When Hauntings Become Inheritance: The Stories That Shaped The Ordinary Bruja
When I first started writing The Ordinary Bruja, I didn’t plan to write a haunted house story. At least, not in the traditional sense. I wanted to write about the kind of hauntings that don’t come with creaking floors or shadowy figures, but with inherited silence, guilt, and the weight of being the first to see what others have learned to ignore.
But hauntings have a way of finding us.
And for me, they arrived wrapped in the influences of four stories that still live rent-free in my imagination: The Haunting of Hill House, The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, Mexican Gothic, and Play Nice. Each one peeled back a layer of what I thought horror could be—and what it means to be haunted not by ghosts, but by family, memory, and identity.
The Haunting of Hill House – Grief That Builds Its Own Walls
Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House changed the way I saw horror. It isn’t just a ghost story—it’s an autopsy of grief. What unsettled me most wasn’t the jump scares, but the quiet ache of it all. The way the Crain family keeps walking through rooms built from regret, denial, and love.
That’s how Hallowthorn Hill came to life in my book. It’s not just a setting; it’s a living reflection of the Espinal women’s silence and sorrow. Like Hill House, it’s a presence that responds to what’s left unsaid.
I wanted Marisol’s haunting to feel cyclical, deeply human—where trauma doesn’t stay buried just because you refuse to speak its name. Hill House taught me that horror isn’t always about the supernatural. Sometimes, it’s about the rooms you build inside yourself to survive loss.
The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina – Magic Written in Bloodlines
Zoraida Córdova’s The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina gave me permission to embrace unapologetic magic. The story of a family bound by a mysterious matriarch—whose gifts, secrets, and sacrifices ripple through generations—resonated deeply with me.
Orquídea reminded me of the Dominican women in my own life: the ones who speak in prayer and proverb, who light candles not just for hope but for protection, who hold entire histories in their silence.
That’s how the Espinal women were born. Their magic, like Orquídea’s legacy, is both inheritance and burden. Each generation carries a power that was once silenced—and a responsibility to reclaim it without losing themselves in the process.
Córdova’s novel showed me that magical realism doesn’t need to explain itself. It exists because it’s truthful to cultures where the sacred and the everyday coexist. Her story reminded me that ancestral magic is not delicate—it’s demanding. And in The Ordinary Bruja, that truth became the backbone of the Espinal legacy.
Mexican Gothic – The Rot Beneath the Beauty
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is one of those novels that hums with unease. It’s not the kind of horror that screams—it whispers. It’s decadent and decaying at once, where the air itself feels poisonous and the walls pulse with history.
What captivated me most was how Silvia made dread beautiful. She built a world where the horrors of patriarchy, colonization, and control literally fester beneath the surface. The mold in that house isn’t just physical—it’s metaphorical.
In The Ordinary Bruja, Salvador embodies that same rot. He’s the ghost of machismo and generational control—a man who believed power belonged only to him. His influence lingers like mildew, feeding on fear and doubt.
I wanted my story to carry that same slow suffocation—a psychological horror that doesn’t always announce itself, but seeps into your bones. Like Mexican Gothic, I wanted to show that the real horror isn’t just in the house—it’s in the systems and silences that built it.
Play Nice – The Horror of Being the “Good Woman”
Rachel Harrison’s Play Nice was the most recent spark of inspiration, and it hit me in the chest. On the surface, it’s about a woman who inherits her mother’s supposedly haunted house, but beneath that is something far more sinister—the expectation to be “good,” to be palatable, to perform happiness even when everything inside you is collapsing.
Clio, the protagonist, is a woman who curates her life for the internet. She knows how to pose, how to smile, how to “play nice.” But when she returns to the house her mother once called cursed, she’s forced to confront the lies she’s told herself to keep that façade intact.
That idea struck a chord. Because Marisol Espinal also performs. She’s spent years trying to be small, agreeable, and invisible—trying to fit into a world that keeps telling her she’s too much and not enough at the same time.
Like Play Nice, The Ordinary Bruja explores what happens when women stop pretending. When they stop contorting themselves into acceptable versions of womanhood. When they finally say, I’m not here to play nice.
It’s in that defiance—when the mask cracks—that true power begins to rise.
The Intersection of Horror, Heritage, and Healing
When you blend all of these influences together—Hill House’s grief, Orquídea’s inheritance from Zoraida Córdova’s imagination, Mexican Gothic’s atmosphere, and Play Nice’s unmasking—you get the emotional DNA of The Ordinary Bruja.
I didn’t write this book to scare people. I wrote it to unbury something. To ask: what do we inherit when we inherit silence? What does it cost to heal what’s been festering for generations?
Writing this novel was my own kind of haunting. Every draft pulled me closer to the ghosts I hadn’t wanted to face—those of assimilation, of womanhood, of ancestral expectations. But it also showed me that hauntings don’t always want to hurt us. Sometimes, they want to be heard.
If The Ordinary Bruja has a message stitched into its spine, it’s this:
Our hauntings are not curses. They’re invitations—to remember, to reclaim, and to rise.
The Ordinary Bruja: Book One of Las Cerradoras Series – Johanny Ortega
$4.99 – $23.99Price range: $4.99 through $23.99 Marisol Espinal has spent her life trying to disappear from her family’s whispers of magic, from the shame of not belonging, from the truth she refuses to face. She’s always wanted to be someone else: confident, capable, extraordinary.
But when strange visions, flickering shadows, and warnings written in her mother’s hand begin to stalk her, Marisol is forced to confront her deepest fear: what if she isn’t extraordinary at all? What if she’s painfully ordinary?
Yet Hallowthorn Hill doesn’t call to just anyone. And the more Marisol resists, the stronger its pull becomes. The past she’s buried claws its way back, and something in the mist is watching—waiting for her to remember.
If Marisol cannot face the truth about who she is and where she comes from, the same darkness that destroyed her ancestors will claim her, too.
Somewhere in the shadows, something knows her name.
And it’s time for Marisol to learn why.
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SKU: Category: Books, Books for Adults, Fantasy, Fiction Books, Horror, Literary Fiction, Magical Realism, Women’s Fiction Tags: ancestral magic, atmospheric fiction, books about brujas, dark fantasy, Dominican folklore, haunted inheritance, Isabel Cañas fans, Latine fantasy, magical realism, psychological horror, Silvia Moreno-Garcia fans, spooky reads, supernatural mystery, The Ordinary Bruja, witchy books 
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