The most wicked house I ever entered was my own. My own, and the Shimizu residence in Silent Hill f.

Konami's survival horror game is a red spider lily bloodbath, a metaphor for the sometimes physical and emotional anguish of womanhood – but unhappy teenage protagonist Hinako Shimizu is a terribly literal creature. Like her, I used to be a school-age girl cowering near my father, wondering, where was my mother? I noticed this about Hinako immediately. So the parallels between our haunted houses were not unexpected, though they were unhappy reminders of a childhood I still don't know how to feel about. 

It's impossible to feel any real love, safety, or sensuality in a haunted house like the one I was raised in. Eyes watched me from everywhere. The portraits on the wall saw me reading Wuthering Heights. The dolls above my bed knew I'd wanted to look at myself in the mirror while I was changing into my pajamas, but I was too ashamed. Everything could see what I craved, and it was embarrassing. Living in a haunted house makes you feel like you're always one foot away from stepping in a dirty puddle full of leaves and dog shit, but everyone finds it too funny to warn you.

My family certainly never would have. Families can't perceive you among ghosts – they're often the source of the haunting. Growing up, I became more convinced of this truth year after year: all of my parents' screams, all the times one of them had a bloody nose, the nights they pounded at my locked bedroom door, all this history created pure dread. Dread accumulates until it's too big for the ceiling, and it pops out of the chimney like Santa Claus. 

When I visit my parents now, though the frightening memories of my childhood are mostly fading, like goosebumps, I still sense lingering poltergeists in their usual places. In my closet. Down the stairs. In the guest bedroom that's sunken into the garden, smelling of dust and the cracked porcelain doll my mom buried somewhere under coats that no longer fit me. 

Hinako, too, observes the way her family's old dread reanimates in Silent Hill f. After I help her complete puzzles in the Shimizu residence's abandoned rooms, father, mother, and worried daughter all appear like blurry holograms. These are familiar scenes to me. Dad is angry at mom and thinks he deserves better than her cooking. Mom is bruised and soaked with tears, but somehow dad is never punished for it – I am. I mean, Hinako is. Really, we are. 

Hinako's house never ends, and in my memory, neither did mine. In Silent Hill f, I unlock a sliding door and find an alternate version of the same home – bedroom, kitchen, parents' room – sitting behind it like a napping bear. My childhood home was similar, a sleeping tiger; I saw myself getting ripped apart by the hidden teeth I sensed were in its infinite shadows, behind flower wallpaper turning yellow from water damage. 

In one strange, dim room, Hinako finds a bleeding wooden head. Its one, giant yellow eye follows her every move, and Hinako is eager to escape it. As Hinako does with the big head, I used to run past a cross stitch portrait of a romantic young woman relaxing among pink roses that still hangs in my parents' living room. I was convinced, for years, the girl was watching me. I was scared, because she seemed so at ease in her gilt frame, a little smile on her full lips like she knew about me – she was waiting. 

Waiting. Waiting for me to surrender.

Everyone who lives in a haunted house has to surrender eventually. Take Eleanor in The Haunting of Hill House, Carrie in Flowers in the Attic, Jane Eyre, Emily in the castle Udolpho… all, like Hinako demonstrates in Silent Hill f, ultimately allow themselves to become entwined with either the supernatural or unnatural. The benefit of this is, as the heart becomes more fragile, emotions come in deeper, more exhilarating colors. The risk is that the mind may become neglected. 

I resisted capitulating to my ghosts for as long as I could. For better or worse, I wanted my heart to be as hard as my bones, and it made me mean – Silent Hill f's unlikeable Rinko demonstrates what living in denial looks like. 

I've still never visited the graveyard my childhood home sat across from. I used to look at it from our porch and imagine all the souls rising from the dirt, sliding down the chimney to watch me, wanting me to become infinitely old like them – the way my parents already made me feel. 

Still, journeys end in lovers meeting, as Eleanor repeatedly tells herself while becoming more a part of Hill House. All these hauntings, including Hinako's, end the same way

But wouldn't it be better if everything could simply be undone with romance? If "surrender" wasn't a word you could use to talk about both a kiss and murder?