Steven LaChance Blog

Twenty five years ago I stepped into a haunted house.

Back then it was just my home. My family and I were living there and trying to figure out what was happening around us. Those were frightening months. Anyone who has lived through something like that knows how it gets into your head. Even when you try to sleep your mind keeps working it over.

I still remember the nightmares from that time. One of them stayed with me for years. In the dream there was a man standing in the shower covered in blood. When you go through something that intense your brain does not simply turn it off when the lights go out.

Eventually I wrote about what happened to us. That became The Uninvited.

At the time I thought I was just telling the story of what my family had lived through. I had no idea that book would open the door to the next twenty five years of my life.

Since then I have spent a lot of time talking with people whose homes suddenly stopped making sense to them. Families trying to understand events they never expected to face. I have spent a lot of time digging into the history of places and the patterns that show up in these cases.

And now here we are twenty five years later.

Architecture of Shadows feels like the other end of that road.

The Uninvited came out of the middle of the experience, when I was still trying to understand what had happened to my family.

Architecture of Shadows comes after twenty five years of living with the question.

In a strange way those two books now sit on the shelf like bookends of the same story.

The first book was written while I was still trying to survive the experience.

This one was written after twenty five years of trying to understand it.