Boo Hags, Haints, and Haunted Houses: Making Macabre Miniatures With Artist Lauren P. Dodge

Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, we’re speaking with Lauren P. Dodge, a writer and artist who’s building a Southern Gothic world that’s taken on a life of its own.

At some point in the last four or five years, long before I knew the name of the person making it, I began following the construction of a Southern Gothic Dollhouse. Alongside 144k+ other spectators, I became absorbed in a miniature house with a dark, twisted history of yearning, queerness, murder, ghosts, missing children, dusty library shelves, dim chandeliers, drowned bathtubs.

Before long the lines blurred: Was this a place I had dreamed? Visited? It became real to me: a house I could lose myself in, corridors my mind wandered when my body fell asleep.

I knew when I started writing this newsletter that I wanted to connect with the artist behind it all. Lauren P. Dodge is brimming with stories and inspiration. On a recent phone call, she blew me away with her intricate world-building, her passion for seeking out intersectional lenses on the Southern Gothic tradition, and her eye for the tiny details that make a story sing. I came away with a list of books and movies I needed to track down, and lots of fresh insights that put the dollhouse into a larger, richer context.

If you’re reading this and happen to work in publishing: Lauren is writing a novel that I really, really want to read. Maybe you could make my dreams come true? Put that book in my hands, so I can sink deep into this world of swamps and bees and girlhood Lauren is building? I’ll love you either way, but I’ll love you extra if you make it happen.

Editor’s Note: I had so much fun talking to Lauren that I lost track of the interview—with her permission, I’ve edited our conversation for clarity, concision, and flow.

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Your current project explores the Southern Gothic tradition, while also introducing new layers of storytelling. Did you come into this project with an existing relationship to the South?

I was born in the Bay Area, but we moved to Austin when I was six or seven, so I grew up in Austin. If you're from the Deep South, Texas is not in the south, right? Southwest Texas is kind of its own thing. But there is a lot of crossover.

Coming from California, it was really the Texas women, I think, that were really different and unique to me. I felt like my teachers were all these really strong women. Like, “You call me ma'am.” It was a whole different culture. But even though it was a little bit more buttoned up, it was also really loving in a way that I hadn't really seen in California. People aren't front porch types in California like that you would see in the South, right? I grew up in the church. We started off Catholic, and then we were Baptist, and then on [to other denominations]. I've explored all these different [religions] and being in the church in some regard, which I think is definitely at the heart of the South.

I went to Texas Christian University for a couple years, and then I transferred to UT. I was studying theater design and stage management and psychology, because I was just interested in all those things. In terms of the dollhouse, the scenic art stuff really got me interested. I'm just obsessed with production design. It's really incredible, the things that people make at scale.

What was that experience like, moving to the South from the West Coast?

My family came from Slovakia—I'm second, third generation. They lived briefly in Wisconsin, went to California within a couple years, and then Texas. As seven year old, I really did a lot of research into the Southern way of life. I was like, “I’ve gotta wear my bolo tie. I've gotta listen my Trisha Yearwood. I want us to assimilate.”

But I've always felt like an outsider looking in, even though I grew up there. I feel like it’s the same as I'm trying to reconnect with my roots. What does that even mean, right? I grew up in actually more of a hybrid between California and Texas, 'cause I would spend my summers in California. So I've never really had that sense of “this is where I'm from, and these are my people.”

There's a lot of that in the South—generally, just in America. But in the South, there are people who were brought over that are still able to connect with their culture. Like the Gullah Geechee people—four hundred plus years, and they've still kept so much of their heritage. I'm really inspired by that. How did they do that? I feel like we gave up ours. We're all trying to survive, but we definitely gave up our culture to assimilate.

When did you begin working on the dollhouse? What inspired you to begin this project?

My parents are Republican. I'm not. I started the dollhouse when Trump came into office. I was really angry about what I was seeing. All of the Christian nationalist talking points are just really frustrating to me, and I started wondering, what is it about the South? If you look at the maps, all the South is so red. It's like, what is it about the South that is attracted to this? Because I was raised in the church, and it just feels very opposite of what Jesus would preach.

This project really started with that question for me—how can I try to make some change? But then, as I'm exploring these little stories and everything in miniature and really thinking about the details of things, I recognized that the South is a very nuanced place. It's not all good or all bad. It's complicated.

