It felt right to tell a story about a service-industry worker in the second person because such people are frequently ignored or dehumanized in their daily lives. When I worked in a movie theater, customers would walk up to the concession stand and start barking orders at me like I was a kiosk instead of a human being. So I wanted the reader to, as you say, inhabit the character more fully than first or third person would allow. There’s an immediacy and intensity that comes from second person when it’s done well.

The entire story, not just the song, is inspired by “Cruel Sister.” There are many, many songs on the same theme, by many different titles. What attracted me was the plain, unalloyed, chilling hatefulness of the crime and the equally chilling retribution—though I carried that part a bit further in my story. The song “Cruel Sister” ends with the ghostly accusation, as does most of its ilk, but I wanted to show the aftereffects of the murderer’s horrific action. The song in “Cruel Sistah,” by the way, is loosely based on W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.”

I’m all about the interplay between the “natural” horror of current events and the “supernatural” horror of ghosts and demons. I think the combination makes for a richer, truer story. I also think that, frankly, it’s important to remember that large swaths of the human population have been subjected to real horrors—genocide, ecological disaster, systemic discrimination—and their horror stories are going to look a little bit different from, you know, Poltergeist.

There are a lot of shows about filming in allegedly haunted sites. My influence was the UK show Most Haunted, where buildings were visited by the regular presenter, a historian, a parapsychologist, and a medium. I always found watching the mediums especially interesting. The controversies around the show are well-documented, and Martha grew from those. I liked the idea that she’d suppressed a lot of herself to survive, and I wanted to write about that.