Midday light beams in through stained glass, illuminating a realm that, depending on where you look, could belong to an ancient church lady or a ghoulish goth teen. Inhabitants include a stuffed bunny in a dress, an angelic white teddy bear, and a black-eyed doll that just might snap to life and suffocate you while you’re asleep. A crucifix hangs on one wall, a rip saw on another. A Holy Bible sits next to a thrift-store novel about a mass murderer called Shadow of Cain. There’s a deer skull on the dresser and a deer foot under the bed. All of the furniture looks at least a hundred years old, and haunted. “Not pictured is my crazy dead cicada collection,” says Hayden Anhedönia, breezily, wrapping up a tour of her bedroom over Zoom one afternoon in March.
She then steps through a doorway into an open space with even more stained glass and pews and an altar. It is the sanctuary of the converted 19th-century church in rural Indiana that Anhedönia currently calls home. She moved all the way from her native Florida into the 6,238 square-foot, $950 a month rental with three friends last summer, after seeing a listing online. “It felt like it was meant for me,” she says as she sits down in front of the altar.
Though Anhedönia was raised in a tight-knit Southern Baptist community—her dad was a deacon, and she and her mom sang in the choir—at this point, the 23-year-old’s relationship with religion is complicated. She left the church at 16, a few years after she was first ostracized for being gay, and a few years before she would come out as a transgender woman and start making harrowing music under the name Ethel Cain. She insists that her choice to live in a former place of worship—and to sometimes explore the nightmarish side of Christianity in her work—was made not out of spite but rather in the spirit of reclamation.
“Everything I do through my art is a way to get my thumb on top of what’s happened to me in the past, because now I’m in control and I can’t be hurt by it again,” she says, a slight drawl peeking through a tone that’s both disarming and determined. “So for me, living here, I can walk around the sanctuary and there’s no bad vibes. It’s this weird, bittersweet comfort. It’s just me and the quiet.”