Horror books
Ten Haunted House Stories
THE SEANCE BY JOHN HARWOOD
OCTOBER 23, 2012
When Constance Langton’s little sister Alma dies, she takes her grieving mother to a séance. She has her doubts as to whether it’s really possible to summon spirits, but she hopes it might offer her mother some comfort. Unfortunately though, Constance’s decision has tragic consequences that she couldn’t have foreseen. Alone in the world, Constance is contacted by solicitor John Montague and learns of an inheritance connecting her with Wraxford Hall, a crumbling manor house surrounded by gloomy woods. The dark secrets of the Hall’s sinister past are revealed to the reader through the narratives of Constance, Montague and another young woman, Eleanor Unwin, whose fate also becomes linked with the house. It’s not surprising that Constance is advised to “sell the Hall unseen; burn it to the ground and plough the earth with salt if you will; but never live there…”
An ancient prophecy predicts that ‘the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it’. On his wedding day the heir of Otranto is killed, his body found crushed beneath a giant helmet. His father, Manfred, Prince of Otranto, fears the prophecy is coming true and contrives to divorce his current wife and marry his son’s betrothed, Isabella, to produce a new heir. However, Manfred carries a family secret and as his desperation to capture Isabella grows, supernatural forces awake within the castle.
One of Poe’s most famous stories, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is narrated by an unnamed man who arrives at the House of Usher to nurse his friend and master of the house, Roderick Usher. The house appears to be falling apart and both Usher and his twin sister, Madeline, are infected with a strange illness. When Madeline dies, the narrator helps Usher entomb her in the family crypt. A storm rises and strange happenings within the house begin to drive the occupants mad.
A woman suffering what we today understand as post-natal depression is taken to the counrty by her doctor husband and forced to rest in what was once a nursery decorated with peculiar yellow wallpaper. Within the pattern the narrator spies another woman creeping, creeping around the room.
A governess takes a position looking after two orphaned children on a remote country estate. Soon after arriving she begins to sight a strange man and a woman moving about the house and grounds. She becomes convinced that the couple are in fact the children’s former governess, Miss Jessel, and her lover and fellow employee, Peter Quint—now both dead. The governess becomes increasingly alarmed when she learns that these ghostly apparitions are visiting the children.
One of the most famous (and frightening) haunted house stories ever written, The Haunting of Hill House establishes many of the tropes of the modern haunted house story. Paranormal investigator Dr. John Montague is determined to find proof of the supernatural. He rents a rumoured ‘haunted house’ where several violent deaths have occurred and invites a number of people with links to the supernatural to join him in the house for the summer. Only three accept his invitation: Luke Sanderson, heir to the estate; Theodora a bohemian artist; and Eleanor Vance, a painfully shy woman who encountered a poltergeist as a child and spent her youth nursing her invalid mother.
Technically The Shining is the story of a haunted hotel rather than a haunted house, but that just broadens the scope for terror. Aspiring writer and recovering alcoholic, Jack Torrance, takes a job as caretaker at the Overlook Hotel during the off-season, bringing his wife and young son along for the adventure. While Jack hopes the winter will give him time to sober up and write his book, the Overlook has other plans. His son, Danny, has ‘the shining’—a gift that enables him to see the horror of the hotel’s past—which he must use to stop his father from killing himself and his mother.
It’s a big call to make, but House of Leaves might just be the scariest book of all time ever. The primary story follows the classic haunted house plot. A filmmaker moves his family into an old house only to discover a sometimes-there-sometimes-not doorway in the living room that leads to a dark maze beneath the house. Against all common sense, the filmmaker decides to investigate and document the process. Unspeakable terror ensues.
Winner of the 2008 Aurealis Award for Best Horror Novel, The Seance is the second book in what might loosely be called a trilogy, preceded by The Ghost Writer (2004) and rounded out with The Asylum (2013). The three novels aren’t explicitly linked, but they are connected through Harwood’s nuanced understanding of Victorian Gothic and all pay homage to the archetypal stories and voices of the genre.
Set in post-war 1940s England, The Little Stranger narrates the financial ruin of the noble Ayres family and general decline of the landed gentry that occurred in post war Britain. Country doctor, Faraday, befriends the Ayres family after attending a sick maid at their estate, Hundreds Hall. However, as he draws closer to the family and comes to understand the extent of their financial distress and struggle to keep the house, unsettling events begin to occur on the estate, threatening the lives of its inhabitants.
Part coming-of-age narrative, part haunted house story, White is for Witching is sinister and surreal. After the death of her mother, eighteen-year-old Miri develops pica—a rare mental illness compelling her to eat chalk, stones and other non-foods. Meanwhile, the ancestral home her father runs as a bed an breakfast stirs to life, scaring off staff and guests, and a mysterious figure, the Goodlady, walks invisible through the rooms.
