Rental, a great, free horror game from new Chilean horror collective Animita, is about a family who's leased a summer cabin, and it focuses on short-term ghosts. It takes under 10 minutes to unwrap and enjoy, like a mummified lozenge from the temple of your purse. But I've come to think of ghosts as an inherited, long-term problem. 

As a renter, I am afraid of rats, mystery stink, non-functional toilets, ceiling leaks, black mold, and ghosts. They aren't as easy to point to as caked white paint jobs and bad plumbing, but they have pulled my hair and blown cold wind around my shoulders. So Rental unfolds like my most paranoid moments — the seconds before I write my name on a lease. Animal Crossing-style bunny Umi is unluckily saddled with someone else's ghost. She's made to carry this immaterial weight immediately; the crème caramel of her soul is obfuscated by an impish white whip. I've found that ghosts are sticky like rose jam and rude. In the Rust Belt and in Texas, apartment ghosts made me self-conscious about breathing too loud ("When, soul in soul reflected / We breathed an aethered air," writes haunted Romantic poet Thomas Hardy). I'd sleep with my head under the covers and forget to vacuum — I was so tired ("When we neglected / all things elsewhere"). But Long Island ghosts are the worst. They'd misplace my lipgloss in the medicine cabinet. 

I'm used to it. And Umi is never surprised. She pairs a beaded rosary with her checkered pink sundress, and she grins with all her white bunny teeth when she discovers a mirrored labyrinth inside the house. Her confidence is impressive — I've never known how to handle my rental ghosts. I don't smile at the unknown, like Umi, I just cry about it. Like, why should a break in reality be my problem? Non-believers usually spend their time more like honeybees, anyway, extracting nectar from the petals of life and then moving on.

But ghosts make it difficult for me to move on. The last time I moved, my thick, felt jacket disappeared from its usual closet hook ("I thought her behind my back," writes Hardy). I searched the entire apartment for it ("And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf"). When I came back to my room, my jacket was there again on the hook, like a fish ("So I went on softly from the glade"). Ghosts fill the walls with violets — "Your great-grandma!" my mom would tell me when the smell, improbably, would drift past the couch — and you have to inhale. But I hate surrendering to my circumstances. I don't want any responsibility other than my own. When I finally own something, why can't it be pure silver? But I like that Rental acknowledges that stains are inevitable. It isn't up to me, and it isn't just a dream, either.