One source suggests that hungry ghosts are manufactured by loneliness, forgotten souls made destitute by unfilial children. But your father had not wanted an altar, had hated the idea of being tethered to a specific point, rooted in the earth. His remains are long gone, (don’t think about that, don’t think about how they only told you about his death when it was too late) disseminated into the sea. He had wanted to be forgotten. (Don’t think about the last time you spoke, not at his father’s funeral, but over the phone before you ran away and made yourself a better life.)

So, how could he hold you accountable? (Don’t think about the times he made you talk him out of killing himself, putting the weight of his life into your teenage hands.)

Desperate, you look up myths from different countries, Irish poltergeists and Native American lore, Egyptian afterlife, even the storied weirdness of Abrahamic religions, which prescribes very specific routes for the dead.

The dead go to hell. The dead do not. The dead wait in their coffins for Kiamat, haunted by everything they’ve done wrong. The dead become addled on the grace of God. The dead do not come back.

The hours come, leave, systematic as a funeral procession. Eventually, you realize it is four am and you’ve nothing to show for your efforts, only a landfill of tabs. Exhausted, you decide at last to discard faith, begin investigating the circumstances that midwife hallucinations. Maybe, it’s all in your head. Maybe, maybe—

Your father announces disagreement with a scream that detonates your Retina screen. You cry out, arms and face striated by glass, bolt from your desk, but he does not relent. He follows you across the house, into the yard, back to the living room where you cower under a thin blanket. He screams at you from outside the fabric, full of an inchoate madness, so close that you taste salt, smell rot, feel the damp chill of the ocean floor.

He screams until the sun rises, until light cuts bands of gold across your shivering, sweat-soaked flesh.

The cacophony becomes a nightly ritual.

You last another forty-eight hours before you decide to escape to your best friend’s apartment. However, your father chases you there too. His voice breaks every window, every piece of electronic, every picture frame on the mantle, every sliver of glass.

“What the hell is going on?” Your best friend emerges from his bedroom, eyes sleep-bruised, terror-hollowed, in time to see the kitchen cabinets tears themselves open. Cutlery and plates launch into walls, a cascade of bent steel and shattered porcelain. The air glints bright with shrapnel.

“My dad—” You begin, but he does not hear you, too busy dialing up emergency services to babble about electromagnetic pulses, conspiracies grounded in some truth of science.

You grab your bags. You run.

Don’t think about all the times your father hurt you.