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Christina Henry Talks Chicago’s Dark Side, Gentrification, and the Haunting Power of Storytelling

By Tom Barnas
10/6/2025

There’s something haunting about Chicago — not just the stories of ghosts in the old hotels or the echoes of long-gone neighborhoods, but the way the city itself seems to breathe with memory. In his latest conversation on The Front Stoop Podcast, Chicago storyteller Tom Barnas sits down with horror author Christina Henry, whose new book The Place Where They Buried Your Heart captures that uncanny pulse.

Set in Chicago, Henry’s latest dive into darkness explores how the city’s shifting neighborhoods, layers of history, and cycles of loss shape the way we live — and the way we haunt each other. “Chicago has always felt like a living ghost,” Henry says, reflecting on her years in Wrigleyville. “The city keeps changing, but it never forgets what was here before.”

We dig deep into the real-life chills of gentrification — how corner stores become cocktail bars, and how memory gets priced out one block at a time. But even in the shadow of those changes, Henry sees community as something sacred. “It’s the people that give Chicago its spirit,” she says. “That’s what I write about — not just the ghosts we make up, but the ones we carry with us.”

Henry, known for acclaimed works like The Girl in Red, The Ghost Tree, and Good Girls Don’t Die, blends myth, fear, and emotional truth like a Midwestern Neil Gaiman with a Chicago edge. Her worlds — filled with monsters, lost boys, and haunted hearts — feel ripped from the foggy corners of Lincoln Park or the cracked brick of Uptown.

While she admits she’s not entirely sold on the supernatural, Henry knows the real power of storytelling: its ability to reanimate what’s been buried. “Stories let us confront what scares us — even when that’s just change itself,” she says.

And that’s the quiet horror of modern Chicago with the beauty in decay, the heartbeat in the bricks, and the stories that refuse to die.

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