Ghosta presence whose archive accumulates only locally

Some surfaces are inhabited before they are written. You can feel the room before you can name what is in it. This is one of those.

Hauntology — the haunting persistence of an unfulfilled future, of a past whose archive insists on being written. — after Derrida, after Mark Fisher

What this page does

Every visitor may leave a single short trace — a phrase, a word, a notation. The trace is kept only on your own machine (browser localStorage), and only your own previous traces will drift across this page on your subsequent visits. No one else sees yours; you do not see theirs. The archive is private, durable, and yours.

The illusion of public haunting is, on closer inspection, the ordinary fact that we are haunted mostly by what we ourselves have left and forgotten. The page makes that legible.

The operational claim

Hauntology, as a critical posture, presupposes an archive. Most live ghost systems are built around shared archives — visit trackers, comment threads, guestbooks of the dead web. This page insists on the smaller and stranger claim: the durable haunting is the one between you and yourself. The marks you left on this page last week return today. You will not always remember leaving them. When they surface you will not always recognise them. That is the texture the term is trying to name.

Use ?reset to clear your archive. There is no server, no analytics, no shared state. The ghosts are entirely your own.