“Haunted Time in New York by Night” analyzes the actual play series New York by Night (Twitch, 2022–) to show how it evokes HIV/AIDS history in New York City without centering an explicit HIV/AIDS plot. The essay argues that the show’s vampiric premise and its aesthetic choices generate a collapsed temporality that feels simultaneously “epidemic” (pre-HAART) and “endemic” (post-HAART), producing a sense of belatedness for those who inherit AIDS history after the most visible crisis years. Drawing on Jules Gill-Peterson’s distinction between epidemic urgency and endemic slow death, the piece reads NYBN’s vampires as literal “ghosts” of epidemic inheritances.

The analysis connects Vampire: The Masquerade’s design history—especially earlier editions that explicitly linked vampirism to HIV transmission and surveillance—to NYBN’s contemporary setting, arguing that later rules changes cannot fully erase AIDS’s foundational influence on the game. Close attention to cinematic landscape (black-and-white imagery, narration, and spatial framing) shows how the series renders Hunts Point and sites like North Brother Island as haunted infrastructures of abandonment, quarantine, and preventable death. A wight narrative arc becomes a proxy for lingering stigmas around “transmission,” responsibility, and communal threat.

Situated in digital humanities, the project models DH as platform-aware close reading: it treats an online, serialized, improvised media object as an archive shaped by game systems, streaming aesthetics, and participatory digital culture. Methodologically, it demonstrates how rule texts, interface design, and audiovisual form can be read together to surface historical memory and structural violence in born-digital performance.