While at a writer’s retreat, Tara Badstubner witnessed a ghost walk through the dining room. In her book Why Ghosts Are Haunting Us in 2026 (For Real), she recounts the experience as a first-person narrative that combines a true-life haunting with an argument about why spirits seem to be appearing everywhere in our stories right now.
A writer’s retreat was where Badstubner went after taking a COVID test and receiving a negative result. Her novel’s concept barely existed—she envisioned a young widow overwhelmed by grief. A modest group of people met there: an engineer, a professor, a teacher, a published author who served as mentor, a poet, and Badstubner herself, a stay-at-home mom. She reached the large stone house late on Monday afternoon, turning off the main road, and found it had a dark appearance. This account is factual, not embellished.
The House and Its Rooms
As soon as they entered the house, Badstubner felt submerged in the murky depths of the ocean—nothing but shadow, broken up by an occasional shift of colored light above. A number of the writers remarked on how eerie the house was, but they quickly discovered a couple rooms that carried a certain warmth to them—the kitchen and the dining area—and it was there that they mostly gathered to talk and read from their writing.
Wednesday night brought a turn for the worse. Four of the women sat at the dining table together, while two more joined remotely via Zoom, kept away by prior commitments on the West Coast.
The Tread Above the Dining Room
Badstubner describes how, on this particular evening, they were all taking pleasure in the gift of companionship and mirth, which had been denied to them for months. They might have been noisy, but who could object? It was during one of these bursts of laughter that a woman sitting across from her abruptly quieted them. Listen, she said, and pointed upward. They all fell silent. Every one of them heard it—the heavy tread of feet above, before it vanished.
They forgot about the noise, just like the predictable horror movies where the heroine talks lightly despite clear warnings she should flee at once. They resumed their conversation and laughter immediately. Then the sound cut them off mid-laugh—the noise of furniture, heavy furniture, being pulled across the floor right above them. Someone called out from upstairs, asking if anyone was up there. There was no answer, but the sound grew louder.
The Shaman’s Offer of a Rose
Do you know what you’d do in the case of a haunting? Neither did Badstubner, but she does now. It was as if she couldn’t commit to an emotion, zigzagging between unhinged laughter and hysterical crying. She describes herself as the untethered woman who is slapped in the horror movie, the first one sacrificed to whatever evil presence needs feeding. Not a proud moment.
Among the many things they discovered during their Zoom call, they found out that both of their companions had been trained by shamans. This piece of information briefly overcame their fear. A shaman? Two shamans? One of them proposed that perhaps the laughter had riled a spirit in the house. They both guessed that an old ghost had been troubled by their noisy behavior and suggested they bring something “rose” to appease her. Rose, the flower.
The fragrance of rose-scented perfume lingered upstairs in Badstubner’s bedroom, upon her bureau. A trio of adult women—three, since the fourth, their mentor, had departed for her home a few miles distant to fetch her dogs and return with eager canine force to hunt their poltergeist—moved together in a tight cluster up the long stairs, along the hallway, into her bedroom, and brought back the perfume. They proceeded in the same tight formation, spraying as they went, choking on clouds of rose perfume—and that one dimwit still crying/laughing hysterically.
While the two shamans kept up a private exchange by text so as not to upset the rest of the group, they each confirmed what the other had seen: Do you see the ghost? Yeah, I see it, too. At roughly the same moment, their mentor and her three dogs appeared, and let off leash, the animals ran through the house, roaming and sniffing, jumping on their beds, looking for treats. The noise came to a sudden stop. Only later did they learn that the locals knew the house as haunted, and that it had once served as an elder care home.
A Novel Takes Shape
That haunting gave Badstubner’s novel a new shape: a husband who stays behind as a spirit, still mourning what was left undone and unfinished in his marriage, while he watches his wife try to start over again. A wave of recent books and films shows that she is far from alone in her concerns. Today we are surrounded by ghosts and faint apparitions fighting for our attention, trying to tell us something essential—or as trivial as to just be quiet, like in her case.
In our literature and cinema, she has detected a similar trend. The spectral presence is growing louder, more insistent, and more widespread. Ghosts have become more prominent than vampires, no longer lumped together with the other weird freaks—the zombies and the werewolves, that paranormal genre once reserved for lovers of the macabre.
Literature’s Long History With Hauntings
Our stories have long been filled with ghosts. The dead daughter of an escaping slave returns in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol—these works set the template for centuries of spectral storytelling. More recently, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a novel about a terrible act that refuses to be forgotten. Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones features a young protagonist, Suzie, who recounts her murder as a ghost striving for closure. But in this moment there is a decided upswing in apparitional visitations. It’s The Lovely Bones describes the dead as pouring into our thoughts, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is another example of a haunting tale.
Within a single three-month window, three film versions of celebrated novels centered on ghosts appeared back to back. The most recent adaptation of Emily Bronte’s gothic romance, Wuthering Heights, joins that group.
What the Story Shows
Badstubner tells a short story with a wide setting behind it. Her own account connects to a bigger shift: ghosts are moving from being a niche interest to sitting at the center of attention. They are not only for people who love horror anymore. Now they appear in common stories, movies, and ordinary talk about houses that are said to be haunted.
The reason her account works is its specificity. She names the house, the location, the group of peers, the perfume, and the dogs. It feels like a true story rather than something made up.
The case for ghosts rests on cultural evidence, regardless of personal belief.
A lesson closes the tale: whenever a spirit has something to say, lend an ear to it. And whenever that same spirit desires rose, grant it rose.
| Event | Time |
|---|---|
| Arrival at the retreat | Late afternoon Monday |
| Wednesday night incident | Mid-laugh moment |
| Mentor’s arrival with dogs | Around the time of the incident |
| Learning the house history | Later, after the incident |
- A woman shushed the group and pointed above
- Furniture was dragged across the floor directly above them
- A woman reached for rose-scented perfume upstairs
- Dogs ran through the house, roaming and sniffing
- The house was known to locals for hauntings
- It had once been used for an elder care home
The tale of Badstubner proves that the supernatural doesn’t require elaborate special effects to hold attention. All it takes is a dwelling, a dining room, and an openness to hearing the noises coming from upstairs.
Source material: “Why Ghosts Are Haunting Us in 2026 (For Real),” Literary Hub.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.