A Queer Presence: Queer Ghostlore in Folk and Popular Cultures (edited collection)
In an essay for the New Yorker, author Nell Stevens writes that, growing up as a reader of ghost stories, the “spectral presences, by being seen and not seen, by exerting energy where none was anticipated, spoke to the queerness I felt within me and didn’t understand. At that time in my life, I experienced my queerness as an unknowable force” (2022). With the advent of media like the YouTube series Queer Ghost Hunters (2016), Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor (Netflix 2020), and Kristen Stewart’s long-awaited queer ghost hunting show Living for the Dead (Hulu 2023), queer ghosts have begun to make themselves visible in the broader landscape of paranormal media.