I picked it up because “haunting” stood out among the more desperately literary titles that lined the bookshelf in my borrowed writing room. I also picked it up because I don’t believe in monsters, ghosts or hauntings. Reading The Haunting of Hill House, a thriller-esque novel published in 1959, was a challenge I could accept. Not like sky diving or skiing, things that actually scare me.
I began the novel late one gray-skyed evening, under one of those warm spring rains that make everything a little greener, a little more earthy. Not unlike the first night the guests spend in the Hill House. “Around them the house brooded, settling and stirring with a movement that was almost like a shudder…. in the trees over Hill House, an owl cried out, and toward morning a thin, fine rain began, misty and dull.”
Since I was alone in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, I decided—a probably-unnecessary precaution—to only read the book in daylight hours. My first concession to Jackson’s talent.
Kindly Dr. Montague kicks off the adventure by inviting three strangers—each with some sort of supernatural experience in their past—to join him for a short stay at Hill House. There’s Eleanor, primary caregiver for her bitter, but recently-dead mother. Theodora, who believed “duty and conscience were attributes that belonged properly to the Girl Scouts.” And Luke, a young man set to one day inherit Hill House. Each of these assistants agrees to keep a notebook on their experiences and reactions. Montague’s doctorate is actually in anthropology—it being the closest connection, he believes, to his true calling: studying the supernatural. He understands how skepticism works, how sometimes all belief needs is a tiny hook on which to hang a split in the seam.
No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice.
My parents bought a house my freshman year of high school. It was on the same street in the same small town where my mother had grown up. The house, a white stucco with 60s-style windows that rolled out and in, but never up, was originally inhabited by a family who’d lost a child and mother to suicide and another child to an overdose. The knowledge fluttered in the back of my mind, a fruit fly, small and swooping into consciousness every now and then. But I had more important things to worry about—a new high school and finding new friends.
Looking back, of course, here’s where the bad things began: deaths and misunderstandings that would take years to scab up. A thousand tiny sadnesses within those sliding bedroom doors. By the time we moved into next house, I quickly recognized oppression in the walls, how they pressed down on all of us even during sunny times. Even now, none of my siblings and I can drive by that one without a shiver.
“In all our conscious minds,” Dr. Montague explains one evening, “there is not one iota of belief in ghosts. Not one of us … can say the word ‘ghost’ without a little involuntary smile. No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where our modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute for defense.”
It’s not, of course, the single, isolated events that haunt us, it is those quiet, cumulative ones that slowly wear us down. Jackson’s language is never dramatic or over-the top, something I could’ve easily shaken off and disregarded. There is only the quiet of what is—doors that don’t stay open, sounds only certain people hear, townfolk that refuse to talk about the house at all.
More than what’s happening in the physical space, I’m unnerved with what I see happening physiologically between characters, within characters. Don’t let yourself go there, I think more than once. Don’t believe that.
Hill House is an odd mansion, so many inward, windowless rooms, off-centered, purposely, by it’s mad-capped builder/original owner. And it’s got the kind of story a haunted house needs. Previous renters never stay the full length of their leases and it takes several conversations before they confess to Dr. Montague that the house should be burned and “the ground sowed with salt,” a sort of biblical confirmation of doneness.
Even when I understand where the novel is careening, I think maybe it’ll end differently. Maybe it’ll turn out that the groundskeepers are delighting in running off the wealthy inhabitants that try to make it home. Maybe there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.
At its simplest, The Haunting of Hill House is, indeed, about a haunting. It acknowledges, slightly-off-event by slightly-off-event, that hauntings cannot happen without the presence of certain vulnerabilities in people or in situations.
Perhaps that’s what was becoming too familiar in The Haunting of Hill House: the fine line between natural and supernatural. I woke, more than once, in the middle of a night—no familiar streetlights to orient me—just the wind giving hell to a branch outside. My thoughts tumbled to Jackson. I googled her obsessively in the dark from my little bed on my little phone in the middle of—have I mentioned?—nowhere, the window screen flapping. Am I smitten? Possessed?
It’s too late, of course, I’ve finished reading the novel and I can’t shake it. That woman, she knew what it meant to be haunted.
