Over a hundred pieces. Stairs that lead nowhere. A maze of empty corridors. The strange Winchester House was one of the first haunted houses to attract tourists looking for chilling thrills.
In 1922, the new owners of the late Sarah Winchester’s mansion made this San Jose, California, home an attraction for foreign tourists. Heir to the fortune of the famous arms manufacturer of the same name, Sarah Winchester, during her lifetime had a propensity to constantly expand and renovate her mansion, which sparked a torrent of rumors. She added complicated rooms (more than a hundred), stairs that led nowhere, and corridors that made the house a confusing maze.
The mansion partly inspired the novel The Haunted House by Shirley Jackson, a classic of horror literature published in the United States in 1959.
Even today, Shirley Jackson’s novel continues to inspire the haunted house tourism sector, which also includes many other evocatively cursed places open to visitors.
The Heritage Of Hill House
In the preface to her best-selling book, Shirley Jackson admits that the idea for her chilling story was inspired by a real investigation by the Society for Psychic Research (SPR) carried out in 1897. This London company, which still exists, founded a Haunted Houses Committee and sent dubious medium Ada Goodrich-Freer to investigate allegations that Ballechin House, a Scottish residence, was haunted.
The book recounting the investigation, having received aristocratic support from the Marquis de Bute, caused a stir in the literary pages of the Times, and many condemned the naivety of the investigators.
Also inspired by Shirley Jackson’s novel, the 1973 film House of the Damned shows the angular and baroque details of Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire. This palace was built by the architect and playwright Sir John Vanbrugh for the Duke of Marlborough, a British hero who won a famous victory at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. This majestic residence saw the birth of the Duke’s most famous descendant, another war hero who is none other than Winston Churchill.
For the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, released in 2018 and loosely adapted from the novel, director Mike Flanagan used the gothic exteriors of Bisham Manor in Lagrange, Georgia. Although built less than thirty years ago, this privately owned mansion looks very gothic.
Vampire lairs and other Gothic places
To attract fans of gothic novels and more adventurous haunted houses, Bran Castle in Transylvania claims to have inspired the menacing incipit of Dracula, a novel by Bram Stoker published in 1897. The latter had never visited Romania, but he built the vampire’s lair from travel guides, conversations with his brother who had stayed in the Balkans, and thanks to his feverish imagination.
The Gothic exploits and re-exploits this anxiety endlessly; he tries to consolidate a cozy and familiar feeling while the inhospitable is constantly lurking in the shadows of dusty rooms, in the creaking of steps, or along the perspectives of empty corridors.
Mark