While encountering Toni Morrison's novel Beloved for the first time, many readers experience extreme difficulty following the text. We know that 124 Bluestone Road is said to be haunted, but "haunted" is a word much thrown around in literature; one can be said to have "haunted eyes", for example, or to speak in a "haunted" manner. In this context, it simply means, "charged with meaning," or perhaps "imbued with a sense of doom." Morrison means both these things, but much more as well, in her description of Sethe's house and the experiences of the family who lives there. Precisely what Morrison does mean by the haunting of Bluestone Road and how said haunting can be seen in different ways and with different readings is the subject of this essay. By questioning the essence and truth of the haunting in the story one can see that not only is the issue of haunting and ghosts central to understanding the novel, but deeper still, it is an issue crucial to understanding the women of the work and their remembrance of the past that is indeed responsible for the haunting of their house.
             To begin with, there are three possible ways we can view Sethe's "haunting," and they will be presented in the order in which they most closely conform to what we normally consider "reality." First, we can argue that there are no supernatural forces at work in the house at all. Sethe herself is psychologically traumatized by the circumstances surrounding the death of her third child, and she has created such an atmosphere of grief that it is transferred to everyone else in the house; these other family members then begin to experience the same kinds of mental disturbances that Sethe does herself.
             When a mirror shatters, Buglar thinks it is his sister's angry spirit; Howard mistakes the normal whorls in cake icing for the handprints of his sister's hands. ...