A client told me yesterday that their house had a ghost.

They didn’t say it jokingly. And I didn’t laugh. Not because I believe in ghosts—at least not in the way people usually mean—but because the comment stayed with me longer than I expected. As an architect, I spend a lot of time thinking about why people feel certain things in certain spaces. And if there were one building type where something might linger, it wouldn’t be an office or a grocery store. It would be a house.

Almost every ghost story starts the same way: it’s an old home. Rarely do you hear someone talk about a haunted workplace or a cursed strip mall. No one mentions a ghost pacing a conference room after hours. Whatever people mean when they say a place feels haunted, they almost always mean a residence.

That makes sense to me.

Homes aren’t just places we occupy. They’re places we emotionally invest in. Love happens there. So does conflict. Habits form quietly and repeat over years. People move through the same thresholds thousands of times, pause in the same doorways, sit in the same corners. Over time, a house learns the rhythm of its occupants. It begins to feel familiar in a way that’s hard to explain but easy to sense.

Most buildings are transitional. We pass through them. We leave very little behind. Homes are different. People attach their identities to them. Our house. My childhood home. The place we raised the kids. Even after people leave, something of them seems to remain—not literally, but perceptually. The emotional occupancy lingers.

Hospitals, hotels, schools, and churches often show up in ghost stories too. They’re emotionally charged spaces, but they’re also transitional. People pass through them at important moments, but they don’t belong to them. A house feels owned. Claimed. Personal.

So maybe houses don’t have more ghosts. Maybe they just hold more of us.

Whether you believe in the supernatural or not, there’s something worth paying attention to here. Architecture isn’t neutral. Spaces absorb behavior, emotion, and time. If that weren’t true, people wouldn’t feel so strongly about certain rooms, certain houses, or certain places they haven’t been in for decades.

If buildings remember anything, homes remember the most,   Designing a house carries a quiet responsibility. You’re not just shaping space—you’re shaping the backdrop of someone’s life. The place where they’ll celebrate, struggle, rest, and eventually leave behind. Long after the furniture is gone, the structure remains, holding whatever feeling the next person senses when they walk through the door.

Maybe that’s what my client was noticing.

Not a ghost.

Just a house that remembered.