Every now and then, a guest says something that stays with me long after the recording. This week, it was Dr. Cailín Murray , an anthropologist at Ball State University who studies the intersection of folklore, belief, and the stories we tell about what haunts us.   “It’s not whether you believe in ghosts or not. We’re all made up of ghosts because we carry their DNA.”   Isn’t that great?!   So maybe, we’re all a little haunted, too.   Not by rattling chains or flickering lig

Dr. Cailín Murray was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. She earned her Bachelor of Arts from Western Washington University in Bellingham, followed by a Master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Before joining the faculty at Ball State University, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Her fascination with ghosts and spirits began during graduate school while reading Karl Marx, and she has been actively researchi

Dr. Bernice Murphy is an Associate Professor in Popular Literature at Trinity College Dublin, where she specializes in American horror and Gothic fiction and film. She completed her PhD on Shirley Jackson at Trinity in 2003 and has since become a leading scholar on Jackson’s work, editing Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy  and serving as academic consultant on The Letters of Shirley Jackson  (Penguin Random House, 2021). Her research explores themes of place and

Shirley Jackson’s brilliant literature, monsters, and your scary neighbor. October invites us to play with fear. We pull the blanket to our chin or peek between our fingers, safely terrified by ghosts, vampires, and the things that go bump in the night. I’ve been thinking a lot about monsters and what they speak to in our larger society. But lately I've been thinking about the monsters hiding in shadows, but those just outside our front door. Because real horror rarely announ

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