At the beginning of Playwright Levi Holloway’s “Paranormal Activity,” currently running at the August Wilson Theatre, newlyweds Lou (Cher Álvarez) and James (Travis A. Knight) enter their new home in London, a home provided by James’s company. The complex play asks a deceptively simple question: Who haunts whom – are houses haunted or are the people in the houses haunted? As it unfolds, director Felix Barrett’s production suggests a darker answer: the dead haunt through the living, possessing bodies not to scare but to demand acknowledgment. Not confession. Not forgiveness. Not reconciliation – just acknowledgement. Lou and James are unwittingly in the center of a maelstrom of paranormal activity rooted in their own soon to be discovered dark pasts.

When the house lights dim and Act I begins, the audience is already primed for what’s to come on Fly Davis’s two-story set. Barrett has made sure we can’t trust our own perceptions — we still cannot see clearly what’s going on, we’re still cold, and we’re still disoriented. We will soon learn that we are experiencing the dread Lou has been experiencing while living in Chicago and will continue to for the next 2 hours.

Lou’s and James’s marriage is complicated which adds to the conflicts they face in their new home. Lou hasn’t been fully “well” for some time. She lives with dread: indeed, constant dread has become like an unwanted companion. James strives to understand Lou’s psychological challenges but that for better or for worse “understanding” masks his frustration with her illness and with his mother Carolanne’s (Shannon Cochran) constant interference in their lives and her inappropriate “interest” in Lou’s illness. These characters’ conflicts drive the play’s plot, most notably in three scenes that demonstrate how well Barrett stages horror and haunting.

First, The Séance. After experiencing unrelenting paranormal activity in the house, Lou and James call in Dr. Etheline Cotgrave a famous medium and spiritualist, host of a podcast on the paranormal.

Eva Kaminsky’s Dr. Cotgrave enters the house officiously and ready to call up spirits. This is no-nonsense spiritualism. After introductions and receiving a black tea from James, Cotgrave sets up the séance. It isn’t long after Lou and James share some personal information that Cotgrave is able to summon the spirit of Lou’s mother. Contact with the dead is possible. But this spirit frightens Cotgrave: she knows this contact with the dead, though successful, is dangerous for the couple because it implicates Lou and James in acts of murder. Eva Kaminsky is not afraid of the dead. She flees the séance because of what she fears the dead can do to Lou and James.

A prolonged Facetime with James’s mother Carolanne ends with a bizarre rant from her. She tells James, “You’re no good. You pretend to be. You’re good at pretending. But You’re small, baby. You’re rotten, baby. You ain’t worth the skin God gave you, baby. Mama sees it and so do you.” After she advises her son to “eat a bullet,” she tells him to answer the door. When he does, Carolanne fades from the monitor and stands at the open door. Shannon Cochran becomes James’s own guilt about the hit-and-run made physical, further supporting the play’s theme that “the dead haunt through the living.” This scene exposes both James’s failures in the marriage and the deep guilt about his past that he’s been carrying.

When James and Lou finally confess to each other their past crimes. The fire and the hit-and-run. Cher Álvarez and Travis A. Knight navigate this scene with authenticity. Lou suddenly morphs into the voice of the girl James killed, telling James, “He shouldn’t have left [her] in that creek” and saying “Look at me Jimmy Peekaboo.” In the play’s climax, James runs to the door, opens it and cries out, i’m sorry/i’m sorry/i’m sorry/Please! I was a kid! I was just a kid I- . . .” As he steps out, James is struck and killed by a passing car. The dead girl is revealed and the audience hears “the clanging of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s BELL” which earlier in the play was meant to signify, “If something happens to you or me, to either of us. And there’s an after? Let’s do what Sherlock couldn’t. Let’s ring this fucking bell. James’s death seems appropriate here given his refusal to rescue the girl he hit when he was a teenager. Her appearance confirms what the haunting has been all along: the manifestation of unacknowledged guilt and the dead demanding recognition.

The exacting precision of the performances of Cher Álvarez, Travis A. Knight, Shannon Cochran, and Eva Kaminsky keep “Paranormal Activity” from descending into melodrama often present in paranormal narratives. They navigate the fine line between psychological breakdown and supernatural possession so seamlessly the audience never sees the shift.

Cher Álvarez plays a complex character who is unsure of her own self and equally unsure of her husband’s commitment to her wellbeing. She gives Lou the appropriate amount of angst, doubt, hope. In the final scene, Álvarez seamlessly morphs from loving wife to being the ghostly presence of the young girl James killed when he was a teenager. This transformation is so subtle and so downright creepy.

Travis A. Knight’s James is also a conflicted character who wears his guilt deeply while trying to move beyond his responsibility for a young girl’s death. This haunting is exacerbated by his mother’s interference in his life and marriage. Knight successfully teeters between his haunted self and his married life with a calm demeanor. It is only when Álvarez’s Lou “becomes” the ghost of the dead girl that his performance shifts into high gear exhibiting palpable terror and profound guilt as he runs out the door in fear and is killed by a passing car. This karmic event is not lost on the audience due to Knight’s authentic performance.

Shannon Cochran delivers an intrusive and sometimes abusive Carolanne, James’s mother. She intrudes on James’s and Lou’s privacy in London, initiating FaceTime conversations that James displays on the TV screen—forcing Lou to overhear psychological abuse about her ‘illness’ and her fitness to be a mother. When Cochran’s Carolanne appears at the couple’s door – as a real person then as a possessed entity – she easily shifts into a more demonic and fearsome character. Her performance veers between maternal and demonic.

Eva Kaminsky conjures up her character Dr. Cotgrave as easily as she calls the dead into the séance. Kaminsky carefully transforms the stoic medium persona of her character when the spirits she conjures up reveal themselves as the spirits of the deceased victim of James’s careless driving and the tortured spirit of Lou’s parents. The actor uses every tool at her disposal to indicate when the séance turns real and dangerous.

The playwright crafts a paranormal script that confronts the audience with important enduring questions. Though left unanswered, these questions become relevant in large part because of the authenticity of the performances and the astuteness of Felix Barrett’s staging. Can two people build genuine intimacy while harboring the darkest secrets about themselves? Does confession to a loved one absolve guilt, or does it merely transfer the burden to them? What do we owe to those we’ve harmed—confession, penance, transformation, or simply acknowledgment? And how much of what we experience as paranormal is actually the weight of our own unprocessed trauma? Can the mind become so fractured by guilt that it creates its own ghosts? These questions are as haunting as the play’s narrative.

Levi Holloway’s “Paranormal Activity” leaves the audience with unanswered questions. Does the past haunt us because we haven’t faced it, or because we carry it with us no matter where we go? Is a haunting ultimately about the dead demanding justice, or the living unable to forgive themselves? We are confronted with the proposition that the true hauntings in life are not just supernatural, but deeply personal and are rooted in trauma, secrets, and unresolved guilt. The narrative challenges the audience to question whether haunting is ultimately about the living unable to forgive themselves. James and Lou are haunted by their pasts just as we are. Because we have not faced the past, we carry that past with us wherever we go.