[page 9] Once upon a time, there was a ghost story. It used to be told in upstate New York, where the young Mark Frost, co-creator of Twin Peaks, went during his childhood vacations. His maternal grandmother Betty, who lived there, would tell him and his brother Scott stories about the area—a land of lakes, forests, and mountains—including one about the unsolved murder of a young woman at the turn of the twentieth century, her body discovered lifeless in a pond. Her name was Hazel Drew, and she became the seed for Laura Palmer and Twin Peaks. David Bushman and Mark Givens recently reopened this long-forgotten case with the blessing of Mark Frost in an attempt to crack it. This led to the book Murder at Teal’s Pond (Thomas & Mercer, 2021), a true mystery about what took place during that summer of 1908. Contrary to what happens in the local lore of Rip van Winkle and his Dutchmen, Hazel’s sleep did not last twenty years but over one hundred. To quote Bushman and Givens: “Similarities between the Hazel Drew murder and the TV series poked at us, relentlessly.” The conference was fortunate to welcome Bushman, who presented his research about the case and Twin Peaks. In this section, the authors kindly granted permission to reprint Mark Frost's foreword to the book as well as their introduction.
The New England in which Hazel Drew lived was still mostly rural, and untouched nature was omnipresent. Since then, the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch defined by the impact of human activity, has radically changed that idyllic picture. In “Our Air, Our Water, Our Earth: Trans-corporeality and Toxic Bodies in Twin Peaks: The Return,” Mark Yates argues that while ecological concerns were already present in the first two seasons of the series, The Return brought things to a new, darker level of pollution, disease, and contamination. According to Yates, it appears that “while the sources which have contaminated the trans-corporeal net-[page 10]works of production and consumption are not explicitly identified in The Return, the events of Part 8 of The Return indicate that the toxication of the planet and its inhabitants began with the development of nuclear weapons.” Dr Amp is the most vocal character regarding this apocalyptic process, describing the poisoning at work all around us (and in us) during his online rants, but the situation of the Double R is also characteristic of what goes wrong in our relationship to the world.
Echoing what takes place at the Double R, the situation at the Roadhouse is also destabilizing: the various scenes that take place there feel like a disjointed assemblage, regrouping moments of alienation, narrative dead ends, and physical violence. It is not easy for the viewers to make sense of these sequences, which might appear to take us away from the characters we care about. The meditative approach developed in “The Roadhouse and Mindful Alienation: On Fearlessly Losing Hope in Twin Peaks’ House Away from Home” by Matthew C. Halteman to the Roadhouse scenes found throughout The Return—an approach grounded in the present, accepting what is instead of projecting desires onto reality, somehow reminiscent of Zen Buddhism—gives us a way to digest these moments for what they are, without trying to impose an overbearing narrative on top of them: “Like Audrey, we have an opportunity to experience the Roadhouse as a wake-up call for disabusing us of delusions and self-defeating false Narratives and raising our consciousness of the present moment.” The risk of such a “quietist” vision is of course that we would remain deaf to any idea of social change, accepting things as they are and not as they should be. Halteman is aware of this and stresses the need to remain active politically in order to collectively improve the world we live in, while individually staying grounded in the present moment. The Roadhouse is indeed both a road and a house . . .
MLA citation (print):
Boulègue, Franck. "In and around Twin Peaks." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 9-10.