I have a Texas public school education in terms of history, so we mostly learned about who shot who, or whatever. But diving into the history as an adult, the history is not what I was taught at all. Lke, at all.

Going back and learning about Southern history and cultures within it now, looking at it through the lens of the Choctaw people or the Gullah Geechee people—not just through the white lens—it's been really interesting and illuminating. It has helped me put into context why people are how they are. Ultimately, I just want us to get along and love on each other. But we've got all this history that we need to work through.

I want to zero in on the name you gave your project—specifically, the fact that you’re calling it a dollhouse. For me, dollhouses conjure girlhood and play. It seems like a really deliberate creative choice, especially because your work also has elements of violence and death.

It’s definitely intentional, yeah. When I think of a dollhouse, it's a little girl's play toy, right? It's a very feminine thing. The domestic space is historically a female space, especially in the South. Little girls use dollhouses to practice domestic flows. People, especially men, have often dismissed it as silly and frivolous. But it's not at all, especially when you make it haunted.

The fact that it's a dollhouse as the medium was something that I was really interested in portraying, because all of the stories that I've been focusing on are very feminist. I'm really inspired by books like The Yellow Wallpaper or A Rose for Emily. Just this mystery of what is in a house—a haunted house, a scary one. I would die to actually be able to explore real one, so I'm just kind of making my own.

I want to make an art piece that takes all of these Southern Gothic legends, stories, music, all of it, and rolls it into one. In doing that, you identify these tropes, archetypes, stories—you see a lot of patterns. If we were to distill this whole genre into one house, what would that look like? What could the rooms represent? Looking at all these stories and these books through the lens of the room has been interesting.

Like a kitchen: What does a kitchen represent to women, and how should that look? What happened in that space, and what did it become for her? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it oppressive? Is it a place of love?

Historically, the study is the one place a woman is not allowed to go. Even though she has keys for everything else, she's not supposed to go there. Why is that? What would it look like if a study were taken over by a woman? The thinking process of it all has been really fun.

There’s a story and mythology built into this house—sometimes in really small details. What are some of the tiniest details you’ve put into the house?

The bees came up because I was trying to figure out how I could bring focus to some of the things in the house. When it's all done, I'm going to have each of the rooms locked so you have to open them, kind of like an advent calendar. As you're going through it, you have to look for clues, and then the story will progress.

I was trying to figure out how I could help draw focus to things that are important in the room, with all of the stuff that you have to look at. And so: bees! I'm able to put bees on things that I want. They're really small. It's not obvious, so when you find them, you're like, “Okay, that's a clue. I know it's a clue.” It gives the audience or the spectator some focus.

With theater, when you do like lighting and design, you're specifically designing to bring focus to a particular part of the story, or else the audience doesn't know what to look at. The bees are really so helpful in that—that was a really big breakthrough.

You’ve mentioned elsewhere online that you’re working on a book. Can you share anything about that project?

I was also trying to think, how could I tell the story of this haunted house? How can I take people along? And I knew I needed to have characters that are discovering it, just as the reader would. It's now multi-level—there's an origin story, a post-origin story, and then a present story.

So: The Honey House is a Southern Gothic novel set in 1969 Mississippi, where five girls, each with a different ancestral lineage, uncover the truth about a decaying estate and the ancient swamp entity haunting it. The story weaves together Choctaw, Gullah Geechee, Irish, Creole, and Slavic folklore—because those are all the backgrounds of each of the girls—family secrets, legacies of the land.

It's told in two timelines: the girls’ coming-of-age summer in 1969, and then the darker history of the Harper family who built the estate. As the girls form a coven-like bond, they begin to realize their heritage holds the keys to banishing the entity. But doing so means confronting generational trauma, unearthing buried bodies, and deciding what deserves to survive.

You'll follow this girl named June to an area called Harper's Hundred or Harper's Crossing—an old plantation that was inherited by by someone distant in the family. He’s from the North, and he considers himself to be an abolitionist, so he demolished the plantation and then built what is now the Honey House. Which is very bizarre that it's in the middle of Mississippi, because it's a Second Empire style house, right?

June’s background is Slavic, but she's been living on the opposite side of the river from Salt Root. And Salt Root is like—are you familiar with maroons? So, during slavery, a lot of these plantations would be really close to Choctaw and Chickasaw Nation land. They had treaties where if any of the people who escaped slavery were to cross a certain boundary, then they they lost them. A lot of enslaved people would run into the swamps. They would run into these First Nations people, and they would live in harmony together.

