How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession

Art historian Blackwell Baines (20 Masterpieces at Mount Stewart) offers a delightfully macabre history of the haunted house, beginning with what she pegs as the origins of the modern archetype—Horace Walpole’s neo-Gothic Strawberry Hill House, a “glimmering white miniature castle” boasting an atmosphere of “gloomth” (Walpole’s quirky “portmanteau of the words ‘gloom’ and ‘warmth’”) that inspired The Castle of Otranto, the first gothic novel. From there, the author surveys haunted houses in the U.S., Britain, and Japan. Part travelogue and part architectural history—with a dash of film criticism when Blackwell Baines reflects on the Amityville Horror house—the book offers plenty of thrills, from Henry VIII’s doomed wife Catherine Howard perpetually fleeing down the Haunted Hallway at Hampton Court to “a pallid woman desperate for a drink of water” at the appropriately named Chillingham Castle. Along the way, the author examines how popular spectral tropes, particularly of women and children, connect with Western understandings of domestic spaces as the private settings of “the most dramatic experiences of human existence”; spotlights how ghost stories evolve with changes in social awareness, such as the transformation of a ghost at Louisiana’s Myrtle Plantation from a French woman to an enslaved woman; and explores the myriad ways a building’s architectural vibes can generate a sense of haunting. It’s an entertaining expedition into eerie spaces. (Apr.)