Summer Homeschooling – Ghost Week

Welcome to Ghost Week! This week is not about jump scares or campfire stories. It is about why every culture has ghost stories—and what those ghosts reveal about memory, trauma, justice, and the things societies refuse to face. We will study ghosts not as monsters, but as witnesses: signs of unresolved harm, unfinished history, and truths that would not stay buried. By the end of the week, you should be able to explain how ghosts function as moral accusations, why silence allows harm to repeat, and what it means to truly listen to the dead.

MONDAY — WHAT IS A GHOST?

• What is a ghost really?
• Are ghosts:
• Spirits of the dead?
• Memories?
• Warnings?
• Stories meant to teach lessons?

Compare Terms

• Ghost
• Spirit
• Ancestor
• Shade
• Apparition

Discussion Questions

• Why do humans tell ghost stories?
• Are ghosts usually evil, sad, protective, or neutral?
• What do ghosts want in stories?

TUESDAY — AMERICAN GHOSTS & HAUNTED HISTORY

Theme: Ghosts as unfinished history

The Most Haunted Places in America:

• The Queen Mary – used as a troopship and hospital ship, so many people died aboard, reportedly over 600 ghosts
• Gettysburg Battlefield – over 50,000 soldiers were killed here over three days, bloodiest battle in the Civil War, nothing else like it has been seen on our shores; intense fear and pain from the battle imprinted the landscape
• Winchester Mystery House – Sarah Winchester rumored to have summoned ghosts there who were killed by the Winchester rifle, guilt and unresolved emotions of the spirits

Most Haunted Cities:

• Savannah – built over expansive forgotten graves, coupled with centuries of intense trauma from yellow fever epidemics, the slave trade, pirates, and major battles. The city’s eerie, moss-draped atmosphere, historic, dimly lit squares, and deep-seated folklore foster a permanent, spooky atmosphere. Old buildings that defy the America desire to destroy the old and worship the new. Even the lively ghosts, like at the Mercer Harris House, seem to live on because there wasn’t an ending, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
• New Orleans – Remember the line from Beetlejuice, “Live people ignore the strange and unusual. I myself am strange and unusual.” People there pay attention to and celebrate the strange and unusual. You get a feeling that the past is not dead; the city is kept in time. The people remain, the stories and superstitions are passed down, the dead remain, the buildings remain. Yellow fever epidemics, slave auctions, criminals shipped from France, New Orleans is scarred. Magic lives here, Voodoo survived here. It is where vampires originated from in America. All the stories, they live on. They are celebrated.
• Salem – the Salem witch trials. The horrible things that happened to the people there has left a stain there. And people come back for that, to appreciate that, to celebrate not conforming to society's oppression.

Why do you think these locations stand out?

Learning Focus

• Ghosts tied to:
• Wars (Gettysburg)
• Old houses & towns
• Slavery, displacement, injustice, violence, tragedy
• American ghosts often represent unfinished business
• Ghosts are what society refuses to process
• Why trauma resurfaces as folklore

Topics

• Why are American ghost stories often tied to places?
• Oral storytelling & local legends

Native American Ghost Stories:

• Tsul 'Kalu (the slant-eyed or sloping giant), or Judacullah (ᏧᏓᎦᎳ): a legendary figure of Cherokee mythology that plays the role of "the great lord of the game", and as such is frequently invoked in hunting rites and rituals. He is where the legend of Bigfoot came from. He could take control of and read people's minds, and hunters would tie masks to trees while hunting, so that he would be scared off.
• Moon-Eyed People (Worley's Cave, TN): cave people from Cherokee legend, described as short (3ft tall), pale-skinned, bearded people with poor daytime vision (bright blue eyes), who built mysterious stone structures in Appalachia.
• Wendigo (Windigo): A terrifying, insatiable man-eating ice monster from Algonquin-speaking tribes (Cree, Ojibwe) that often represents greed or gluttony.
• Two-Face: A Plains Indian figure with a beautiful face on one side and a hideous face on the other, known for killing those who look at it.
• Dry Fingers: An Iroquois, vengeful apparition that terrorizes travelers in the wilderness.
• Skadegamutc (Ghost-witch): Wabanaki lore describes this as a reanimated, undead shaman that feasts upon the living.
• Skin-walkers: In Navajo tradition, these are harmful witches with the ability to shapeshift into animals.
• Flying Heads: Giant, disembodied heads that hunt humans, featured in various Woodland and Plains tribes' lore.
• Underwater Panther (Night Panther): A powerful, dangerous creature in Algonquian folklore that lives in deep water.
• The Hidden One: A Canadian/American Indian tale about a great, invisible hunter whose wife could only be seen by those who could see him.

