“Every town has a haunted house.” This is the thesis statement of my new novel, Killer House Party. And I believe it to be true. Not that every town has a house with ghosts, but that every town has a house that is haunted. A house that is infamous or legendary. It evokes a very human fear of the unknown, an abyss that–if it catches your gaze–you may never look away from.
A haunted house is a folktale. Its retelling defines a place. You can find a city/town/neighborhood’s deepest fears in the story of its haunted house. Maybe it’s the betrayal of the safety we expect from a home. Or the suffocation of being pinned down to one place. What is the house keeping out? What is it keeping in?
Writing a novel about such a well trod trope means being in conversation with every haunted house you’ve ever come across. A haunted house symbolizes different things to different people. A haunted house is only ever a symbol.
These are the houses that haunted me, in fiction and in life. These are the ghosts whispering in the walls of my haunted house book.
Haunted House by Jan Pieńkowski
Jan Pieńkowski’s Haunted House (1979) was my first scary story, the foundation of what I came to understand as the horror genre. The book itself appeared in my life with no origin. There was no loving inscription on the first page nor eager cousin watching, waiting for my reaction. In my memory, I read it hiding on the side of a couch with black and white Beetlejuice stripes, heart in my throat.
The front cover is the front door (or vice versa, the front door is the front cover), making the act of opening the book a kind of breaking and entering. The prose is in second person, the text casting the reader as a doctor who has been invited into a house of horrors. Eyes follow you from behind paintings. Slime drips down the stairs. The house is full of animals, monsters, and an alien crashes through the bathroom wall. And at the end, you cannot leave. There’s no denouement. No “whew, it was all a dream.” The last thing you hear is your patient screaming for you while you’re trapped in the attic with a huge bat and a box from Transylvania being sawed open from the inside. (Here, the pop up aspect of the book becomes auditory, as the saw truly grinds against the heavy paper box). Closing the book, you find the door has been nailed shut, trapping you inside the story forever.
Welcome to Dead House (Goosebumps #1) by R.L. Stine
Creating this list is sort of like carbon dating myself. One can look at the pop culture markers of my life and probably guess my age within a year. (Feel free to play along at home! Check my wikipedia to see if you’re correct.)
Goosebumps books to me were pure junk food. (I say this with all due respect to Mr. Stine as someone who also tries to write fun, scary books best read in one sitting.) Welcome to Dead House (1992) does what all great middle grade novels must and creates a world in which the children are right from the start and the adults are stodgy, stuck in their ways, and wrong.
Josh and Amanda’s family have inherited a creepy old house from a relative no one’s ever heard of. It’s old. It’s brick. It’s definitely haunted. Every new person they meet has the same name as someone in the town cemetery. Nothing weird here! Enjoy your free mansion! Dead House doesn’t have the silly sense of humor typical of Goosebumps, making it feel more sinister like Stine’s Fear Street books for older readers. Josh and Amanda’s dog is murdered. The town is full of ghouls in need of a human sacrifice. And, in the end, as the heroes are getting away, they see another family being brought in to take their place and they do nothing to stop it. Horrifying.
The Winchester Mystery House
Ah, the Winchester Mystery House. Notable to any Northern California resident for its Grim Reaper billboards (now sanitized to be less threatening). Recognizable outside of the 100 mile advertising radius because of a Helen Mirren film about the mansion’s spooky origin.
The Winchester House, as a concept, is a great haunted house story. Sarah Winchester married into a family of gun magnates and was so haunted by everyone their company’s products had killed that she built a big ass mazelike mansion (then called Llanada Villa) in San Jose, California to hide from the ghosts. The house had thousands of short stairs, some leading straight into the ceiling. It had over a hundred small rooms. The front half of the house was boarded up, even while the rest was still being constructed.
Except. Well. Anyone who has been tricked into taking the tour of the house can tell you that the answer to most things is that Sarah Winchester was a very rich, very infirm little old lady who built her house in a place with a lot of earthquakes. The many tiny stairs were due to her debilitating arthritis. Part of the house was boarded up because of earthquake damage. Using the house to confuse ghosts wanting to take revenge against her family? It wasn’t even the only house she lived in–she also had a houseboat.
Haunted houses are always less interesting when they are explicable.
The Zodiac Shack
What is a haunted house but a place where a Bad Thing happened? In my hometown of Vacaville, California the local Bad Thing was the Zodiac Killer. (Our state mental hospital also housed Charles Manson. David Fincher was obsessed with us for a few years.) Inactive for twenty years before my birth, the Zodiac Killer was known for killing women and couples in isolated areas of Solano County and then sending ciphers to the local newspapers about it. In my childhood, the name would just get thrown around, associated with otherwise innocuous locations. The lake. The park at the top of a hill.
The so-called “zodiac shack” was a house and a barn out on a country road. There were stories about how the Zodiac Killer brought victims there or stored their bodies. It was haunted. It was terrifying. It was titillating. It was a local legend with no basis in fact. The shack (and the barn) were remnants of a local well-off family’s farmhouse, abandoned in the early 20th century. There’s no evidence that the Zodiac Killer ever set foot there.
I’m no true crime girlie and this is the only haunted place on my list that I’ve never seen or been to. I drove past it once, flying in a friend’s mom’s convertible in the middle of the night. “That’s the Zodiac Shack,” he said. To me, it was just part of the darkness of the landscape.
Shirley Jackson Trio: The Haunting of Hill House/The Sundial/We Have Always Lived in the Castle
No one writes a haunting quite like Shirley Jackson. Perhaps it’s because no one understands the act of haunting their own house better than an agoraphobic (she says, from experience). The houses in Jackson’s books (Hill House, Halloran House, the Blackwood Family Estate) are all truly haunted by the same thing as every house in the world: a family. The house is the site of all a family’s woes, their secrets and peculiarities, the things they hide from the outside world. The house is the only witness to the horrors a family perpetrates against each other: the poisoning of the sugar bowl, the push down the stairs, the grief of an orphan who does not miss her abusive parent.
Within the house’s walls, a family is an organism that imprints itself on every room even after death. Every house keeps impressions of those who lived inside it before. The floor under the carpet. The handprint in the cement. The ghost in the attic. Echoes and reminders.
Every house is a haunted house.
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