Ghosts are not-recognizable faces and shrunken everyday presences

Evidence

‘Also,’ he continues, ‘there is nothing worse than not recognising someone you know, someone close, family, seeing a look in them that just isn’t them. I was once in a lock-in in a pub and the regulars there and some mates started telling these fucked-up ghost stories from real life, maybe that had happened to them, and I swear if you heard them…One girl told me the scariest thing I ever heard. Some of these stories would stop a few words earlier than seemed right. They don’t play out like a film, they’re too simple, too everyday, slight. Those stories ring true and I never forgot them. Sometimes maybe you see ghosts. On the underground with an empty Costcutters plastic bag, nowhere to go, they are smaller, about 70 per cent smaller than a normal person, smaller than they were in life.’ — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 227

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: “Stories that stop a few words earlier than seemed right” and ghosts that run 70% smaller than life — a theory of uncanny horror built from the everyday-slight rather than the spectacular.
• BMF: The unrecognizable look of someone close — ‘seeing a look in them that just isn’t them’ — lands close to a horror-geometry echo in We (Zamyatin), where the numbered see something alien flicker in familiar faces, though here it’s domestic uncanniness rather than political awakening.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: Mainstream media commodities simulated emotion while Burial severs voices from biography — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 223