The article examines how violence affects those who, not being direct victims, live in contexts where violence prevails. The text states that the spectral logic of violence, its presence-absence, permeates everyday forms of social relationships and breaks the opposition between the everyday and the extraordinary. The paper, which is based on a commuting ethnography fieldwork in a Colombian municipality dominated by neo-paramilitary structures, as well as on an auto-ethnographic exercise by the author, concludes that for confronting the ghost of violence, inhabitants of a territory dominated by it must make a practical distinction between actual daily life and potential violent life. © 2023 Instituto Colombiano de Antropologia e Historia. All rights reserved.