ByRoger Luckhurst
Published October 25, 2023
• 8 min read
Soon after the death of Sarah Winchester in San Jose, California, in 1922, the new owners opened her mansion as an attraction for tourists drawn to tales of the bizarre. Winchester was the heir to the gun manufacturer’s fortune, and rumors swirled around her constant home building and renovation. She constructed elaborate extra rooms (more than a hundred), stairs that led nowhere, and empty corridors that turned the house into a bewildering maze.
Was her fortune cursed? Did Winchester build a labyrinth to confound vengeful spirits? Were there séances held in the mansion every night?
The answer was no to most of these questions, but once the famous magician Harry Houdini visited and told the owners to market it as the “Winchester Mystery House,” its commercial career was secure. It has just celebrated its centenary and is still a popular attraction in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can take the “Walk with Spirits” tour, attend a séance, or—new this fall—immerse yourself in creepy “Unhinged Housewarming” evenings.
The mansion was one of the inspirations for Shirley Jackson’s classic 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House—a key gothic novel that portrays a house as a reserve of malignant energy. The famous opening paragraph tells us that the house “stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within.” In the novel a group of paranormal investigators stay in the house, which they only belatedly realize is feeding off disturbed psychic powers that are conjuring murderous, long buried resentments.
Ever since the book’s success—and thanks to Stephen King novels, “true” paranormal TV shows, and found-footage films such as Paranormal Activity—we’ve become attuned to the idea of the Bad Place, the house where past traumas or atrocities have leaked into the atmosphere and then gotten stuck on repeat.
Here’s how Jackson’s book continues to inspire haunted house tourism, and where you can visit other evocative Bad Places.
The legacy of Hill House
In the preface to her bestseller, Jackson confessed the idea for her ghost story had been taken from a bizarre true-life inquiry by the London-based Society for Psychical Research in 1897. The Society (which still exists) formed a Haunted House Committee and sent the dubious “psychic sensitive” Ada Goodrich-Freer to investigate claims of haunting at Ballechin House in Scotland. The book of the investigation, given aristocratic endorsement by the Marquis of Bute, caused all sorts of ructions in the Letters pages of the London Times, with many condemning the naivety of the investigators.
(Ghost stories scare up new life at these historic hotels.)
Jackson’s novel was filmed in 1963, to great effect, as The Haunting. Director Robert Wise used Ettington Park Hall in Warwickshire in the United Kingdom for the unnerving exteriors. The Hall was the ancient estate of the Shirley family, stretching back to the Domesday Book, but it was rebuilt in the 19th century in the neo-Gothic style, all pointed arches and polychromatic brickwork. Some claim the Hall actually is haunted, being such an old family pile in Shakespeare country. An elderly Victorian ghost totters around at twilight, while “Lady Emma” is said to glide through the corridors at night. However, as a current 4-star hotel popular with wedding parties, it now doesn’t play up that angle.
Also inspired by Jackson’s book, the 1973 film The Legend of Hell House featured the sharp-angled, baroque details of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. The palace was built by the architect and playwright Sir John Vanbrugh for the British hero the Duke of Marlborough, who had won a famous victory at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. The grand house was the birthplace of the first Duke’s most famous descendant, and another war hero, Winston Churchill.
For the recent Netflix series, freely adapted from The Haunting of Hill House, director Mike Flanagan used the Gothic exterior of Bisham Manor in Lagrange, Georgia. This mansion, in private hands, does look suitably Gothic, but is actually less than 30 years old.
Vampire castles and other Gothic spaces
For the more adventurous admirer of Gothic novels and haunted houses, Bran Castle in Transylvania, Romania, claims to be the inspiration for the brooding opening section of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Stoker never visited the region, but constructed the vampire’s den from travel books, conversations with his brother who had journeyed in the Balkans, and his fevered imagination.
(Inside the fortress known as ‘Dracula’s castle.’)
Bran Castle welcomes tourists, unlike the Villa Diodati on the waterfront of Lake Geneva in Cologny, Switzerland. This was the site where, in 1816, the Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley and their entourage tried to scare themselves silly by telling ghost stories during a particularly violent thunderstorm. The meeting was to prompt the teenage Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein and Byron’s much put-upon doctor, John William Polidori, to pen “The Vampyre.” Villa Diodati is privately owned, and security fences keep the curious out.
It is not only family manors or rambling country mansions that inspire Gothic vibes. For a time, Detroit’s abandoned factories stood in as symbols of a whole industrial economic and social order coming to an end. No wonder this landscape features in recent horror films, such as It Follows (2013), Don’t Breathe (2016), or Barbarian (2022).
We also seem to be spooked by the husks of prisons or asylums—those sprawling institutions whose ruins haunt us with the death of a certain optimistic belief that a spell of institutional treatment might improve people. The last of these so-called “monster asylums”—such as the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane in Ovid, New York—shut down in the 1990s.
(These are the most haunted places in the U.S.)
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, sometimes turned to the house as a metaphor for the human psyche, a place with lots of secrets locked away in basements or forgotten bedrooms. An avid reader of Gothic stories, Freud argued that the Gothic inspired feelings of the unheimlich. Often translated as “uncanny,” the original German means unhomely, and this gets at precisely what unnerves us about haunted house tales: the irruption of something horrifying or unholy in precisely the location we always thought was the safest space.
The Gothic runs and re-runs this anxiety on an endless loop, trying to shore up our sense of home, knowing all the while that the unhomely always lurks in the shadows of dusty rooms, the creak of staircases, or along the vistas of empty corridors.
Roger Luckhurst published Gothic: An Illustrated History in 2021, and has written cultural histories of psychical research, zombies, vampires, and mummies.
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