The door closes unexpectedly; footsteps are heard on the stairs; face seen in the window. The haunted house is a staple of gothic writing, television and film, but what is it about this humble setting that makes it so fascinating?
For many this makes sense scary or amazing – a meeting of what is familiar and foreign. Home, we would like to think, should be a place of safety, shelter from the world and domestic harmony. When this space becomes strange, alien in some way, terror appears.
The ghost appears to tell a story – often of an event or regret from the past that ties the story to a place or person, where the past intrudes, disrupting the present and one's sense of home. Sources as ancient as Pliny the Youngerarchaic Roman lawyer and writer, tells stories of haunted houses.
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Gothic writings of the 18th century in Britain began with the castle as a house. Castles were dual spaces, both domestic and political, and in these spaces, like the one at the center of Horace Walpole's work Otranto Castle (1764) the ghosts represented family feuds, the restoration of inheritance, and moral revenge.
Later, in the 19th century, the taste of Gothic becomes closer to everyday life. Questions of truth and narrative reliability became critical as Victorian novels took place in more regular households.
During the Victorian era, the ghost story gained popularity through stories published in periodical newspapers. Charles Dickens even went so far as to create a collaborative series of ghost stories in the Christmas issue of his magazine All year roundand it all takes place in different rooms of the same haunted house. Authors included Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins.
Haunted houses often exploit the tension between inside and outside. Ghosts like the mysterious children at Mr. James's Lost hearts (1895) come from inside the house and result from the traumatic events that took place there. Ghosts seen by the governess at Bly Manor in Henry James' classic Screw rotation (1898), are intrusive characters, first seen from a distance, and then increasingly encroaching on the domestic space as the governess tries to protect her youthful charges from their influence. Anxiety about home as a private space and protection is pervasive in these stories.
However, the haunted house also connotes confinement, often reflecting women's imprisonment, particularly in domestic spaces. – suggests Emma Liggins, a Gothic researcher from Manchester Metropolitan University, in her book Haunted house in women's ghost stories that the ghost story “transforms the domestic space into a place of terror that threatens marital relations and women's lives and mental health.”
The move to the 20th century did nothing to exorcise these ghosts. If anything, they have become more ubiquitous as up-to-date life and historic buildings collide.
The rise of modernism and the rise of cinema in Western culture brought modern opportunities in writing and visual media for depicting the haunted house, and entire series such as The Amityville Horror (1797 and then 1977) apply the house as a framework.
Visual media allows for further play with the sense of interior and exterior and questions about narrative truth explored in earlier fiction. The BBC's celebrated paranormal drama Ghostwatch (1992) introduced viewers to a supposedly televised domestic drama, blurring fact and fiction to appeal to viewers. Billed as a “documentary,” the program pretended to be interrupted by supernatural forces when Pipes' ghost appeared to interfere with camera equipment, fooling – and terrifying – many television viewers.
In some hauntings, ghosts are not the only threat; the house itself may be a supernatural force at work. Shirley Jackson's Hill House, from her 1959 novel Haunted Hill House celebrated not so much for the ghosts that dwell within it, but for its own ghostly malevolence: “Hill House's face seemed wide awake, with alertness flowing from the empty windows and a hint of joy in the brow of the cornice.”
The house can, of course, also be a metaphor for the mind, a concept popular in Freudian readings of the Gothic that consider the texts in relation to the unconscious. Here, the eeriness of a haunted house can accurately reflect the way we are strangers to ourselves, with secret rooms, passageways, and ghosts within, creating a neat analogy to the mysterious and unknowable nature of the human mind.
After all, houses in fiction and film can and often are cleared of ghosts, although this is not always the case. Haunted houses such as Otranto by Walpole and Edgar Allan Poe House of Usher (from The Fall of the House of Usher, 1839), dispossessed of their spirits, fall and fall. However, at the end of Shirley Jackson's story, Hill House was still “standing against its backdrop of hills” after (spoiler alert!) took the life of the main character, Eleanor.
Most buildings outlast human buildings, and a haunted house reminds us that something we may think we have – our own “home” or our mind – exists before us and beyond us.
What is your favorite haunted house story? Let us know in the comments below.
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