Welcome back! It is a brand new year and 2026 is already off to a positive start. I can’t wait to keep you all updated on what I have planned. Let’s just say it is going to be a busy year for Everything Haunted, but for now I have to tell you about a book.

I’ve just finished reading No Ordinary Deaths: A People’s History of Mortality by Molly Conisbee, and it is the kind of book you carry with you in your thoughts for a while once you’ve put it down. Not because it is heavy or overwhelming, but because it shifts how we think about something so familiar that we often avoid looking at it too closely at all.

This book is a deeply human exploration of how ordinary people across time have lived with death, marked it, ritualised it, spoken about it, and sometimes tried very hard not to speak about it. Conisbee reminds us that how we die, how we mourn, and how we remember are not just personal experiences. They are also shaped by culture, technology, belief, economics, and the emotional rules of the world we’re living in.

One of the things I loved most is how Molly writes about death as something that moves alongside us through history rather than sitting at the end of it. Death is a companion that changes shape. Its rituals shift. Its symbols evolve. The way we talk about it adapts to the times we’re in. Periods of social upheaval, technological change, or uncertainty often bring death back into view, and with it a renewed urge to represent, discuss, and make sense of mortality. Reading this in a post-pandemic world, that felt especially resonant.

Conisbee also writes beautifully about grief as something that doesn’t unfold in a neat, orderly timeline. When we lose someone, time collapses. We slip between past and present, between memory and regret, between what was and what might have been. Grief doesn’t move forward in straight lines, and neither do we. This idea felt deeply familiar to me, not just on a personal level, but in the ghost stories and films I keep returning to. Hauntings often behave in the same way grief does: looping, resurfacing, refusing to stay put.

There is a lot here about the difference between grief and mourning, too. Grief can be internal and private, the emotional weight we carry. Mourning is what we do with that weight in the world: the clothes we wear, the rituals we follow, the ways we show others that we’re hurting. Our ways of acknowledging death keep shifting, just like our relationships do.

Ghosts keep death open as a question rather than a full stop. Thinking about death can help us reassess what matters, what we hold onto, and how we want to be remembered. It can also encourage us to learn from the past, and to recover kinder, more honest ways of supporting the dying and acknowledging grief in the world we live in today.

A wonderful book.