I love the idea of, like, what would it be like if one of these places was in the middle of a swamp, and it's untouched? They still have very matriarchal [communities] run by women, like Choctaw [tradition].

[In the novel] the swamp itself is a liminal space with a magical quality. When you come to it, depending on what your own personal, ancestral monsters are, they will show up in the swamp. The haunting of the Honey House itself is an amalgamation of these girls trying to figure out what the fuck it is, but they each have their own stories. But it's a whole other thing, because America is a melting pot, so they've made a completely new monster.

The Gullah Geechee would call her a boo hag. She wears people's skin, and she’s like a soul eater, a spirit eater. A lot of cultures believe that spirits stay and linger while the soul moves on, and they can show up in different animals. And so she's trapped them all in this house.

I got full body chills. Sorry for cursing, but this is so extremely my shit.

It's so fun. This dollhouse inspired this whole world-building thing. The fact that things can just exist, have a set of rules, and magic, and then you put in these characters—it really is like playing with a dollhouse.

But what I’ve been struggling to figure out is how I should tell this story about other people's cultures and heritages, especially with the BIPOC community. I don't want this to be another white-centric story—like, oh, this white girl comes in and she saves the day. I am myself white, but instead of being like, “Oh, I'm white, and I can help you because I have the white card,” I need to dig into my own heritage. Through that, we have so much in common. All of us have been stolen from; all of our cultures have been stolen from us for this creature that is white culture in America.

The eater of the house really is ultimately colonization, as a boo hag wearing other people's skin.

Have you experienced any hauntings or strange events yourself?

I found our house in the Cape in a couple of local ghost story books. [The previous residents] were always complaining about there being piano music, and only women could hear it.

I'm planning on putting the piano next to where this woman’s bedroom was. She’d have to leave the bedroom because [the piano music] was really annoying her, and her husband would sleep through it.

And then there's this door that would drop down into a root cellar that was always opening. They put a china hutch in front of it, but when they woke up, the hutch was moved over and the door was open.

When we first went there, I was tearing down some of the wallpaper to keep and thinking, “Please, I hope this doesn’t anger any ghosts.” I hear [my partner] Andy scream downstairs. He was trying to close a window, and the window randomly slammed shut. His hand went through the glass, and he was bleeding absolutely everywhere. So really, this is very spooky.

But when I think about the piano playing, there's never been a piano in this house. And like, I'm bringing a piano in the house, yeah? So maybe I'm haunting the past people, because I know what song was haunting them, and I'm totally gonna learn it.

Cool Zine Alert! Hallowzine.ink III

There are just 10 days left to fund Hallowzine.ink’s Kickstarter! It’s ~50 pages of comics, fiction, and poetry, all created to summon that special chill only October can bring. I pledged $15 for a print copy and a fun sticker. 🎃 You can check out past issues here.

Up Next: Talkin’ Texas Horror with Author Chris Panatier

Next week, we’re staying in the South with author Chris Panatier. I tore through his latest novel, Shitshow, in a few whirlwind days of reading. When I finally put the book down, his sinister Twilight carnival danced on the backs of my eyelids. Thankfully, I could not smell the diabolical concessions he dreamed up.

After that: I have a very fun slate of newsletters planned between now and the start of November, so buckle up! Lots of secrets and surprises, a guest author, new interviews, more multimedia wanders. I’m having so much fun! Thank you for joining me on this journey back to old school blogging.

For now, a brief TBR update: Since posting about my overflowing bookshelves, I’ve made some headway! Tananarive Due’s The Between is a dread-filled dreamscape that I recommend for anyone who loves Jacob’s Ladder. Mike Bockoven’s FantasticLand is a masterpiece of faux-oral history that I genuinely could not put down. (The hotel story will haunt me for the rest of my life—if you know, you know.) And Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts is a deeply rewarding read for horror fans, or an ideal launchpad into the rich legacy of horror literature for those beginning their journey.

Little by little, I’m working my way down the list! I’m currently reading Rachel Harrison’s Play Nice and oh my god, I love it so much. I think it really might be her best, and clearly I’m not the only one—as of today (Wednesday) she is officially an NYT bestselling author.

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.