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Dirt After Dark: Inside Killjoy's Kastle and Hell Houses

This month, we're talking ideologically-driven haunted houses with a book report from Anna on Inside Killjoy's Kastle and a deep dive into the phenomenon of hell houses. Content note, we touch on the themes of these spaces, which include homophobia, gun violence, abuse and violent bigotry, so tread carefully if these themes are hard for you to hear about. 

Inside Killjoy’s Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings (UBC Press)

Affecting Activist Art: Inside KillJoy’s Kastle, A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House (InVisible Culture)

We Are Monsters: On “Inside Killjoy’s Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings” (LA Review of Books)

Should Christians Celebrate Halloween? Here's Why That Question Has Been Picking Up Steam Since the 1960s (Time)

Remember Scream in the Dark? Here are 9 facts about the granddaddy of Lancaster County Halloween attractions (Lancaster Online)

Scaremare (Liberty University)

"Signaling through the Flames": Hell House Performance and Structures of Religious Feeling (American Quarterly)

A Hell House Divided: Performing Identity Politics through Christian Mediums of Proselytization (BYU ScholarsArchive)

Evangelical Hell Houses Are Waking Nightmares (Vice)

Church's Haunted House Draws Fire (New York Times)

Stairway to Hell (The Atlantic)

Judgement House Scripts 

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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.