Looking for a home where classic charm meets modern living? Maybe one with tons of natural light? I have a few in mind that are move-in ready! Well, as long as you don’t mind the moaning ghosts. Or the weird puppets. Oh, and the bleeding walls, cursed basement, and other kinds of oozing ectoplasm? The current owners — who may or may not have died under mysterious circumstances — have tossed that in for free. Lucky you! Yes, call your realtor (or a priest), because today we’re venturing into a terrifying horror subgenre: haunted house novels.
Although I shudder to think of what the Zillow listings for the homes in these books might look like, as a reader I can’t resist a good haunted house story, and I’m certainly not the only one. It’s an enduring fan-favorite for a reason — hauntings in domestic settings have provided fodder for scares for centuries, stretching as far back as Pliny the Younger’s Ancient Roman ghost stories (61 –112 AD), and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764, the latter of which is widely regarded as the first Gothic novel. What is it about haunted Victorians, castles, and cabins that captures our collective imaginations so?
These books are far from simple, straightforward encounters with things that go bump in the night. Typically layered within every example of the haunted house motif is a whole host of metaphors, featuring manifestations of fear, trauma, greed, loss, and pain seeping up from the floorboards. That added complexity is often what makes them so memorable. (Well, that and the nightmares. Can’t forget the nightmares.) From one of Stephen King’s most iconic novels and a classic from the author of I Am Legend, to contemporary bestsellers by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Grady Hendrix, there’s something on this list for every kind of (doomed, ill-fated) house hunter.
