The Women We Turn Into Ghosts

Content note: This post contains graphic descriptions of gender-based and family violence.

I recently learned a new phrase: family annihilator.

These are people who commit what is known as familicide, killing all or most of their immediate family at once. Ninety-five percent of family annihilators are men, who typically die by suicide after murdering their families. According to The Trace, a publication focused on gun violence, over the last two years, family annihilation in the U.S. has occurred 1.8 times per day on average. 

In recent months, there have been several devastating, high profile cases of family annihilation. In April, a former National Guard member in Shreveport, LA, killed eight young people in his family, including seven of his own children. In July, a Michigan man killed his wife and their six children. Earlier this month, a 45-year-old man in Erie, PA, killed seven of his relatives, including two young grandchildren, his wife, and their three children, one of whom was due to give birth in a few days.

Still, knowledge of the phrase “family annihilator" came to me from an unusual source: a young historian who leads a true crime walking tour in Winston Salem, North Carolina, one of many dark walking tours and similar events that gain in popularity beginning in September. 

In the U.S., the extended Halloween season—now commonly referred to as Summerween—has further bolstered the true crime genre and the paranormal tourism industry, a multi-billion dollar business. This is the time of year when our algorithms go into overdrive, pushing terrifying tales and targeted ads for ghost tours. 

But dark tourism now goes beyond historic ghost tours to focus on uniquely American sites of torment and abuse, such as prisons and asylums, or far more recent grizzly murders. 

For example, the first stop of my local true crime walking tour was a bit of a double whammy, leading us to the front doors of the Forsyth County Detention Center and detailing the crimes of murderer and self-proclaimed satanist, Pazuzu Algarad. He apparently attempted suicide at the downtown jail by using his teeth—filed into sharp spikes—to bite through his arm. (According to our tour guide, the 35-year-old had a number of severe, untreated mental illnesses. He later successfully chewed through an artery in his arm and died at prison in Raleigh while awaiting trial. His story, of course, is the subject of a true crime docuseries.) 

But it was the last stop of the true crime walking tour that really stuck with me.

Under the marquee of an independent movie theater that was previously a portrait studio, I learned about North Carolina family annihilator Charlie Lawson. Just before Christmas in 1929, he brought his large family from Germanton to the portrait studio in Winston Salem to take a now infamous family photo just before he murdered his wife Fannie and six of their seven children, sparing only his eldest son. At the entrance of the former portrait studio that captured one of the family’s final moments together and alive, our tour guide pulled out their black and white portrait. I stared into the haunted eyes of Charlie and wondered what possesses men to do such damage. 

While true crime, haunted history, and similar tours can certainly be a festive way to ease into Spooky Season, something truly ghastly is at the center of these stories—and it’s so commonplace it’s almost mundane: gender-based violence. 

“Intellectual Furniture”  

Last fall while visiting North Carolina, my teenage niece wanted to stay up late and watch a scary movie. She asked me to put something on that she'd never seen before, so I chose The Shining. 

I hadn’t seen the 1980 Stanley Kubrick film since I was a teenager in the early 2000s. All I really remembered was that Jack Nicholson plays Jack Torrance, who loses his mind while working as a hotel caretaker and trying to write a novel. I somehow forgot that Jack drags his wife Wendy and their young, telepathic son Danny to the beautiful and remote Colorado hotel, where Jack slowly becomes more abusive and dreams of killing his family.   

My niece was quite disturbed by the physical violence of a movie marketed as “psychological horror,” and so was I. Not long into The Shining, I found myself saying, “Oh, this is a movie about domestic violence.” 

I embarrassingly relayed this recollection to University of Oregon Associate Professor of Information Politics and Media Ethics, Whitney Phillips. How could I forget that the entire plot of The Shining is that Jack terrorizes his wife and wants to murder his family? 

“You’re getting constant messages from all kinds of media, from the time that you're a kid, that says it’s normal to see women get killed, so why would you remember this specific movie?” Phillips said. “Gender-based violence is so prevalent. You see women get abused across all media, so over time it just becomes a piece of intellectual furniture that you take for granted.”

When I reached out to Phillips in late October, she was in the middle of teaching a cross-cultural monster narratives class that covers vampire media. The supernatural genre is a particularly sneaky Trojan horse for violence against women. Studies show that viewers are more influenced by media that doesn’t appear to present an argument than by media that overtly presents an argument or otherwise shows itself to be ideological. That’s when “our shields go up,” Phillips explained. 

But romantic vampire stories, what’s ideological about that?   

While true crime, haunted history, and similar tours can certainly be a festive way to ease into Spooky Season, something truly ghastly is at the center of these stories—and it’s so commonplace it’s almost mundane: gender-based violence. 

Phllips said that in the 20 years she’s taught college, nearly everything about her young, women students has changed—minus their childhood love of the Twilight series of books and, later, films. 

“They are consistently shocked in my class when they realize that Edward Cullen is an abuser,” Phillips said. “For the most part, they never in their lives thought about it, and it’s definitely not something young viewers are encouraged to think about. But when you lay it all out, it’s clear Twilight normalized intimate partner abuse. Jealousy and possessiveness and other alarming behaviors are treated as romantic. So many young women walk away from my class saying, ‘Oh my god, what was I watching?’”

If pushed to be introspective, how many of us could say the same about our own viewing habits?  

“Dollar Sign on a Dead Woman” 

Phillips said it’s her goal to teach her students to think critically about the media they consume. One of her classes, for example, examines the ethics of consuming true crime stories.

I am ashamed to admit that I am a woman who consumes vast quantities of true crime documentaries, which actually shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Women make up the majority of true crime viewership. 

