The House Next Door

There is a certain morbid fascination we have with haunted houses. People love to be scared, myself among them, as there is something innate in each of us that's at least a little curious about the supernatural. Haunted houses are a hotbed for such paranormal activity, as some may claim. Based on those claims, stories have been told and movies have been made on the subject. Crinkly, old houses that are broken down and dilapidated are often written off as haunted, even if that is not truly the case. Why? Because people, even the ones scared by their own shadows, are at least a little captivated by the proposition of the dreaded haunted house.

Where the idea of the haunted house, or the haunted mansion originated, I can't be sure. The idea seemed to pop around the 19th-century and the creation of the Victorian mansion. Gothic architecture also played a large part in the equation. It in itself added was a catalyst for giving Victorian mansions their more spooky tendencies. Maybe it was the shoulders of the rafters, the head of the peak, shattered windows glaring out at the world with their palely-lit eyes. Maybe it was creaking stairs, the hollow halls, the passing light at the end of it that makes us question whether or not we'd just seen an apparition.

Maybe it was the dusty books on the shelves, the cold spots, the stoic, gloomy ancestors peering down from the walls, the bumps and groans in the night that make us question if it's just the house settling, or something more sinister emanating in through the plentiful cracks. The idea of the haunted Gothic mansion might have come from the penny dreadful novels circulating around Victorian London. Maybe it was even before that, with the tales of creaky, nefarious castles stemming from Shelley's Frankenstein and Stoker's Dracula.

The idea more than likely hit American soil with the morbid, bleak tales of Edgar Allan Poe, especially with his "The Fall of the House of Usher." Two long-lost friends reunite in a dilapidated, old mansion, one to try and see to the other's melancholic ailment. It seems to be over the one with the ailment, Roderick Usher, and his sister, who has just passed away. Her phantasm returns to take Roderick with her as the mansion crumbles to the foundation and the name Usher dies with them.

Alfred Hitchcock might make a good case for a filmmaking version of Poe, and brought his own vision of the eerie Victorian home in Psycho. Norman Bates runs a motel in the middle of nowhere on behalf of his mother, to whom he has a very macabre connection to. Norman lives in the spooky Victorian on the hill next to the motel, and while we can hear his mother talking to him, it's actually Norman himself, speaking for her as her corpse rots in an isolated room.

In 2012, we got a horrifying look into the English manor in the middle of a marsh in The Woman in Black. I saw this movie in the theater and it was scary, the image of the woman in black, the ghost of a jilted mother, sending a chill or two down my spine. Her Victorian home was surrounded by overgrown foliage, rusty, iron bars, and a gloom in the air that cast a plague over the entire town.

Crimson Peak showed us another haunted, Gothic house in England, complete with ghosts and just enough of a sense of desolation to make the heroine, and the audience, perpetually unsettled. The house is certainly a mansion, and is certainly isolated, which gives it all the fervor it needs to become its own uncredited character. It's lonely spires reach to the misty sky, the windows casting their hollow stares down upon those who dare tread the land of Allerdale Hall.

Netflix recently brought the Victorian and its ghostly sprawling manors in 2017 with The Lodgers. The house is a crinkling character, graying and dilapidated, surrounded by the past notions of a better time. The house is guarded by a complicated familial love and evil in one, with a young adult brother and sister looking to live threw the night in such an eerie locale.

Netflix also recently brought us The Haunting of Hill House, which is part family drama, part terrifying ghost story. It's Victorian mansion is definitely an antagonist, spawning spirits a plenty, and a curse that forces ropes around the necks of those drawn to it. The house is a breeding ground for the macabre, the culprit possibly black mold, or such a long history of death running rampant through its long, creaking hallways.

There is something about the Gothic Victorian Manor that makes our imaginations run wild. It appears to us as imposing, all-knowing, menacing, and teeming with spirits. The haunted question crosses our mind the second we step into them, whether we want it to or not. Just what happened there, we ask. A murder? A patricide? Suicide? Are the ghosts benign, or are they truly malignant, as foreboding as the gloomy exterior of the house itself?