When I was eight, I became obsessed with the paranormal. Ghosts, witches, psychic activity – pretty much anything I couldn’t see but could talk myself into believing at any moment I caught myself alone, which at the time was a fair bit because my two sisters and brother were in high school near the city and I had the house to myself for an hour every afternoon until they got home. I’d sit downstairs in the lounge room and listen out for footsteps on the floorboards above me, or close my eyes and try to ‘sense’ if other ‘beings’ were around.
It wasn’t that I was thrilled or unafraid by the prospect of hanging out with unearthly hobos or being taken by the darkness. I was fucking terrified. Most of the time I’d end up locked in the toilet or the others would find me sitting in the front yard when they came home, waiting for someone else to arrive before braving the house again. But it was the fear that attracted me. Sure, the thoughts of evil shit came on their own and with disturbing frequency, but I pushed them in my mind until they overtook me to the point of hyperventilation. At the same time as I felt like I was going to die, I loved being scared. (I also went through a phase of pretending to be dead every time my mother got home, but that’s possibly a different phychology for another time.)
For my ninth birthday, I asked for a horror-themed party. My sisters had the idea of turning our double garage into a haunted house and they and my mother went about the business of buying up on supplies from a Halloween shop across town. This made me nervous. By that age, it already wasn’t particularly OK to be into games, let alone dress-ups, and my party was going to include both. I realised I was placing my Grade 4 social status in the hands of the less-than-cool women in my family and I had a lot to lose – all five of my friends were coming.
On the night, I got into my executioners costume (which I had to keep explaining seeing as I was really just carrying a fake axe around – and I’m sure their nine-year old repeatedly sighing, “I kill people,” wasn’t creepy for my parents at all) and my friends and I were led to the entrance of the garage. One by one we were blindfolded and taken around the cold, cement-floored room and made to touch various objects with our hands: a bucket of ‘guts’ made from offal, a plate of ‘eyeballs’ from grapes. Then, with the blindfold removed, we had to climb through cobwebs and a tunnel and past my father sitting in the corner, staring blankly like a brain-fried patient with a torch to his face. I remember proudly thinking that my family was less sane than I’d given them credit for.
The scariest part, though, was the soundtrack playing while all this happened. It was a grainy, sparse recording of doors creaking and slamming shut; of soft laughter leading into tortured breathing and muffled struggling sounds. It was purely sadistic. My mother later gave me the tape (it was orange and branded “Halloween sounds”) and I’d put it on sometimes if I wanted to freak my sisters out when they weren’t expecting it.
My obsession with the paranormal eventually faded – resurfacing at 14 via an anti-Catholic-upbringing investigation into The Book Of Shadows as well as a heavy god complex – but the disturbing sounds contained on that cassette never disappeared from memory. Now, I know I was not alone in having lo-fi, eery effects ingrained into my psyche. Now, there’s ‘witch house’, the genre causing about as much “that’s not a genre” and “FUCK OFF AND DIE PITCHFORK” the last six months as ‘chill-wave’ or most other things before it, but definitely some kind of ‘happening’ generally considered to be led internationally by Texas label Disaro and Michigan act SALEM (pictured top), and encompassing California’s oOoOOand, most recently, Rhode Island’s Dream Boat and their ‘haunted’ beats, droning synths and interjecting effects. If it’s your ‘thing’, make sure you also share it with your younger brother or sister. They might look scared but, believe me, they secretly love it.
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