There was a particular kind of silence that arrived when the electricity went out.
In the dark, the house I knew by heart became unfamiliar. A hallway stretched farther than it should. The trees outside moved like figures. Every small sound had a second meaning, and the night seemed to lean closer.
That was when my mother told us ghost stories.
She never rushed them. She let the silence do some of the work, letting a pause settle before the next detail. We would sit close, listening to her voice while the blackout gathered around us. The stories were frightening, but they were also intimate. They belonged to our family, our home, and those suspended hours when the ordinary world disappeared.
The shape of a story in the dark
What stayed with me was not only the fear. It was the way my mother transformed the unknown. A shadow became a possibility. A distant sound became a question. The darkness was no longer empty. It was full of memory, warning, humor, and imagination.
When the electricity returned, the room went back to normal. The walls were only walls again. The hallway shortened. But the stories remained. They followed me into sleep, into long journeys, sparking both imagination and creativity and into the places where the coast meets the night.
Where the coast becomes haunted
Haunt the Coast began with that feeling: the moment a familiar place shifts into something else.
The coast can be bright, open, and full of movement. It can also become quiet and unknowable after sunset. The tide changes the shape of the shoreline. Wind moves through empty spaces. A path that felt ordinary in the afternoon can feel charged at night.
That tension is the heart of the collection. Haunt the Coast is drawn to the space between comfort and unease, beauty and mystery, memory and invention. It is not about darkness as something to escape. It is about what darkness reveals when we give ourselves time to look.
A collection built from memory
The pieces in Haunt the Coast carry that same contrast. They are made for movement and ease, but they hold a mood beneath the surface. They belong on the road to the water, around a late-night fire, or in the quiet after everyone else has gone home.
They are reminders that clothing can carry a story before we say a word. A silhouette can feel familiar. A color can bring back a place. A detail can suggest something just out of view.
My mother’s stories taught me that fear and wonder are often neighbors. They can live in the same room, on the same shoreline, inside the same memory. Haunt the Coast is my way of returning to those blackout nights, when the lights went out, the coast felt close, and a story made the darkness feel alive.