Quiet Hauntings…

While I’ve been thinking about quiet hauntings for this month’s theme, I keep being drawn to mirrors. 

People once believed that mirrors could trap a soul. There was even an old superstition of covering mirrors after someone had died to allow loved ones a safe passage to whatever comes next and prevent them being trapped.

This quiet horror of mirrors found its way into my short story collection The Unfamiliar & Other Stories. In the story Them & Us, Dorothy believes her missing husband is trapped within the mirrors of their house…

Dorothy places the scarf over my eyes and, as she ties it at the back of my head, says, ‘I’m going to blindfold myself now, then I’ll switch off the light.’

‘Okay.’

I wait. 

The scarf fits so tightly against my face, I can’t open my eyelids, and Dorothy’s heavy breathing fills my head. 

Eventually, I hear her shuffling away. 

There’s a click. 

Then there’s an even deeper darkness and I feel exposed to all kinds of mistrust. 

I don’t like it.

The theme also appears in Harrow House, my current writing project. Sharry, the protagonist, is haunted by the ghost of her aunt, but she can only see her in reflective surfaces. Mirrors, windows – even the blank, shiny surface of the television screen. 

There’s something unsettling (and deeply human) about the idea that our reflections might live a separate existence within the realm of a mirror – and that other unseen things might exist there too. Because much like the universe, how far does the realm of a mirror stretch?

Dorothy’s story appears in The Unfamiliar & Other Stories.

If mirror horror isn’t quiet horror, I don’t know what is.