“What once was a place of joy is now haunted. Or maybe it was always haunted—you just can’t see the ghosts until you’re close to being one yourself.” —Leonora Folger from Only Murders in the Building
Last night, at 3:45 a.m., I heard a strange man’s voice in my room. He had a gravelly tone, like he’d just smoked a cigar. I think he said something about leaving a legacy. My husband and I shot out of bed, looking around wildly for the source. Turns out, it was just his iPad, spontaneously playing a video he’d paused earlier in the day. Apparently, this is a thing that sometimes happens. A glitch of tech. Still, it took me some time to settle back to sleep after that. In my dreams, a shadowy presence chased me through the endless corridors of a huge house—a recurring nightmare that always leaves me breathless, as if I’d actually been running.
The next morning, I laughed as I told my daughter what happened with the iPad voice. “Silly, huh?” I asked. But she wasn’t convinced. Her eyes grew round, fascinated. She whispered, “Did you think it was a man come to catnap me?” I reassured her no, no, we’re perfectly safe. “How do you know?” she persisted. I saw in her question the same dark fear dancing in the corners of my mind. What if?
Though I can handle movies and shows about the supernatural, I can’t watch true crime, because I have no appetite for the idea of actual humans turning on each other. It is the scariest thing I can imagine; much too close for comfort. Those endless Buzzfeed articles about serial killers? Can’t scroll past them fast enough. I also struggle with the fact that many victims’ families don’t sanction the retellings and there is a real fear of casting too-simplistic binaries onto both perpetrators and their victims. Any attempt at storytelling—and I’m not exempt from this—will often lean on the most sensational “hook.” The formula muddies when there are real victims involved.
But true crime is a widely popular genre, particularly right now, with the proliferation of shows like Dahmer and Making a Murderer, and podcasts like Morbid. (My favorite metafictional spin, Only Murders in the Building, offers an additional layer of remove from the muckduck.) And even before this golden age of murder T.V., there have been countless documentaries, specials, and books dedicated to (perhaps even glamorizing?) the very deepest, darkest recesses of human transgression. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is still considered required reading for many English majors, though it is incredibly gory and problematic in terms of Capote’s journalistic integrity.
So why is true crime so popular? Why do we willingly expose ourselves to the terrifying depths of existence?
One explanation, for women at least, is that these stories act as a kind of cautionary tale offering insight into how to avoid a Ted Bundy in real life. True crime media gives us a sense of control because it pulls back the curtain on the worst-case scenarios. As humans, we’re driven to try to understand the unknown; and perhaps there’s a small part of us that thinks: If I know the worst, it can’t happen to me. It’s an evolutionary, self-protective instinct.
Some psychologists tie the popularity of true crime to the Id, that Freudian concept of the untamed part of the mind where we imagine unspeakable things, often without ever articulating them consciously. One surprisingly common fantasy is that of murder. So to address the darkness inside of us, true crime media may give catharsis to thoughts that—for the vast majority of us—never come anywhere close to action. And we can engage safely, in our homes.
My layman’s explanation? I think true crime gives us that rush of adrenaline, a dizzying waltz with the what-if. That adrenaline is heady, I’ll admit, if not particularly pleasant. I feel my heart racing when I’m scared, even if I’ve put myself in that situation purposefully (i.e. going into a haunted corn maze at an ungodly hour). When I’m face-to-face with that life-or-death fear, even if there’s a filter between me and the actual threat in question, I can glimpse how far I’d go to protect myself and my loved ones. Because isn’t that the truth of it? We each think we are the exception to the rule, the hero that will vanquish the darkness. And, in a way, we are. We’re all still here. Alive.
My mother has been obsessively listening to Vietnamese ghost stories on YouTube every night. She falls asleep to them. I ask her how many she’s heard and she tells me she’s flown through at least one hundred so far. Mostly, she listens to stories of lovers seeking revenge, women who come back to haunt their feckless husbands. These Viet stories aren’t true crime, but they offer a similar fear for my mother, as a superstitious human who believes sincerely in things that bump in the night. To her, ghosts aren’t far from true crime, in that they are real threats in her world. And, at the risk of overanalyzing her, I think her Id is at play here in her choice of story, as a woman whose first husband was patently cruel and unfaithful.
I guess what I mean to say is that our collective relationship with fear is a constant push and pull. We turn from it, only to glance over our shoulders again, trying to catch a glimpse of the unspeakable. It’s a sort of intense emotional rubbernecking. Maybe we want to bear witness for the victims. Or maybe true crime offers proof of our own empathy, a reassurance that we could not be capable of such things ourselves. Either way, liking true crime—or avoiding it—isn’t a moralistic stand. Our feelings towards true crime, and by extension, fear, tells us something about ourselves, even if that something is that we’d rather not examine our own darkness.
As Charles from Only Murders in the Building says, “Sometimes it’s easier to figure out someone else’s secret than it is to deal with your own.”
When I heard the voice in my room last night, nothing at all was amiss in my household. My daughter was safely tucked in her bed—though she had an unprecedented nosebleed upon waking that stained her sheets. Nightmares aside, my husband and I did eventually fall back asleep. But what remained in our household was a persistent, unsettled feeling, a not-rightness that clung to our minds. Itself a kind of haunting.