“The word ‘haunt’ [and its variations] may be one of the closest English words to the German ‘unheimlich’… Just as ‘German usage allows the familiar (das Heimliche, the ‘homely’) to switch to its opposite, the uncanny (das Unheimliche, the ‘unhomely’)’ (Freud), so ‘haunt’ signifies both the dwelling-place, the domestic scene and that which invades or disturbs it.” - Mark Fisher, Hauntology

The private home is a vessel for the staging of our personal and collective hauntings. From eerie halls and spiritual apparitions to the metaphysical spectre of the free market “hustle”; we all have our ghosts. On a personal level, it could be nightmares, your housemate’s dishes, a coat on the back of a door in the dark, contorting into the unhallowed figure of a dæmon; violent neighbours, the wind, or the willows that besiege you. Collective hauntings are anxieties we share. Theft, rot, fire, flood, inflation, rising damp, rising sea, pollution, mould, bleach. They are woven into our walls, sewn into the floorboards, drilled into the roof.

Our dwellings are the armature and cocoon designed to protect us from these external horrors. Yet, the pestilence of mould and mildew in the domestic space is omnipresent. A haunting from within (“It’s coming from inside the house”). While this sort of fungi is essential for life on earth, it doesn’t discriminate between a log in the forest and the chipboard in your walls come mealtime. Perhaps the odds are stacked against us.

Historically, our focus has centred on keeping moisture out. So much so that we have lost sight of its potential as the exposer of truth: that conventional homes reinforce our divorce from the natural world. As “rational beings” defined by structure and order, we like our plants in pots or printed on wallpaper. Apparitions of untameable ecologies such as mould are an affront to our vexed biological ego. If we fail to control our blockish corners of the earth, we might be forced to consider our flimsy mortality.

If this wall could talk it would want the same things I want: “More food. More drink. More warmth.” Oop! There I go; humansplaining the mould! The truth is I don’t know what it (they?) wants. Probably to colonize the earth. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is the reality of our situation.

So, we collaborate. One way of confronting the dread is to imagine a way of living with natural ecologies, where their affront to domestic piety is revitalised as the “new ornate”. For if we continue to dwell as we are, we stoke the fires and burn ourselves in effigy.