Lauren Riensche likes to travel. She's visited Georgia, New Orleans, Atlanta, Venice, Italy and London, just to name a few. And when she arrives in a new place, her favorite thing to do is take a ghost tour.
"I like to think that it lets me into a little bit more of that community's lore, and to a little bit more of the behind-the-scenes of that community," she said.
So when she moved to Cedar Falls and discovered the community didn't have a ghost tour, she decided to create her own.
The now-annual Cedar Falls Ghost Tour is highly anticipated each year. Carrying a lantern to light the way, Riensche led a sold-out tour group this year around downtown Cedar Falls, places where ghost sightings have been reported by residents and where she has found historical documents about events that she believes could be connected to those sightings.
"I hope people — regardless of whether or not they believe in ghosts — come away with a deeper understanding not only of Cedar Falls as a community, but also of individuals' lives and their experiences here in Cedar Falls over the years," Riensche said. "I think that by talking about the people and places historically tied to these tales, you can empathize with them a little more."
Along the way, of course, she told ghost stories, tying together the fabric of Cedar Falls' history through chilling — and sometimes gruesome — tales rooted in true events that took place.
They're the kinds of stories that author Carmen Maria Machado specializes in. The Iowa Writers' Workshop grad's writing highlights the horror of daily realities in ways that are both thought-provoking and downright spooky, especially in her award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, published in 2017.
"I was one of those children who was both completely terrified of spooky things and then was also really drawn to them," Machado said on IPR's Talk of Iowa. "So I did a thing that I'm sure my parents absolutely loved, which was I would read scary books, and then I would be up all night with the lights on really upset and not able to sleep. And then they would find the books and take them away. And then I would simply find new ones to scare me."
Machado compares consuming scary media, like ghost stories or horror movies, to riding a rollercoaster: it's a safe, controlled way to experience fright without danger.
Machado's short story collection in particular carries elements of traditional ghost stories, or supernatural stories, that incorporate the realities of being a woman. Machado says part of what makes scary stories so chilling is the ways they connect to real places and experiences.
"When I write horror stories, I'm starting from a place of my life," she said. "My fears, my dreams, the bad things that have happened to me and horror narratives — whatever they are. Whether they're haunted house stories, or demonic possession or whatever, they often latch kind of easily onto these really relatable sorts of human experiences."
Machado is currently teaching a class on the literature of haunted houses at the Writers' Workshop, which focuses on how places, just like those visited on the Cedar Falls Ghost Tour, can serve as the perfect setting for horror and ghost stories.
"The thing about a place is that it exists throughout time," she said. "A ghost story is a way of having the past and the present push up against each other."
Machado also thinks ghost stories offer an opportunity to think about the sublime.
"There's a reason that different sorts of places, different regions have different kinds of ghost stories. And there's actually this really great book that I love, called Ghostland by Colin Dickey, and he talks about how if you really want to get to know place, you should ignore the local history, like ignore everything else, and just look at the ghost stories. And that's going to give you a sense of not only what has happened in a certain place, but also how people conceive of their own history."
