Crossing The Rainbow Bridge
Exploring the deep-fried lore of Haunted Mound
I have a personal obsession with the connection between haunted houses and music production. There’s a moment where the physical becomes metaphysical, the structure fostering the creation becomes symbiotic or parasitic. The music is a blood sacrifice for the bones of the house, which feeds and nourishes the sound.
There’s Olympia’s storied Track House, where Phil Elverum recorded three Microphones albums. The black house hidden amongst the trees was the home of many hauntings, including a ghost dog who’d whine and scratch at the doors. Later, in 2014, a metal collective moved in and painted demons and deities all over the walls. Mysterious flowers would bloom in the garden, varieties that weren’t usually seen in the Pacific North West.
Riot Grrrl was birthed in another Olympia haunted house, now existing only on paper ephemera, like old show fliers. This house was called The Curse and Kathleen Hanna lived there, once upon a time, or so the lore goes.
In 2012, Gaahl from Gorgoroth led a terrified and bumbling post-Indie Sleaze Vice journalist through the icy mountains of Norway to find his childhood home and to face his memories of the tiny isolated town he grew up in. When they reach the top of the mountain there’s snow, lots of it, and the journalists aren’t fully absorbing the atmosphere. Later, Gaahl laments he wasn’t asked the right questions. They shone a torch on the ghost and it vanished. These things only happen when no one is looking.
Britney Spears sold Brittany Murphy the house she died in. Did you know that? Spears’ former makeup artist stated: "[Spears] had that place up on Sunset Plaza — and I'm just gonna say, this is really weird … She calls me … I had my friend do reiki healing on her, he had come up, I guess she'd had a crazy partying weekend and needed to relax. He left, and she swears to God that he opened some spirit portal or something, and these bad spirits had come in … and they were trying to, like, push her down the stairs or something crazy." Britney sold the property to Brittany Murphy in 2003. Murphy thought the property was unlucky, sinister and wanted to leave. She never did.
Haunted Mound of course, have their own haunted house. They work and live in the Butcher House, which is hidden somewhere in the forests of Northern California (don’t pull up). Like all good lore, to an extent it’s manufactured. In the track ‘Haunted Mound Reapers’ by Hackle and Semetary, the lyrics go “Stay in my haunted house, I call it the butcher house (Yah). Murder house, snuff house, haunted house, my butcher house.”
The Butcher House is the product of myth-making, deep-fried edits and the laws of attraction. It’s surrounded by skin-walkers and deer gods, but they can be fought off, or protected, with AK-47s. And so the lore goes, and so the lore goes.
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Cast your mind back to 2012, if you will. Chief Keef has just dropped Love, Sosa. Hard In Da Paint has been out a few years. S4LEM are about to disappear into the night, not to be seen again until 2016. Tumblr is at its peak. Semetary is already experimenting on Garage Band, age ten. He’s making dubstep, whatever’s cool at the time. What more can be expected of a ten year old who grew up entirely online? His parents are artists. It will be a few years until he sees Yung Lean live for the first time, until he discovers witch-house. The piles of haunted lumber to build the Butcher House though, are there: the Trap-a-holics certified hood classic sample, the grainy oversaturated filters, Flocka’s resounding drops, reminiscent of dubstep before him.
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This is the part of the essay where I try to deconstruct dense internet lore to provide an explainer. I don’t want to explain too hard though, it’s always best to know when to preserve the magic. Researching Haunted Mound is like looking into an alternate universe- if Mayhem had a discord, if someone put the Rio De Janeiro filter over Dead’s suicide photos. I’m trying to build my own miniature haunted house, to prop up my cut-out dolls of the key figures.
Like all good things, I begin at the Reddit, which provides the following: ‘Haunted Mound are a musical collective who make a style of music best described as witch house/horrorcore combined with drill and trap. The collective was started by Semetary and Ghost Mountain in 2019, with their first project being the mixtape “Grave House.” The two no longer collaborate, and Ghost Mountain is living a normal life, “going to college and shit.” The collective has branched out to have a number of members and offshoots, including overseas members.
