Thorn Hall

Abstract

Thorn Hall is a work of speculative fiction set within a haunted dormitory at a former missionary boarding school in Aotearoa New Zealand. The narrative follows Deia, a young Māori woman whose ability to see, hear, and physically experience ghosts positions her within a continuum of Indigenous knowledge systems that have long recognised the presence and persistence of the unseen. In this context, haunting is immediate, embodied, and inseparable from the histories the institution attempts to contain.

As Deia’s presence intensifies the manifestations within Theresa Hall, the spirits grow increasingly hostile, drawing power from her permeability to what the building holds. The haunting initially gathers around a monstrous feminine presence that emerges during moments of acute violence. While it’s first read as a threat, this entity is later revealed as protective, positioning itself against two more insidious figures: the ghosts of a sexually abusive headmaster and a religiously punitive woman. These horrors are positioned to reflect the documented violences embedded within missionary education systems that sought to discipline, suppress, and restructure Māori life under Western religious authority. Theresa Hall doesn’t merely house these histories, it reproduces them.

The novel’s horror operates across sexuality, indigeneity, and institutional control, but it’s within these intersections that resistance also forms. Deia’s queerness and her Māori identity mark her within a framework that’s historically policed both body and belief. Yet her relationship with Juno establishes an alternative structure grounded in whakapapa, reciprocity, and care. Through this connection, and through her engagement with Māori cosmology, Deia’s sensitivity is no longer framed as instability, but recognised as inheritance, a continuation of ways of knowing that colonial systems have consistently attempted to discredit yet have never succeeded in extinguishing. By merging supernatural horror with Indigenous epistemology and queer romance, Thorn Hall positions haunting as both trauma and testimony, exploring how reclamation of identity becomes an act of resistance against historical erasure.

Through its engagement with Gothic space, supernatural embodiment, and Indigenous relational frameworks, Thorn Hall refuses the idea that institutions such as Theresa Hall can be separated from the conditions that produced them. The building isn’t a neutral structure altered by harm, but an extension of a system that encoded discipline, surveillance, and control into its foundations. Its architecture maintains that authority, its ghosts enforce it, and its contemporary language of safety fails to undo it. The novel’s horror emerges from this recognition: the institution can’t be made safe because its violence isn’t incidental but structural.

The final image of the feminine apparition, now appearing as a young girl, brings this argument into focus. When Deia states, “She’s me,” the recognition collapses the distance between past and present, between victim and witness. This isn’t a simple metaphor, but an acknowledgment that the violence held within the institution isn’t separate from the lives shaped in its aftermath. The figure in the window reflects both what’s been endured and what would continue if the structure remained. In naming the girl as herself, Deia refuses the fragmentation imposed by the institution and asserts continuity where erasure was intended.

Thorn Hall doesn’t conclude with restoration, but with rupture. The destruction of Theresa Hall is the only action that interrupts the authority it continues to hold over both the living and the dead. Institutions founded on colonisation, religious control, and racialised discipline can’t be repaired into safety. They must be dismantled. In this way, the novel positions survival not as adaptation to oppressive systems, but as the refusal to remain within them.