There is a house in Clinton Hill that’s haunted. Zoe Kazan is sure of it. She feels it in her bones. We’re on a rambling walk from Prospect Park to Fort Greene; we’ll just pass by it, I suggest, and see if I can tell which one it is. It doesn’t look haunted, she explains, just in case I’d search for broken shutters or a dilapidated roof or a sign that reads GHOST LIVES HERE, but when she did this with her former babysitter, she felt the haunting immediately. We walk down one shady block after another until she slows in front of an average, well-kept brownstone across from a school on one of the nicest blocks in the neighborhood. It’s not at all spooky, especially in broad summer daylight, and yet. “Look,” she says, holding up her goose-pimple-covered flesh. “Do you really not feel it?”
Kazan feels ghosts everywhere she goes. “I had so many encounters as a child,” she says. “I have started a practice of going into new spaces and being like, I am not interested. Do not talk to me. Do not appear to me. I am not curious. I am not open.” She knows how things from the past can affect her if she’s not prepared to encounter them.