Common Themes

• Moral Lessons: Stories often function as cautionary tales to keep children from wandering off or to respect the, sometimes dangerous, natural world.
• Respect for Nature: Many monsters are created when humans violate natural laws, such as cannibalism (Wendigo) or disrespecting spiritual practices.
• Ancestral Connections: Ghosts are not always malicious; they can be warnings or spirits of ancestors checking on the living.
• Transformation: Themes of humans turning into monsters or animals are common across different tribes.

Activity

• 🏚️ Design a Haunted House Backstory
• Who lived there?
• What happened?
• Why does the ghost stay?

Critical Thinking

• Are these ghosts scary… or reminders?
• Should we listen to ghost stories as history clues?
• Why are American ghosts tied to places, land?
• Are American ghost stories a substitute for justice?

WEDNESDAY — JAPANESE YŪREI & YOKAI

Theme: Emotion creates spirits; Grief that becomes a curse

Learning Focus

• Yūrei = human ghosts, spirits bound by unresolved emotion, “The Grudge;” they form through betrayal, abandonment, extreme grief or rage
• Yokai = spirits, creatures, tricksters
• Strong emotions (grief, rage, love) can bind spirits
• These ghosts are not evil; they are what happens when suffering is ignored

Cultural Ideas

• Obon Festival: honoring ancestors, restoration of balance, the monk who released the well spirit
• Emotional excess as destabilizing; Ghosts aren’t “evil” — they’re unbalanced

Art Activity

• 🎨 Paint or draw a Yūrei
• White clothing
• Long dark hair
• Floating feet
• Create a Yurei whose rage is justified. Should this ghost be released – or allowed to haunt?

Reflection

• How do emotions affect us after events end?
• What happens when feelings aren’t resolved? When grief is ignored?

THURSDAY — SCOTTISH CASTLES & GREEK SHADES

Scottish Spirits

• Community memory, like the Native Americans, oral history is a big part of their culture
• Castle ghosts – usually historic figures, victims of battles and bloodshed
• Banshees (warnings, not villains) – ghosts warn, but do not save, future is known and unavoidable
• Bean Nighe (Washerwoman) – banshee-like spirit seen at streams washing the bloodied clothing of those about to die
• Caoineag – weeping spirit, name means “weeper,” she is said to signify death
• Thin places where worlds overlap – rooted in the Gaels and Celtic lore, the veil is thinner, Samhain, Beltane, Yule, etc. The Fae. The Wild Hunt.

Greek Underworld

• Structured afterlife
• The dead are processed, memory can be erased, punishment is permanent
• Shades = echoes of people
• Rivers of memory, forgetting, and fate
• Ghosts tied to burial rites & respect; moral consequence, Francesca, the opera

Text Focus

·         Book 11: The Underworld (Nekyia)

Dark Reading

·         The dead cannot change their fate.

·         They exist as:

o    Warnings

o    Lessons

o    Evidence of consequence

·         Memory is painful—but forgetting is worse.

Activity

• ✍️ Write a “Crossing the Boundary” Story
• A character meets a ghost
• What lesson do they learn?

Theme: Storytelling as meaning-making

Final Project Options (choose 1–2):

• 📖 Create a Ghost Myth
• Culture
• Rules
• Purpose
• 🎭 Act out a ghost story (mini play)
• 🎨 Make a Spirit Mask or Totem
• 🗺️ Build a Spirit World Map

Ethics Discussion

• Should ghosts scare or guide?
• How should we treat the dead and ancestors?
• Why honoring the past matters

🗓️ FRIDAY — GOTHIC FICTION

Literature uses ghosts not to frighten—but to force moral reckoning when justice, burial, or truth fails.

• Ghost = accusation
• Haunting = unresolved ethical debt
• Silence = complicity

Students track how each tradition answers one question:
What do the dead demand from the living?

The House Is the Ghost

The Fall of the House of Usher

• Gothic ghosts are systems, not spirits.
• Trauma embeds into:
• Architecture
• Bloodlines
• Social class
• Silence

Key Concepts

• The uncanny
• Repression
• Inherited guilt
• Madness as haunting

Critical Question

• Are Gothic ghosts supernatural—or psychological consequences of abuse and power?

Assignment

Identify what is actually haunting the story.

🩸 CRIMSON PEAK — A GOTHIC ANALYSIS

Core Claim

Crimson Peak is not a haunted-house story.
It is a crime scene that refuses to stay silent.

The ghosts do not exist to frighten the living — they exist to test whether the living will listen.

