“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

“Certainly there are spots which inevitably attach to themselves an atmosphere of holiness and goodness; it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad.”

yellowjackets x the haunting of hill house by shirley jackson

WHY ARE YOU HAUNTED?
a survey

Dream house as haunted mansion

What does it mean for something to be haunted, exactly? You know the formula instinctually: a place is steeped in tragedy. Death, at the very least, but so many terrible things can precede death, and it stands to reason that some of them might accomplish something similar. You spend so much time trembling between the walls of the Dream House, obsessively attuned to the position of her body relative to yours, not sleeping properly, listening for the sound of her footsteps, the way disdain creeps into her voice, staring dead-eyed in disbelief at things you never thought you’d see in your lifetime.

What else does it mean? It means that metaphors abound; that space exists in four dimensions; that if you return somewhere often enough it becomes infused with your energy; that the past never leaves us; that there’s always atmosphere to consider; that you can wound air as cleanly as you can wound flesh.

In this way, the Dream House was a haunted house. You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened. And then it occurs to you one day, standing in the living room, that you are this house’s ghost: you are the one wandering from room to room with no purpose, gaping at the moving boxes that are never unpacked, never certain what you’re supposed to do. After all, you don’t need to die to leave a mark of psychic pain. If anyone is living in the Dream House now, he or she might be seeing the echo of you.

It is better to be engulfed by one’s surroundings than slowly digested in the stomach of some unknown predator. The insect can always reemerge from its disguise once the perceived danger is gone. For the insect, space acts as a means of containing or at least delaying immediate danger. Similarly, the haunted house film functions, at least on one level, as a means of perceived containment. If human anxieties are bound up and enmeshed in the narrative of the film then viewers are, in a sense, separated from their own fears. The haunted house film therefore acts as a buffer between the spectator and the darkness of personal phobias.

While the tendency of Hill House to manipulate the weaknesses of its guests is frightening the true threat is its unsettling ability to reveal what should have remained hidden. Dr. Montague suggests that “we are only afraid of ourselves” to which Luke replies, “no...of seeing ourselves clearly and without disguise.” Hill House forces the characters to confront the terrors of their own human natures. Like Hill House the haunted house novel in general represents the outward projection of human fears and phobias. These fears are materialized in the form of the haunted house, a creation intended to protect the self from one’s own dark spaces. Thus, whether or not a house is truly haunted the mind perceives it as such. “As a concept...the uncanny has...found its metaphorical home in architecture: first in the house, haunted or not, that pretends to afford the utmost security while opening itself to the secret intrusion of terror.” Just as Hill House threatens to reveal what the other characters have carefully kept hidden the real threat of dark space is the possibility that man and woman will be confronted with that which they have attempted to rid themselves of. There is, however, no real means of completely separating the self from the dark.

The manic repetition of bits, each articulated as a feature, makes for a particular variety of strangeness. En masse, these contribute to an "aesthetics of crowding:" a sort of liberal nightmare in which the individual unit cannot be properly assimilated into the expression of a collective. The Pullman is a monster after the Leviathan, at least after the famous engraving on the title page of Thomas Hobbes' book. It appears a meld of independent entities that have not been, or cannot be, assimilated into the morphology of a greater corporate body. There remains an unresolved tension between the whole and its parts. Hence we might understand many of the awkward products of late Victoriana, their tremulous density and corseted appearance-–as if they were barely restraining a bolus of forces.

horror in architecture, by joshua comaroff & ong ker-shing

if we were to dissect a house as we might a human cadaver, we would find ourselves able to isolate and describe its various appendages and their functions in a decidedly anatomical fashion. There is even a fair number of direct comparisons to be drawn between those organs of a house and those of a human body.

For example, let us examine the living room. Often the dominant space of a house at ground level, as well as typically the center of activity in a well-populated home, the living room is very much the heart of the house. While a human heart circulates blood to oxygenate the body's extremities, the living room circulates people, activity, communication. It is the room most often to be found "beating," as active and vivacious as its name would imply. The comparison is only strengthened when we consider also the living room is most commonly the room to contain the fireplace, making it additionally a locus of actual, physical heat.

It is easy to think of the kitchen and dining room as the stomach or digestive system of the house, though this comparison is tenuous. A contrast: the function in analog of a bathroom should be immediately obvious. The hallways and corridors of a house are its veins, providing circulation coursing throughout its frame. A staircase bears more than a passing resemblance both physically and symbolically to a spine. The windows serve much the same purpose as eyes, and anyone who has rounded a bend or long drive and come suddenly face to face with a tall, dark manor will tell you that it is difficult to shake the impression that the house, through its lightless windows, is a creature capable of vision and intelligence.

The bedroom is perhaps the room that most eludes direct comparison in this fashion. At a stretch, and allowing for a bit of poetic sympathy, it might be said that the bedroom is not unlike the human mind – or those parts of it that dictate thought and imagination. In the bedroom, dreams are dreamt, passions are ignited, epiphanies are experienced in cold sweat at early hours. In the bedroom is where people invariably spend the majority of their time, though comparatively little of it whilst conscious.

And yet this analogy is an incomplete one. Obviously the mind is an exceedingly complex thing, but the bedroom represents the thinking, dreaming part of the brain and it is the basement that represents those lower, unconscious parts. The basement is dark, it is buried. It is a place full of cobwebs where memories are stored. A point of comparison, truly. Often the unnerving uncertainty that comes with considering the deeper aspects of the human psyche is not unlike gazing down at the swimming blackness pooled at the bottom of the basement stairwell. It is a place we spend our childhoods filling with monsters that will lay for years in patient silence. It is a place that, barring some specific errand, we seldom ever want to go.

Of course this comparison, though appropriate, is a very heavy-handed one. Often the basement is little more than a storage space, littered with the corpses of spiders and woodlice. While poets and psychoanalysts no doubt dread the thought of a dark basement, in truth it is the bedroom, the waking mind, that place of dreams, which is actually the most frightening of all.

It is here, in the bedroom, that we are at our most vulnerable. Each night we shut our senses to the world for hours at a time, trusting in the house to keep us safe until next we wake. In this state of extreme vulnerability we will spend something like twenty percent of our lives. Anything might stand beside us, watch us, keep us company until dawn and we would never perceive it. We can only pray that the house will not let such things carry on while we sleep. In this way, during these hours, the bedroom seems less like a mind and more like a mouth. For it is here that the house is most likely to betray us. It is here that we place ourselves most at the house's mercy and spend each night hoping that it will not bite down.