A Clue About a Particular Dis/taste

This guy looks unthreatening enough even for me. Brian Whitehouse, CC BY-SA 4.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. I’m in the midst of one of those semiregular attempts to determine what it is about ghost lore and supernatural horror that pulls me in, especially when a good part of it leaves me terrified in its wake, unable to sleep, sometimes for a few nights running. Why in the world do I expose myself to such things when I know what will happen? What’s so overwhelmingly fascinating here that I’ll sacrifice a good night’s rest, and how is it that full-blown middle age hasn’t managed to get a handle on the same sorts of phenomena that make children hide under the covers? Part of that effort involves trying to figure out why I’m really just attracted to the supernatural subset of the vast genre of spookiness—and not, say, to body horror, slasher films, and the like—and then only in a limited fashion, meaning it’s rare that I’ll go in for vampires, and even less so werewolves or golems.…