It’s horrific and grim, but thankfully Leti is on a mission to rid them of an eternity with their killer and end their suffering. The ghosts of the episode belong to nine spirits, eight “restless souls trapped in house with their killer.” You see, the last owner of the house, Hiram Epstein, experimented on disappeared Black residents of the South Side, and buried them in “the room below the basement.” Leti, before learning this, started using the room as a darkroom, and the spirits of the missing Black residents and of Hiram Epstein keep showing up in her photos. What is she going to do with this life in this strange new world?īefore we can get that answer, Letitia has to deal with the haunted house she’s stumbled into. She’s contemplating this question too, her own mortality at the front of her mind. “ What did you do to make a mark on this world?” the poetic voiceover asks (and you’ll notice, it almost sounds as if the voiceover is saying “Leti”). The other churchgoers are jubilant: a woman dances, catching the holy spirit. In the episode’s opening, evocative scene, Leti is lost in thought while attending a church service. Lest we forget, Leti died in Ardham and she is dealing with that grief.
Those three missing persons (who end up being racist white men killed by the spirits and the house itself) end up seeming beside the point. All of our Black characters survive until the end of the episode. Thankfully, neither Letitia nor her artist friends that have moved in with her die or go missing. Ten days later three people went missing inside the house, never to be seen again.” This approach is a bit jarring, but it emphasizes that the next story will be a contained one within the larger world that’s building. It reads, “ In the summer of 1955, a group of Negro men and women moved into a house on the North Side of Chicago.
The main plot is actually spelled out to us early on in an intertitle. “Holy Ghost,” is squarely Letitia’s episode. But these threads are put on pause to make way for this week’s main story. Meanwhile, without his brother, Montrose is drinking a lot, presumably grappling with the family secrets alluded to in his final conversations with George. Her gaze lingers on his empty seat at the dinner table, and she’s upset when she learns Atticus will no longer be staying over to keep them company. We know she wanted to do some of the travelling, and she deserves to. We know that she has a knack for astronomy-we’ve seen Dee sketch her photo with a telescope, and she discussed stargazing on the phone with George. What might the characters’ worlds look like without George? We’ve learned that not only does Hippolyta copyedit for The Safe Negro Travel Guide, she also does most of the behind-the-scenes work: typing up entries based off of George’s travel. As she says, “something doesn’t feel right.” The unknown is haunting her.
She senses something more complicated happened than George being shot by a sheriff. But Hippolyta is smarter than they’re giving her credit for. But how can they explain what happened back in Ardham when they aren’t even processing it themselves? The three have avoided each other since George’s funeral. It’s frustrating to watch Montrose, Atticus, and Leti lie by omission. She promptly buys a new copy, but she’s in turmoil: she knows she’s not been given the whole story. We see her holding onto George’s copy of Dracula, his favorite book, before she begins ripping out the pages. Hippolyta is not only mourning the death of her husband, but she’s angry about the shifting world around her, too. It’s been three weeks since George’s funeral and the characters are all feeling his absence. So thankfully, Atticus doesn’t question Leti or her sanity-he simply says, ever so gently, “Walk me through it.” He’s a good friend to Letitia in this moment, and it’s also in service of the plot-similar to last week, this obstacle must be overcome by the episode’s end. After “Whitey’s on the Moon,” I’m on board for almost any expansion of the show’s supernatural logic. Ghosts of the haunting kind are a new addition to the world that the audience has already had to accept as possible by the time Letitia utters their existence. Yes, we had monsters, and yes, we had wizards trying to open up doors to Eden-but we didn’t have specters of this manner. What’s interesting is that if we were to rewind the clock on Lovecraft Country’s story just an hour, back in Ardham, this type of horror was not necessarily a given within the show’s world. “My house is haunted.” Letitia delivers this news to Atticus late into the episode with a weary matter-of-factness that’s accrued over the last month of her life.
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