1. THE HOUSE AS A BODY

Gothic Architecture as Moral Decay

Allerdale Hall is not merely haunted — it is rotting.

Classic Gothic fiction treats architecture as psychology:

• Crumbling walls = inherited corruption
• Bleeding clay = buried violence
• Snow falling inside = collapse of boundaries

The house is incapable of containment.
Secrets seep upward. Floors bleed. The past stains the present.

Gothic parallel

• The Fall of the House of Usher: the house collapses because the family must

Crimson Peak’s innovation
The house doesn’t fall at the end — it has already fallen.
The story is about whether Edith escapes before it finishes killing her.

2. THE GHOSTS ARE NOT THE MONSTERS

Ghosts as Evidence, Not Threat

Unlike traditional horror, the ghosts in Crimson Peak:

• Do not chase
• Do not lie
• Do not harm the innocent

They warn.

They function like:

• The shades in The Odyssey: reminders of consequence and irreversibility

They appear after death, not before danger — because injustice has already occurred.

In Gothic ethics, ghosts appear when justice has failed so completely that only memory remains.

3. LUCILLE SHARPE: THE TRUE HAUNTING

The Gothic Villain as Trauma Preserved

Lucille is not “mad” in the modern sense — she is what happens when trauma is ritualized.

Key Gothic markers:

• Abuse mistaken for intimacy
• Love fused with ownership
• Preservation over change
• Death as control

Lucille does not want survival.
She wants stasis.

She murders not for money alone, but to freeze time, to prevent abandonment, to keep the house (and Thomas) unchanged.

This aligns with Gothic antagonists who:

• Inherit violence
• Repeat it
• Call it love

4. THOMAS SHARPE: COMPLICITY AS COWARDICE

The Gothic Tragedy of Moral Weakness

Thomas is not innocent.
He is not fully monstrous.
He is ethically bankrupt through inaction.

This places him firmly in the lineage of:

• Gothic male figures who benefit from silence

Thomas knows:

• The murders are wrong
• Lucille will not stop
• Edith will die if he does nothing

Yet he delays.

In Gothic logic, failure to act is an action.
The house bleeds because Thomas let it.

5. EDITH: THE GOTHIC HEROINE WHO LISTENS

Knowledge as Survival

Unlike many Gothic heroines, Edith is not saved by:

• Marriage
• Romance
• Rescue

She is saved by interpretation.

She:

• Believes the ghosts
• Reads documents
• Connects patterns
• Rejects romantic illusion

This is crucial:

Gothic heroines survive when they stop mistaking beauty for safety.

Edith’s arc is epistemological:

• From innocence → literacy
• From fantasy → truth
• From love → self-preservation

6. THE RED CLAY: MEMORY THAT CANNOT BE BURIED

Color as Moral Language

The red clay is not subtle.
It is not symbolic in the abstract.
It is literalized blood.

• The earth remembers what the people deny
• Snow cannot cover it
• Time cannot erase it

This mirrors:

• American haunted-land narratives
• Post-war ghost traditions
• Gothic insistence that land keeps score

7. WHY THIS IS TRUE GOTHIC (NOT HORROR)

Genre Ethics

Horror asks: Will you survive?
Gothic asks: Do you deserve to?

Crimson Peak is Gothic because:

• The violence is intimate
• The ghosts are ethical
• The terror is inheritance, not surprise
• The villain is the past, lovingly preserved

8. FINAL INTERPRETATION

What the Film Is Actually Saying

• Love that requires silence is violence
• Beauty can coexist with atrocity
• Ghosts appear when the living refuse accountability
• Survival belongs to those who listen, not those who deny

Crimson Peak argues that the dead are not dangerous — the people who refuse to hear them are.

1. GHOSTS AS TRAUMA RESPONSES

Psychological Frame
In trauma psychology:

• Trauma resurfaces when it is suppressed
• It repeats when it is normalized
• It becomes destructive when it is aestheticized

Discussion Questions

• Why do the ghosts in Crimson Peak warn instead of attack?
• How is haunting similar to intrusive memories or flashbacks?
• What happens when trauma is treated as “normal” inside a family?

Key Insight for Teens

Trauma does not need to be violent to be deadly — it needs to be ignored.

2. THE HOUSE AS A TRAUMATIZED SYSTEM

Concept: Trauma Lives in Environments

Allerdale Hall functions like a traumatized body:

• It leaks
• It decays
• It cannot regulate temperature or boundaries
• It bleeds through repression

Questions

• How does the house mirror Lucille’s mental state?
• Why is it important that the house cannot be repaired?
• What does it mean that Edith cannot “fix” the house — only escape it?

