on the possibility for this empty house and all those like it to have a kind of afterlife, beyond human materialism, then it all looks pretty grim.

Fortunately, other options are available.

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In Part 2, I’ll take a look at how things might look differently from a non-linear, non-material, non-anthropocentric perspective—and how this might help us create meaning in the face of an uncertain future.

1. I’ll be publishing “All Green” on here as a serial, starting sometime in the next month.