The Whole Haunted World...Interim
Ashes and ghosts
In case you didn’t already know this, I’m a Californian; with the exception of one year as a child spent in the northern California enclave of Novato, I’m a lifelong Southern Californian. I was born in Pasadena, grew up in nearby Arcadia, went to UCLA, and have lived all over Los Angeles. In 2015 - exactly ten years ago this very week - I bought my first house, in the foothills at the top of the San Fernando Valley.
I don’t just love my city; I consider it to be a major part of my identity. Where others might define themselves by their family connections, gender, religion, or even hobbies, being an Angeleno ranks pretty high in my list of things that are deeply me, just below being a writer. Los Angeles is a very special place, one that people from all over the world come to, following their sunshine-hued dreams. Sometimes those dreams come true; more often they fade in the face of day-to-day mundanity. Sometimes the dreams turn out to have been nightmares all along, which is one reason I think horror writers flourish here.
All of you reading this know what kind of week this has been for my city - namely, possibly the single worst in its history.
Look, we knew the winds would be bad, we knew the combination of hurricane-strength gusts and incredibly dry conditions (we’re the driest we’ve been in 80 years) could lead to fires, we knew global warming is here now and will lead to more devastation with each passing year, but obviously no one expected this.
To say it’s been stressful (and heartrending) would be an underestimate. Where my house - which, by the way, I love almost as much as I love my city - is located, it’s been uncomfortably close to two of the week’s fires (the Hurst and Archer conflagrations). We got our first actual evacuation warning (for the Archer) on Friday morning. For the last three days, we’ve had cat carriers and important documents and bags of books ready to go. Right now, both the Hurst and the Archer seem to be under control, but more blasts of wind are expected between now and Tuesday, so we’re not unpacking yet.
Meanwhile, places I’ve loved since childhood have magically vanished, wiped from the map in less than a week.
One of those places I talked about in a post here last month: Upper Hastings Ranch, known for its Christmas lights display. As a kid, we drove through this place every Christmas, checking out the astounding yards. I’ve never forgotten one in which life-sized Peanuts figures ice-skated around a front yard covered in fake ice. That was magical to me.
Last month, we took our friend Lynne Hansen, who was visiting from out of town, to Upper Hastings Ranch to see the display. Even though it wasn’t as remarkable as it once was - real creativity has given way to lights and inflatables - it was still a delightful holiday outing. We followed it up with a visit to a Sierra Madre ice cream shop called Mother Moo Creamery, and a visit to a 104-year-old historical landmark called Christmas Tree Lane, which features a mile of gorgeous deodar trees decorated in Christmas lights.
Upper Hastings Ranch is gone now, a month later. I mean, gone. Over 100 houses destroyed, which is most of the neighborhood. Upper Hastings Ranch has presented its Christmas displays for over 70 years. Meanwhile, although some of the houses on Christmas Tree Lane in Altadena have burned to the ground, they say the trees have survived.
Of course this is all secondary to those who have lost homes and businesses. Daniella Pineda, a wonderful actress who once optioned my novel The Castle of Los Angeles (and who would have been fucking perfect for the lead role), lost her home, getting out with nothing but her dog and her laptop. A friend’s mother lost her restaurant in Pacific Palisades.
And it’s not over yet. I’m writing this on the fifth day of the fires. Last night, for the first time, I saw flames in the distance on my drive home from work (the Kenneth fire, lighting up the sky in orange and pink behind the hills to the west of the Valley).
The loss is unimaginably huge. It will haunt Southern California for…well, decades, at least, if not forever.
Ghosts. Throughout history, they’ve most often been created by trauma. I believe we’re afraid of them because they represent the worst parts of us - rage, terror, dreadful events. There’s a reason ghosts are never reported at places where nothing terrible ever happened, and, conversely, there’s a reason that when a haunting is created by urban legend, the back story invariably involves a gruesome death. People who die peacefully in their sleep - or places that have placid, quiet histories - don’t become the stuff of campfire tales.
When the Covid pandemic locked us all in our houses in 2020, I (correctly) predicted a rise in paranormal belief, given the vastness and depth of the collective trauma (you can hear me talking to CNN’s Harry Enten about it on his Margins of Error podcast). So will this massively traumatic event turn Los Angeles into a haunted place?
Not immediately, because we’ll be too busy picking up the pieces for a long, long time. People who’ve lost homes and businesses won’t just be rebuilding; they’ll first have to decide if they want to rebuild, and risk the same thing happening again in the future.
But at some point - ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now - people will stand in the middle of a floor somewhere and say that yes, they can sense the spirit of someone who died in the fires of 2025. It won’t matter that no one really died there, that the building they’re standing in isn’t one that survived the fire, or that they may just be having a neurological malfunction and not really sensing a ghost. What will matter is that they are experiencing something real to them and something that was real to people in the past, and this is one more way of remembering the terrible fires that wiped out entire parts of our beautiful city during one week in 2025.
Thank you, Lisa, this was exactly what I needed to read today.
Oh my, I feel you on the bags of books. We live in Tarzana, and last night was the night where we could see the flames over the top of the mountain, the Palisades fire, For the first time. I have been collecting signed books since I was 17. I am now 46. You graciously signed some books for me at the Iliad when I first moved here. Stay safe please.