Psychological Tie
This reflects intergenerational trauma:

• Harm passed down
• Preserved through silence
• Repeated through ritual

3. LUCILLE — TRAUMA TURNED INTO CONTROL

Important Distinction for Teens
Lucille is not “evil because she was abused.”
She is dangerous because she refuses to let trauma end.

Discussion

• When does survival turn into domination?
• Why does Lucille confuse control with love?
• How does trauma become identity?

Ethics Question

Is Lucille a victim, a villain, or both — and why does that matter?

4. EDITH — SURVIVAL THROUGH INTERPRETATION

Psychological Growth Arc
Edith survives because she:

• trusts her instincts,
• reads evidence,
• stops romanticizing danger,
• chooses truth over attachment.

Questions

• Why is believing the ghosts an act of self-trust?
• How does knowledge become a survival skill?
• Why does love fail as protection in this story?

PART II — COMPARATIVE GOTHIC MAP (MODERN FILMS)

Shared Gothic Rule

The ghost is never the threat. The system that created it is.

When Trauma Is Inherited, Not Remembered

Core Claim

Crimson Peak depicts intergenerational trauma as a self-preserving system in which harm is passed down, normalized, and ritualized—until it becomes indistinguishable from love, tradition, or identity.

The film does not show trauma as something characters remember.
It shows trauma as something they live inside.

I. INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA — THE THEORY

Intergenerational trauma refers to trauma that:

• is not fully processed by one generation
• becomes embedded in behavior, relationships, and systems
• is transmitted through silence, control, repetition, and distorted attachment

Key mechanisms:

1. Silence — harm is not named
2. Normalization — abuse becomes “how things are”
3. Repetition compulsion — trauma is reenacted, not healed
4. Role inheritance — children inherit survival roles, not safety

II. HOW CRIMSON PEAK MODELS THIS EXACTLY

1. THE ORIGINAL TRAUMA IS NEVER SHOWN — AND THAT MATTERS

The Sharpe parents’ abuse is referenced, not depicted.

This aligns with trauma theory:

• The most damaging trauma is often unwitnessed
• Later generations experience effects without context

Lucille does not remember safety being taken from her.
She never had it.

Result:
Trauma is not a memory — it is the foundation of identity.

2. LUCILLE INHERITS A ROLE, NOT A WOUND

Lucille inherits:

• caretaker
• protector
• controller
• keeper of the house
• enforcer of “family”

In intergenerational trauma:

• children adopt survival roles to maintain stability
• those roles harden into identity
• relinquishing the role feels like annihilation

Lucille does not fear violence.
She fears change.

Ending the trauma system would mean:

• losing purpose
• losing control
• losing the only form of “love” she understands

3. LOVE IS DEFINED BY TRAUMA LOGIC

Trauma systems distort attachment:

• control = care
• possession = intimacy
• secrecy = loyalty
• endurance = virtue

Lucille’s relationship with Thomas reflects trauma-bonded attachment:

• fused identity
• fear of abandonment
• extreme jealousy
• violence justified as protection

Key insight for teens:
When trauma defines love, harm feels moral.

4. THOMAS IS A SECOND-GENERATION CARRIER

Thomas did not originate the trauma.
He maintains it.

Intergenerational trauma persists because:

• later generations inherit guilt without agency
• silence becomes survival
• complicity feels safer than rupture

Thomas embodies:

• learned helplessness
• moral paralysis
• inherited obligation

He is not abusive in the same way Lucille is —
he is structurally loyal to the trauma system.

5. THE HOUSE IS THE TRANSMISSION MECHANISM

In trauma theory, environments can carry trauma when:

• they enforce secrecy
• they resist repair
• they reward compliance

Allerdale Hall:

• isolates
• decays
• traps
• bleeds

The house does not symbolize trauma.
It enacts it.

This reflects a core principle:

Trauma is transmitted through systems that outlive individuals.

6. THE GHOSTS ARE FAILED INTERRUPTIONS

In intergenerational trauma:

• symptoms appear when systems strain
• warning signs are ignored
• intervention comes too late

The ghosts:

• warn
• show evidence
• repeat patterns

They appear because:

• the system failed to self-correct
• accountability never happened
• silence outlived the victims

Ghosts = the cost of untreated trauma.

7. EDITH AS A TRAUMA INTERRUPTER

Edith survives because she is not part of the inherited system.

Trauma interruption requires:

• outsider perspective
• pattern recognition
• refusal to normalize harm

Edith:

• names danger
• rejects secrecy
• chooses rupture over preservation

She does not heal the Sharpe trauma.
She escapes it.

That distinction matters:

Not all trauma systems can be repaired. Some must be exited.