Interestingly, cisgender, white, heterosexual women serve as the genre’s largest audience. Overwhelmingly, they are consuming true crime media that reflects the stories of other white women, women they can relate to or see themselves in. While this demographic certainly experiences intimate partner violence, Phillips was quick to note that the prevalence of the “dead white woman trope” doesn’t accurately reflect the statistics of who is actually most likely to experience this kind of abuse and violence. That would be BIPOC women, trans women, bisexual women, and other marginalized groups. 

Still, true crime is a genre that is filled with dead white women, which Phillips said sets this demographic of women up to be “extra paranoid.” 

“How convenient that the way they can deal with their paranoia is to watch more true-crime media. It’s like a self-perpetuating consumer cycle," Phillips said. 

And even if you consume this genre thoughtfully, with an eye toward structural inequalities, for example, you’re still a cog in the cycle—and there are consequences. 

“Engaging with this kind of media, whether viewers realize it or not, feeds into an attention economy that puts a dollar sign on a dead woman,” Phillips explained. “Media is then increasingly incentivized to get returns on its investment, so there's even more of a reason for them to keep making more of this exact kind of content that has a very specific template. Hollywood doesn’t put money towards something that isn't a proven winner, and dead, white, women are a proven winner.” 

Something we can’t let ourselves forget is that the scariest thing about the ghost story isn't the ghost; it's the culture that made her one. 

More broadly, studies show that women view true crime shows as sort of a survival toolkit, giving them tips and tricks for how to escape a kidnapping or elude a killer. But there’s another, more disturbing reason for their loyalty to the genre.  

“Simply put, it’s entertaining,” Phillips said. “Our beliefs about the world or the ideologies that we ascribe to, even subconsciously, are cultivated through lots and lots of exposure through lots of media over an extended period of time. Across all of the media we consume, there is this recurring theme of a dead woman being an interesting plot point. Millions of women around the country are just used to seeing women get killed, so it’s not their fault they’ve internalized it as a good story.” 

I like to think I’m a judicious and discerning true crime viewer, and I’m certainly one who spends the majority of each episode yelling at the TV about the uselessness of law enforcement. In fact, the reason I went on my local true crime walking tour was to verify my many preconceived notions that such a tour could only be unethical and insensitive to local, surviving family members. I was also fairly certain the tour would only further stigmatize mental health issues and the many other complicated factors that can sometimes fuel gender-based violence, familicide, and intimate partner violence. 

I was wrong. 

My true crime tour guide went to great pains to emphasize how untreated mental illness, poverty, and organized abandonment overwhelmingly shape the people society later comes to think of as “monsters.” She also told us that when possible, she runs the content of her tour by any living descendants or survivors in the area, in an effort to reduce harm and make sure the information she shares is accurate. 

While she ultimately chose not to go on the record, the tour guide later told me that she aimed for her tour to be respectful and that the true crime tour was actually one she initially felt a lot of unease leading. She does not consume true crime content in her free time, she said, because of the many ethical issues surrounding the genre, namely that it’s exploitative, retraumatizes survivors and families, and that most of it is copaganda—propaganda portraying law enforcement as heroic, mostly for poorly performing basic functions of their job. (It’s worth pointing out that officer-perpetrated domestic violence occurs at a higher rate than the general population, and police are accused of sexual violence with “alarming regularity.”)

Headed into Halloween, I’m now seeing gender-based violence in so many of the festivities I usually love—even the innocuous ones. Earlier this month, I became obsessed with a neighbor who every couple of days rearranges skeletons in his front yard to display them engaging in different, silly behaviors. Sometimes they’re holding beer cans or chasing each other through flowers. I was taken aback by a more recent scene that showed a skeleton in a Hawaiian shirt pushing a lawnmower over a skeleton wearing a long blonde wig. 

I can hear men on the internet calling me a feminist killjoy. Maybe they’re right, but my conversation with Phillips has given me a lot to think about. 

The associate professor said the argument in her class is never that you should totally avoid watching true crime or similar genres. Some docuseries call attention to the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Others focus on survivors and families in powerful ways that don’t reduce their lives to a singular, violent event. In other words: The question of whether we can “ethically” consume true crime and similar content isn’t so cut and dry. 

Even if we approach the genre thoughtfully and perform our due diligence to ensure we’re only consuming content that doesn’t portray gender-based violence, familicide, and intimate partner violence in gratuitous, exploitative ways, these efforts don’t mitigate or change the larger problem. The information economy is "fundamentally amoral and unethical,” according to Phillips. Individual iterations of true-crime storytelling within the attention economy can be more or less ethical, she said, but the system in which it all circulates cannot be ethical because it’s not designed to be; it is designed to extract capital.

 “Success within the attention economy is attention, it’s not thoughtfulness or ethics or morals,” Phillips said. “It’s about getting people to click and watch and engage, that’s all it cares about. Ethics is anathema to this kind of system, but we should still try to be ethical. It’s a tricky line to walk because gender-based violence is so commonplace, it’s banal. But in a system that’s not designed to bring out our better angels, that banality needs to be fought, otherwise violence will continue to be the way stories about women are told.”

It’s uncomfortable to think about how our collective obsession with the macabre isn’t merely a love for thrills and chills. During Spooky Season, so much of what we give our time, attention, and hard-earned money to—whether it’s a slasher film, a true crime docuseries, or a ghost tour—is shaped by violence against women. 

Still, I agree with Phillips’ approach: I’m not here to tell you not to queue up that series or buy the ticket to the haunted house. If I’m being honest, I will likely continue on the same path. But something we can’t let ourselves forget is that the scariest thing about the ghost story isn't the ghost; it's the culture that made her one. 

This post was edited by Andrea Grimes and copyedited by Nicole Froio.