A seasonal ritual practice by James Marilyn

The House That Haunts You debuted as a sold-out, one-night work realized on Halloween 2025, staged inside the live/work studio of James Marilyn in Woodstock, New York.

Featured in Chronogram and described by the Exhibitions Director of the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum as “truly ethereal—unlike anything I’ve ever encountered,” the work begins with a simple invitation: to ring the doorbell.

Viewers enter the artist’s home at nightfall in duos and trios, welcomed with a ritual offering before moving through a guided passage across seven thresholds. Through scent, light, sound, and gesture, the work unfolds as a sequence of intimate rituals—reimagining the haunted house as a living archive where personal memory, collective myth, and presence converge to conjure ghosts in the present.

The house is navigated by intuition. Viewers encounter invocations, the burning of effigies, and amulets gathered from the space and carried away as talismans. A soundscape drawn from mid-century American cinema layers shared cultural memory into the experience of passage.

Conceived as a seasonal ritual practice, The House That Haunts You is intended to recur, shift, and reconstitute over time—returning in new forms, sites, and contexts while remaining bound to ritual, temporality, and domestic space.

Rooted in the folk traditions of the Hudson Valley and shaped by a cosmopolitan network of collaborators, the work establishes an evolving framework that resists permanence, categorization, repetition, and closure.