People have come up with many ways of describing the many emotions that make us uneasy. We focus on differentiating the fine shades of disquiet because these feelings help us to become sensitive to the dangers around us.
Often, we are unnerved by things that our rational minds know cannot be real. So it is when we feel haunted, whether we feel we are being followed by an actual spirit or by an idea that won’t let us go. At the core of a haunted emotion is the knowledge that a thing cannot actually hurt us, combined with the certainty that we are in real danger from it.
Some of the things that haunt us might be called spook, but feeling haunted has a different rhythm to it than feeling spooked. To be haunted is to be stalked by a lingering remnant of what once was, a gradual, growing presence in our lives. To be spooked implies a more sudden reaction.
Feeling haunted can be eerie, but it isn’t necessarily so, because being haunted isn’t necessarily connected to fear. We can be haunted by a memory that makes us feel guilty, or a song that elicits an emotion of strange joyful sorrow.
Underneath all these variations, there’s a kind of relationship in the foundation of a haunting. The things that haunt us won’t let us go. They persist, even when we would prefer that they go away.
