Positively Do Not Open

Suburbia, zoning laws, and the quiet containment of fear

Lately, I’ve been rewatching horror movies. Not new ones. Just the old reliables I’ve watched a million times. Final Destination, The Conjuring, Amityville Horror. Comfort watches. Not for scares, but for structure. There’s something weirdly calming about the way even the most chaotic supernatural terror still plays by rules. Which might explain how I ended up deep in The Conjuring universe... and somehow deeper in zoning laws.

The first time I had to actually pay attention was for a podcast episode on Return of the Living Dead. Dmitry Samarov came back on That Horrorcast, and we slid right into talking about zombies, acid rain, and resurrection gags like we hadn’t both been through weird spirals lately. Somewhere in the middle of it, we brushed up against my last Substack post. The one where I wrote about grief without saying what I was grieving. Dmitry didn’t push because he’s a real one. But we circled it. Had a semi-coded conversation that felt oddly safe, like two people holding a side chat inside a public one. It helped. That whole episode helped. Talking about the undead made me feel less dead-adjacent.

People have been careful with me lately. They’ll bring up something like demonic possession or decapitation and then backpedal, like I’m going to shatter if someone mentions blood. And I get it. They know I lived something. They’re trying to be thoughtful, and I appreciate it. But once you’ve experienced real-life horror, you realize how much it doesn’t resemble anything on screen. One night, my childhood home looked like a slasher film. No actors. No one yelled cut. And I had to clean it.

Since then, I’ve been spending nights in my childhood bedroom. Watching bad movies and trying to fall asleep to the hum of an old fan. Real-life horror has terrible sound design.

I settled into a strange rhythm. Most nights, I just let the fan hum and wait for sleep to show up. I wasn’t writing the novel I’m supposed to be finishing, but I started jotting down weird little stories again. People unraveling in ways that don’t always look like unraveling. Nightmares that slip in quiet. Sadness that shows up dressed like routine.

I'm not the only one in my family who loves horror. It’s one of the weird things my cousins and nieces and I actually bond over. No matter the age gap or whatever else is happening, we always circle back to the same stuff. Ouija boards, slasher reboots, bad sequels we secretly love. When the family finally got together for something that wasn’t grief, it made sense that we ended up talking about horror again. Paper plates, overcooked burgers, and someone making fun of Annabelle. Someone else brought up Ouija boards. And my niece, without missing a beat, said:

“Did you guys hear the Annabelle doll went missing?”

I laughed. Figured it was a TikTok rumor or a marketing stunt for the Conjuring franchise. But later that night, I looked it up anyway. Just to be sure. Because apparently that’s who I am now. Someone who fact-checks haunted doll rumors alone in their childhood bedroom after a family cookout.

That’s how I stumbled into the zoning rabbit hole.

Here’s the thing most people don’t realize: the real reason you can’t visit the actual Warren Occult Museum anymore isn’t because of demonic interference or Vatican censorship. It’s because of suburban zoning laws.

The Warrens were the original paranormal influencers before that was a thing. Ed was a self-taught demonologist. Lorraine claimed to be a clairvoyant. Together, they ran toward the kind of things that make most people turn on the lights and check their locks. Haunted houses, demonic possession, cursed objects. If it was weird and terrifying, they were already on their way.

They were also devout Catholics with a flair for performance. Their museum wasn’t some polished institution. It was a basement in their Monroe, Connecticut home, stuffed with relics they claimed had spiritual baggage. The Annabelle doll was just the mascot. There were dozens of items, all allegedly neutralized by prayer and encased in glass. Visitors came for the fear, stayed for the folklore.

For decades, it operated quietly. It wasn’t zoned for public access, but no one said anything. Monroe runs on R-40 residential zoning, which prohibits the use of a home as a public attraction. But when only a few ghost-curious guests showed up now and then, it was easy to look the other way.

Then the movies happened. The Conjuring franchise exploded, and suddenly everyone wanted to see the real thing. The once-quiet basement became a pilgrimage site. Cars lined the street. Neighbors complained. The town finally noticed that a horror museum was running out of a ranch-style house.

So in 2019, they shut it down. Not because they questioned the Warrens’ beliefs. Not because of some priestly intervention. They shut it down because of parking violations and safety concerns.

In official town records from 2019, Monroe’s Planning and Zoning Commission confirmed that the museum violated R-40 residential zoning laws, which prohibit commercial ventures including museums within single-family home zones. A cease and desist order was issued after a rise in complaints from neighbors about parking congestion and public safety hazards. The museum, long tolerated as a private curiosity, had quietly exceeded the limits of its legal status as soon as it became a cultural landmark.

The thing about zoning laws is that they were invented to preserve an illusion. Suburbs are curated. The streets are wide, the lawns are trimmed, and nothing unexpected is supposed to happen. R-40 isn’t just a code. It’s a belief system. One that insists on separation. Business and home. Sacred and profane. Normal and weird.

We’ll tolerate cursed dolls in a basement until they start attracting traffic. We’ll look the other way until the weirdness becomes visible. What shut the museum down wasn’t the fear of evil. It was the fear of inconvenience.

We like to believe fear is unpredictable. That it surges up like a haunting, unexpected and wild. But the truth is, most fear lives in frameworks. It’s managed, permitted, and politely suppressed. We manage unease the same way we manage noise ordinances and driveway access. The museum didn’t get exorcised. It got code enforced.

Regulation is its own kind of magic. A way to pretend control exists. We put rules around the unexplainable and call it civilization. Zoning becomes a kind of protective circle. Not drawn in chalk or salt, but in ordinances and setback requirements. I get the impulse. Rules feel safer when you’ve seen what happens without them. It’s all meant to do the same thing: keep the weird stuff contained.

The museum technically still exists. The items are still there, just without the tour groups and holy water routines. The fear is dormant. Or maybe just ignored.

We keep pretending horror is about breaking boundaries. But the truth is, most of us find comfort in rules. Regulation is our collective superstition, a secular ritual we use to keep the unknown in check. Even when we claim to crave chaos, we tend to crave it in settings where someone is still quietly enforcing the fire code. Fear needs form, or else it spills. That’s why we draw lines. Zoning lines. Boundary lines. Imaginary ones. They aren’t just restrictions. They’re incantations we live by.

Even cursed shit has to follow code. And maybe that’s why suburbia sleeps so well.

On a maybe unrelated note: Big thanks to Bending Genres, Hobart, JAKE The Anti-Literary Magazine, Scaffold, and Rejection Letters for being into the oddness I’ve been writing lately.

And a fun reminder about the KGB Bar reading next week, where I’ll actually read an out-of-context excerpt from this novel I’m working on. Proof that all this demonic, Starbucks, haunted doll, zoning research is actually going somewhere…