The Psychology of Haunted House Stories

Photo from theplacesyoullsee.com

My favorite horror sub-genre for both books and movies is the haunted house story.

In books, some of my most loved haunted house tales include The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons, Julia by Peter Straub, Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco, the H.R. Wakefield story The Red Lodge, and of course, The Shining by Stephen King. Many of my favorite horror movies are based on those books, such as The Innocents (1961), The Haunting (1963), The Haunting of Julia (1977), The Shining (1980) and Burnt Offerings, (1976).

I’ve been considering why haunted house tales resonate so strongly with many people and I’ve come up with two primary thoughts:

Home Sweet Home.

First, they hit us where we live. Literally. Haunted house tales address the primal human need of shelter. What could be more terrifying than a home that isn’t safe for human habitation, the very structure that is supposed to be our guarantor of warmth and security? Significantly, most haunted house tales begin with the classic trope of an individual or family taking up what they think will be a permanent residence in the unsafe quarters, only to find out it’s not what they think it is. A few tales do focus on temporary residencies, such as Hill House, its imitator The Legacy of Hell House by Richard Matheson, and of course, The Shining, but most haunted house victims are in it for the long haul. Or so they think. (For myself, I think one of the reasons why I love the genre so much is because I’m very much a homebody, with a tendancy for making strong attachments to places and things, so the fear of having an unsafe home is probably greater for me than for a travel-lover or someone who moves every two years. )

If These Walls Could Talk.

Second, a home by its nature is the place where we think we can be our “true selves”, safe from the prying eyes of a disapproving public. Our home witnesses both the worst and the best of human nature. How easy is it to imagine that a house—particularly an old one—has been silently absorbing or somehow recording the worst of human behavior over the march of time, and then playing our own ugliness back to us when we least expect it? Very easy.

Examples of the Two Approaches.

The most famous haunted house stories seem to address either, or both, of those two fears. In Hill House, The House Next Door, Burnt Offerings and of course The Shining, the “bad place” is a living thing that can think and act for itself. Whatever ghosts residing within are just weapons that the bad place uses to weaken and terrify the new potential victims.

In The House Next Door and Burnt Offerings, there aren’t even any ghosts at all: the evil house acts directly against its victims without bothering to employ any ghostly middlemen. As Shirley Jackson said of Hill House, some houses are just born bad. Anne Rivers Siddons memorably took that idea and ran with it in The House Next Door, in which a new, modern house is evil because the architect who created it was descended from a brutal murderer, and somehow transported his “bad blood” into his creation.

In the more traditional haunted house stories, by contrast, the house isn’t alive, it’s just a silent recorder of the ghastly deeds that were carried out within its walls, or ghosts are tethered to the house by a need for revenge or an unwillingness to move on to the other side. This category would include The Turn of the Screw, The Red Lodge, Straub’s Julia, and The Stone Tape, a nifty little low-budget British thriller from the early 70s directed by Nigel Kneale, the director of Quartermass and the Pit. In The Stone Tape, the idea of the house as a recorder of evil deeds is presented literally. The cellar of the “haunted” house is built with a rare type of stone that can record video of human interactions, and the “hauntings” are simply the stone replaying footage of an old murder over and over again. In Julia, the house is haunted by an evil child named Olivia, who was murdered by her own mother, and whose malevolent spirit is reawakened when Julia, another mother who killed her daughter, moves into it. In Turn of the Screw, two deceased servants are (allegedly) tethered not exactly to the house itself, but to the two children who live in it.

Today, the haunted tale has a long list of tropes and props that are by now very familiar to readers and viewers. There’s the locked room with no key; the haunted basement/cellar/attic; the mirrors that reflect ghosts; the cask of letters and mementos left behind (often a music box); the eerie spectre who haunts the garden or nearby woods; the faucet that drips blood or nasty water; the door that won’t stay closed (or open); the face at the window; the creepy servants or locals who know more than they are willing to say. These conventions are so well-worn that it’s often now hard to find a haunted house tale that seems original.

In my novella/long short story, The Drowning Game, (available on Amazon Kindle), to be different, I wrote about a haunted swimming pool. But I still had to add in things that make a good haunted house tale—a creepy old house; a locked case full of strange objects (instead of the proverbial locked room); a bathtub full of something horrible; windows that look like eyes.

There’s only so much you can do with a swimming pool.