Here’s what we know on the current members of the Haunted Mound collective:
Semetary’s real name is available to find online. I don’t want to publish it. Like all good mysteries, what’s real is never as exciting as the fiction behind it, so the less time discussing the mundanities, the better. He’s 21. His other musical aliases include Semetary Grave Man, Grave Man and DJ SORROW. Semetary is the founding member of Haunted Mound, and one of the most prolific. Based on his digital footprint, he seems to have largely defined and set the tone for the Haunted Mound aesthetic.
There’s Buckshot, who’s famously… Irish! His other musical aliases are solventabuse and solventabuser, respectively. His entry into the collective was primarily through creating dank photoshop edits, catching Semetary’s attention online. They spoke, collaborated and eventually Buckshot came to stay at the Butcher House for a month, and continues to create solo work from the aisle under the Haunted Mound collective.
Hackle, also known as Hackledown, is Semetary’s best friend. He begun as a fan, hitting Semetary up from an “empty-ass Instagram account,” the rest is history lore. He’d previously dabbled in music, but nothing serious. Hackle has released a solo album “GUNSMITH THA MIXTAPE” 2022 and also singles with Buckshot and Semetary. He lives in the Butcher House. Him and Semetary are on opposite sleep schedules.
Oscar18 is a producer from Ireland, who works closely with Buckshot, having credits on 9 out of 11 tracks on Buckshot’s Burning Barn and a few credits on Semetary’s Screaming Forest. As far as I know, he’s still located in Ireland.
Snuffer is a producer from Wales, who has had a longer career predating his work in Haunted Mound. Previously producing tracks for horrorcore Memphis rapper 901 Kruger under the name Slick Killa. He has producer credit on the Semetary Track Moonshine and various Turnabout tracks.
Gonerville is a videographer and producer who produced 7/10 tracks of Turnabout's album "Cutter Lane". He has shot and edited a variety of Haunted Mound videos, for example Turnabout's "HUSQRIDER" & Sematary's "KAMAKRAZEE.”
Grimoire is also known as f4irycorpse, and is an artist and producer who produced the Hackle and Semetary track “Peterbilt.” APPARENTLY Grimoire is Australian!? … I stay intrigued.
Turnabout is a rapper from Utah who made his Haunted Mound debut with the track “My Reaper” with Semetary. Recently, he’s released the album “Cutter Lane” and the single “Bolos.”
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A lot of the key pieces of Haunted Mound lore lives on deleted Instagram live streams, removed and re-uploaded music videos, lost songs with Ghost Mountain on guitar (before he defected to “normal life”) and deleted Tweets. The notion of collecting rare artefacts and possessed objects to try and piece together a mystery is strong with Haunted Mound. Engaging with their content feels like an augmented reality game, or smoking too much sativa and ending up in Halloweentown.
The music itself is hard to describe. Obviously each member of Haunted Mound possesses a different sound, which is constantly evolving and distorting, like the way a meme becomes progressively surreal over time. There are Haunted Mound staples- the ‘Haunt-a-Holics: real. haunted. mound’ signature sample, distorted monotone vocals, trap beats, witch-house inspired edits and euphoric highs and video game samples. There are hardcore and shoegaze influences, with samples from Title Fight and My Bloody Valentine. There’s an obligatory comparison to early emo and scene rap, like Brokencyde (sorry to go there). To put it simply, Haunted Mound’s music is much better than most of its peers, or whoever people want to compare them to. The music is tongue in cheek, but never feels irony-poisoned, the songs are a perfect mix of banger and emo-influenced melancholy. They always slap.
The visual edits for the album artwork and film clips are created mysteriously. Semetary refuses to disclose the apps he uses, but they are only able to be used on an older iPhone (top secret model). Besides these signature crispy edits, there are obvious visual markers of a Haunted Mound artist- Florida Man swamp mythos, Winnie The Pooh hauntology, guns, animal bones, Jack-O’Lanterns, Online Ceramics and Brett Helquist-esque illustrations. Some of the imagery is reminiscent of early black metal fliers, or images of the Columbine kids.
