I’m Afraid You’ve Got Ghosts

What inspired you to write this play?

   The play began with an episode of Supernatural. There’s a moment where a family leaves the brothers alone in their house because they claim they can fight ghosts, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how surreal that would be in real life. Imagine handing over your home, and all its memories, to complete strangers.  I wasn’t sure which was more wild to me, believing in ghosts or believing in people.

   What began as a comedic premise gradually deepened as I wrote. I found myself thinking about materialism, memory, and the way we assign meaning to objects. A house becomes a home not because of what fills it, but because of the lives lived inside it — the things we keep, the things we can’t throw away, and the ghosts we carry with us whether we believe in them or not.

What's your favorite part or line in the play?  Why?

When Aaron calls the house “Our haunted home.”  It’s a funny line, but it’s also the heart of the play. The haunting, like the house, is something to share. What brings these characters together isn’t fear, it’s belonging.

Where did the characters come from? Are they based on people you know?

   The characters were shaped less by any single real-life person and more by the actors who brought them to life in the early workshopping of this project. Hunter, the original Harper, is funny, razor-sharp, and a chameleon of complexity when it comes to making characters feel startlingly real and human. She has a way of revealing the contradictions inside a person without smoothing them out — letting humor and pain sit side by side.

   The entire ensemble approached their roles with that same generosity and curiosity. In rehearsal, they began making choices that revealed layers I hadn’t yet articulated on the page   contradictions, vulnerabilities, flashes of humor, and unexpected tenderness. Watching them work reminded me that characters aren’t puzzles to be solved but people to be understood. 

   What emerged was a group of individuals who felt lived-in and specific, not because they were based on someone I knew, but because they were shaped by the empathy and imagination of the people playing them. They helped me realize I wasn’t writing archetypes or plot devices. I was writing people.

What did you try to achieve with this play?

All I set out to do was write a silly little ghost story. I believe that comedy exists in honesty, and that laughter is the fastest way to open the door to vulnerability. At the very most, I hope it leaves audiences feeling that the ghosts we live with are often just evidence of how deeply we’ve cared.  At the very least, I hope you laughed.

Do you have anything else you'd like to add?

Boo!