There’s a reason winter ghost stories endure. Winter strips everything back and, due to long, unending nights, it can leave us alone with the parts of ourselves we usually outrun. It’s a season that pushes us inward towards reflection, reckoning and the quiet truths we don’t face up to in brighter months.
Ghosts, whether from folklore, memory or the subconscious, rarely exist to terrify. They arrive to remind us that something is shifting. Something is asking to be acknowledged. Something old needs to be laid to rest… or at least carried differently into the new year.
February is the month of quiet hauntings.
It’s a beginning wrapped in an ending.
A door half-open.
A shadow that lingers just behind us, whispering: What will you do next?
R. H. DIXON 