The House of Wonders (HoW) in Zanzibar was racialized urban matter, built under the command of ‘Arab’ bodies, then bombed and rebuilt by white British colonialists. In 2020, under the ruling of the Chama cha Mapinduzi (the Party of the Revolution, whose African-ness was called upon to justify the violent revolution against Arab and British domination in 1964), the HoW collapsed. Here, we attend to the void left by this collapse, in the middle of recurring political violence against some-bodies in Zanzibar. We center Zanzibari reactions to the HoW’s collapse. Analytically, we decide against a recent move in sociolinguistics and linguistic landscape studies to use spectrality and ghosts as concepts to speak about absent presences (Deumert 2022; Volvach 2023), opening up a space for debate around the potentials and limitations of these notions in sociolinguistics. Thinking and writing with the void allows us to show how the absent presence of the HoW can produce different un/racializing dynamics that are ongoing and open, holding indeterminate potentialities for healing the  Zanzibari wound of race and/or for inflicting more pain.