However, there are no visual markers as ubiquitous as Harold The Tree. Harold is the Haunted Mound logo, and is also canon in the Haunted Mound story. According to reddit user MOH4, Ghost Mountain and Semetary carved their initials into a tree, surrounded by a heart. The tree was named Harold- it’s TBD whether this is true. It’s also rumoured to also be related to a Fallout 3 character and someone in the Reddit mentioned Healthy Harold, which has made my sensors detect Australians in the chat (naaaauuur, huuuagh, haunted mound melb show when!?). Commonly found on the Haunted Mound Reddit are kids thanking their “goated ass moms” for buying them New Rocks, Groot memes, dank mordor edits and what back in my day, was known as cursed images.
Haunted Mound owe a debt, whether or not they realise it, to Lauren Alice Avery and also Walter Pearce’s popularisation of pseudo-redneck fashion.
Lauren Alice Avery was the first to play with social media in this way, and no one has done it like her since. An heiress to a large property fortune in LA, Lauren’s online antics became increasingly surreal and she set the stage for the deleted Instagram Live as lore canon, making Lives of herself in limos waving samurai swords, hanging out with tweens. When all the nepo babies started jacking her swag, she made true on art // artist and moved to a small town, becoming obsessed with grainy images of lockets, libraries and old ships. She posted snow angels, Silent Hill graphics and what can only be described as 1940s nurse core (?). She got married to a tanked guy with rimless glasses and they had a baby. She raised silkworms. Lauren currently follows Semetary on Instagram (as of 07/12/22).
Recently, she went on Instagram live and my best friend Richard and I were lucky enough to catch her, at midnight during the pandemic. She was filming from a WWII army tent that had been set up in her living room. We asked her (and I’m not even kidding) if her house was haunted. She said it was, and tried to show us the porch area where she’d had the most paranormal activity. The live glitched out, and we lost Lauren in a series of pixels before we could see the ghosts.
Walter Pearce sends dispatches from the woods, Written Like This. And i Wonder if The Haunted Mound boys, Have Read Them. Because indeed, there Is Overlap. He too is married, he too flirts with conservative dirtbag leftism. He was one of the first to live Trad, and move out of the city- get married, buy a bloodhound.
To compare Haunted Mound to anyone, especially Drain Gang or Bladee et al is to miss the point. It’s like YouTuber Yoshima says: ‘comparing Haunted Mound’s music to that of Drain Gang is like comparing all experimental noise rap to Death Grips’. Yes, but... not quite.
While Drain Gang feels like it’s for the city kids, for the New Yorkers & the edgelords, Haunted Mound is truly, for the weirdos. Semetary grew up solitary, with no friends (his own words). What was the point when high-school, like everything, would inevitably end? Hackle played sports, football to be exact. He never liked athletics, he was “on some other shit.” Semetary is staunchly alt- left, decrying the “alt-right, Sam Hyde, Drain Gang, weird fanboys”. While so much of popular online behaviour and aesthetics is about flirting close to fascism, but in a cool disaffected way, there’s something so earnest and pure about Haunted Mound. There’s no hate, just world-building.
In 2022, aesthetics are becoming increasingly more demented. Context collapse is causing typically hardcore Republican imagery to feel identical to that of the trendy Dimes Square kids. In contrast, ironically, Haunted Mound feels grounded and stable. They’re gonna be wearing True Religion, they’ll be waving guns and Jack O’Lanterns, their dogs will have glowing eyes, existing only in a flashbulb moment.
In a rare 2022 interview with Semetary and Hackle, Masked Gorilla describes having interviewed hundreds of artists, from Lil Peep to Kendrick Lamar and says candidly, that it’s not often you meet artists so authentic. He says off the cuff: “you live and breathe this.” This is why Haunted Mound and their fanbase feel like one of the last true subcultures. In an over saturation of images, content and the endless snow shovelling of Y2K aesthetics online, Haunted Mound have truly *trap-horn* remixed an aesthetic to make it feel new again. Despite being so deeply online, they somehow remain elusive and enigmatic. Haunted Mound is borne of the Internet and unlike Millennials, they are so deeply digitally literate that they have no past, and they feel like a version of what future fandoms and content creation will look like. Haunted Mound fight against that old Walter Benjamin prejudice that reproduction of an image devalues its aura. They prove, through their visuals, lore and music that what is reproduced isn’t dead, it’s just been rebuilt. The bones of the haunted house might be sourced from elsewhere, but the ghosts are solely their own.