All the stories in ‘Night Side of the River’ toe the line between technology and the occult, virtual reality and paranormal activities, to question the reader’s perception of the world we bewilderingly live in. ‘The Old House at Home’, an atmospheric ghost story set in New York, collapses these apparently distinct planes of existence, as it collapses timelines, and ‘the living and the Dead. That old binary.’ There were rumours of Sylvia Plath’s ghost haunting Whitstead, of course; in my last year living in the house, someone’s girlfriend said she felt a cold presence in the third floor bathroom. But we talked of “Sylvia”, or “Sylvia’s ghost”, as the benignant genius of the place, our household god. Reading her description of the house in her journal, in her letters, made us more aware of its history, that the lives of countless others had unfolded there, that they would continue to do so after we were gone. Like the house in Winterson’s story, Whistead was (is) “a Miss Havisham house pinned in its own past.”

First published in Jeanette Winterson’s Substack, Mind Over Matter, on 18 November 2021 and available to read here. Collected in Night Side of the River, Jonathan Cape, 2023