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Paper short abstract

This paper examines two family ghost stories as uncanny events that resist closure. Taking the ghostly possibility seriously, it asks how spectrality unsettles official narratives of belonging, revealing broken relations, displaced histories, and attachments that exceed national categories.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines two ghost stories that circulate in my family, not as clear accounts of supernatural beings, but as events that remain difficult to explain. Rather than asking whether the ghosts were real, I ask what becomes possible if the ghostly possibility is taken seriously as a methodological opening.

Drawing on hauntology and the Freudian notion of the uncanny, I argue that spectrality operates here through a process of “unhoming.” It unsettles what should appear familiar and self-evident: the family house, kinship, inherited identity, and the sense of being at home. At the same time, it disturbs national and historical categories such as Polish/German, Polish/Ukrainian, ours/theirs, home/foreignness, victim/perpetrator. These family stories do not deny history, but they work against its simplified national organization. They bring into view attachments, losses, and intimate forms of relation that grand narratives often leave out. Methodologically, the paper proposes accompaniment rather than representation or closure. To accompany these stories is to stay with their uncertainty and follow the relations they gather, the tensions they produce, and the categories they unsettle. In this sense, family ghost stories disclose not another reality to be represented, but a haunted reality in the making: relational, unfinished, and more entangled than official narratives of belonging allow.