Haley Newlin > Recent Status Updates

“Grief is greedy. It’ll eat you right up.”

“Anytime someone is walkin’ the line between livin’ and dead, they can fall over to the wrong side just like that.”

“…the idea of haunted houses ain’t new. This is an old, old city, the oldest in Georgia. War, disease, hurricanes—we done seen it all, and survived. A lot of people think, with all that death, we can’t help but have ghosts around.”

Woman mourning a child she never got to know bc of her father’s violent rejection of her biracial child

This book swells with grief

Death records for Black residents, even successful people like Lewis Bell, didn’t exist in most places in the U.S. in the turn of the 20th century, but especially in the South

That’s so f*cked

Delilah wonders if the house could trap her in its sad past as it takes her through memories of previous owners

Part of her wants to give in to that grief. I think this speaks to grief on a bigger level, how some days it feels easier to just stop paddling and sink

“Behind bars a man never reforms. He will never forget. He will never get completely over the memory of the bars.”

“I was walking on my own coffin”

Malcolm returns to Boston and begins a new hustle

The presence in the house is pain. Abram says you can evict a haunt but how do you get pain to leave?

“She had an increasingly unnerving sense that the house could hear them. If it heard something that made it angry, who knew what it might do?”

John-Lester saw a crying man in the attic

A grieving ghost

“Death comes in threes.”

Repetition of this phrase adds a constant, thrumming dread

Aunt Haddie was in movies, limited to servant and maid roles as a black woman, but used the money she made from acting to buy 724 Hartford Street on her own

All characters connected by way of grief

Lewis’ grief is so heavy, so disorienting and he isolates himself in his denial, disconnecting from the reality of his loss and the physical (rotting) proof of it

Delilah becomes increasingly protective of the house, seemed to be “some other person, some other entity”

This is historical and gothic horror but really explores manifestations of grief, too, through denial, avoidance, estrangement, and isolation

1910- white hospital refuses to help a black, dying pregnant woman

“Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.”

13 year old Malcolm X ordered to go to a reform school

Makes me think of the Dozier School for Boys in Florida and The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

“If you want something, you better make some noise.”

Malcolm X learned at an early age that using your voice and shouting out in protest could accomplish things

Malcolm X knew he’d die by violence, two of his uncles did, so did his father

“No wonder people made dumb choices in slasher movies. Anticipation reduced you to a quivering mess.”

"Slasher movies were nothing. The real horror was not being able to escape who you were in high school."

"There was no exciting drama around dying, despite what movies showed. Only the limp pathos of a life on its way out."

Even though Black Americans only made up 10% of the U.S. population during Vietnam War, 24% of American casualties overseas were Black

Many Black soldiers feared that they were being put on the frontlines for genocidal purposes

Only 2% of psychiatrists in the U.S. are Black

Limiting the available treatment and therapy options available to Black Americans seeking mental health care

Rodney Barnes’ aunt disappeared into Crownsville Hospital

I follow this guy on IG. He does horror film commentary and has written several comic books and for television