Steven LaChance Blog

Every once in a while I stop and look at two books sitting on my shelf.

The Uninvited and The Architecture of Shadows.

They were written many years apart, but in a strange way they belong to the same story.

The Uninvited was the beginning of everything for me. It tells the story of what happened in our home in Union, Missouri, a place that would later become known as the Screaming House. At the time, I was not trying to become a paranormal investigator or an author in this field. I was simply a father trying to understand what was happening inside my home and how it was affecting my family.

Those experiences changed the way I looked at the world. When you live through something you cannot easily explain, it has a way of opening questions that never fully go away. You begin to realize how much of life sits just beyond the edges of our understanding.

Writing The Uninvited was my attempt to tell that story honestly. It was never meant to be a declaration about ghosts or the supernatural. It was simply a record of what we experienced and what it felt like to live through it.

What I did not know at the time was that it would become the beginning of a much longer journey.

Over the years that followed, I visited hundreds of locations. I met families who were trying to understand strange events in their homes. I walked through abandoned buildings, historic houses, old hospitals, and quiet roads where people believed something from the past still lingered.

Some experiences were unsettling. Some were subtle. Many were simply human stories about memory, grief, and the way places hold on to history.

After a while I began to understand something important.

The paranormal is not always about ghosts. More often it is about people trying to make sense of experiences that affected their lives in profound ways. It is about memory. It is about emotion. It is about the ways the past sometimes refuses to stay in the past.

That realization eventually led to The Architecture of Shadows.

If The Uninvited was the beginning of the story, The Architecture of Shadows is where the journey eventually led me. After twenty five years of investigations, conversations, and personal reflection, the questions became larger.

Instead of focusing on a single haunting, the book explores the broader pattern behind many of these experiences. It looks at how place, memory, trauma, and history sometimes combine in ways that create what people interpret as paranormal events.

In other words, it asks a different question.

Not just what happened.

But why experiences like these happen at all.

One book begins with a family trying to survive something frightening and confusing inside their own home.

The other reflects on decades of experiences and asks what those moments might be teaching us about the relationship between people, memory, and the spaces we inhabit.

When I look at them now, the two books feel like bookends.

One marks the beginning of the journey.

The other reflects on everything that came after.

If someone reads them together, they are really seeing the full arc of a life spent trying to understand the unexplained.

For readers who have followed my work over the years, the two books speak to each other in interesting ways. One captures the moment everything began. The other steps back and looks at the larger picture that slowly came into view over time.

And after all these years, the most honest answer I can give is this.

We still do not fully understand what is happening in many of these places.

But the search for understanding has been one of the most meaningful journeys of my life.

— Steven LaChance