Author: Christian Pentzold

For as long as humans have buried their dead, they’ve dreamed of keeping them close. The ancient Fayum portraits – those stunningly lifelike images wrapped in Egyptian mummies – captured faces meant to remain present even after life had left the body. Effigies across cultures served the same purpose: to make the absent present, to keep the dead around in some form. But these attempts shared a fundamental limitation. They were vivid, yet they could not respond. The dead remained dead. Across time, another idea emerged: the active dead. Ghosts who slipped back into the world to settle unfinished business,…