narrative essay about the haunted house

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Haunted house narrative writing. The house stood on the top of lonely hill. There was no chance of taking the way through roads. I had to take the shortcut.

13 Redwood Villa

It was cloudy and the first few specks of the rain were exploding on the dark gravel. I was in the park and I knew that I was going to get drenched if I didn’t make my way quickly from there. A major storm could be heard on the distance echoing through the silent night.

I had to reach there, as quickly as possible. Just a few moments ago, I had got the message from my friend, Lucy, to go there – 13 Redwood Villa. She had asked me to reach there by 7 pm and it was already half past six. Thunder clapped overhead and the clouds burst on the horizon.

The house stood on the top of lonely hill. There was no chance of taking the way through roads. I had to take the shortcut. “What shall I do”, I pondered over it the second and decided I’d go the hill way to the top. So, I moved forwards. It was dead chilling cold and the rain had made it even more difficult to walk. The cloud had obscured the moon in the dark night and the whole way filled with sense of anger and malice.

I took a deep breath of the cool night air and walked faster towards the house. My curiosity was already beyond its limits. Now, I was almost to the top. The flickering light of the house could be seen nearby.

Finally, I reached there – 13 Redwood Villa.

The house stood, 3 storeys high, with boarded up windows and a broken chimney, giving the house a menacing look. Its door had been boarded up too but you could easily push it open between the planks at the bottom.

“Am I sure this is the house”, I thought to myself. Lucy hadn’t told me about why she wanted to see me. I was not really excited now, not after the dreadful smell and the abandoned look the house gave. “Well, I couldn’t turn back now, after all I’ve come till here”. I was stuck between fear and excitement.

But at last, a crack of thunder, a flash of lightning and slowly I pushed the door open. The rusty hinges gave a scary creaking noise. I took one last look at the outside of that fearsome house. The rain was splashing down around me. And then I had ducked under the planks of wood and was inside, peering about in the darkness.

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As my eyes adjusted in the darkness, the room slowly came into the view, the long bare corridor with doors leading to unknown rooms. I then started even forwards. Suddenly I heard a squeak. I was totally daunted. And then I heard some footsteps as if someone was wandering around me.

My heart was accelerating. Thud, thud, thud... The rain was still pattering dismally on the window panes. Although petrified, I went to the door to see who it was. No one! I again heard the noise. I looked down. Thank god it was just a cat, an abandoned little black cat.

But its look was enough for me to give a fright. I had looked at the cat’s face in the gloom and I could see its dark hair, its perfect features and a ghastly eyes staring back at me. I slammed the door close and made a run. I could hear the cat meowing back as if trying to break inside. It all seemed stupid now. I should’ve never come to this house.

I was still running and just at the moment I saw a big door on the corner of the corridor. I went inside and entered a large bare room. It was all dark and smelled of sodden clothes and rotten fruits. Running through the side of the room I noticed a flight of stairs ahead of me. I could hear someone muttering on top of stairs.

Hurriedly, I ran up the stairs and reached the second floor. The windows upstairs were covered with large, black curtains which flapped along as the gust of wind rushed inside the windows. All the walls were covered with cobwebs. The floor creaked under my feet. That corridor had even more doors that led to unknown rooms. And I could still hear the voices.

Just then I saw someone hurrying inside one of the doors. It might have been the same person of whom I had heard footsteps of. I was shocked and shivered with frightfulness. “Who else could be inside? Was it Lucy?” I decided to follow the person. But the dim light of the moon flickered and the person darted away. I missed. That must have been my imagination.

Slowly I entered the room standing just behind me. That room was such a mess, as if someone had torn it apart in rage. All the things were tipped over on the floor. Through the bars of windows I could see the sky slowly clearing up. I looked at my watch. It was already ten to seven.

I still hadn’t seen Lucy yet. “If this was her trick to scare me then I would’ve never forgiven her, but what if she wasn’t playing a trick. She should’ve been here by now!”

I left the room and marched towards another room, and another. Through more doors and up another staircase and I realised I was totally lost. I swore I was. But I knew I was now on the topmost floor.

As I stood there, stiff, I heard the owl hooting and outside and also the rustling of leaves. But beneath all the noise, was the terrible silence that overpowered every other sound.

The voices were getting louder.

I checked through almost all of the rooms until I was really exhausted. I paused for a second and went towards the windows. I needed fresh air. Outside the windows I could see the whole city as dead as doornail. There was no trace of any sound, not even a single muttering or laugh. I again turned towards the corridors. I only had two more rooms to check.  

I stepped up to one door and slowly reached for the handle. Just as I was about to enter inside, a group of bats hovered outside from the room. That was scary. I screamed with terror. I closed my eyes and ducked down until every bat had flown away. Luckily it was all quiet again.

Hastily I grabbed out the torchlight from my pocket and set it alight. In the flashlight I saw a puddle of liquid on the floor. Drops were splashing into it. “Was that a blood?” I frowned.

As I looked up, I saw a large chunk of wood that had fallen out of the ceiling. The rain was seeping into through the crack. I sighed with relief. The puddle on floor was just a rain, not the blood.

Just then I noticed some white thing on the floor. I focused the light on the floor. The light shone vividly at a large pair of sharp fangs. My head snapped up. I tried to scream but no sound came up. I stumbled back, clutched my stomach and fell over on the floor. I was unable to rip my eyes away from the sight. It couldn’t have been a real Dracula!

Startlingly, I crawled forward to touch the fangs. It came off onto my hand. It was just a fake pair of fangs. I was confused for a moment. Was it any trick!

It was now already five past seven and I was still wandering around the house. I still had to check in through one more room. The door stood on the farthest corner of the corridor. It looked creaky and intimidating. The illusion made it look even more sinister. Standing there, watching the quiet patience of the door, I knew it was more than a fright inside. I knew something was there. Not evil or malicious, simply dangerous!

The muttering voices were now gone. The whole house stood dead quiet. The only thing I could now hear was my own breath. Through the windows, the pale light of the moon shone beneath the dark deep clouds. Everything seemed so ghastly and unrealistic. I got up and slowly made my way towards the final door. My knees were now too weak, I had to bend and walk.

Lastly, I reached it. I grabbed the door handle and pushed myself inwards.

Oh my God! The room was so dark and so creepy. No windows, no light, nothing! I stood there in the silent darkness for a moment, holding my breath. I knew there was something hidden behind this darkness. I was now too much scared. So, I started backing away. Suddenly, something touched my back. I swore it was a human hand. “I must run away”. All these creepiness was now too much for me to bear.

But a noise behind me made me stop. I turned around slowly and tried to adjust my eyes in the darkness. Bare feet hit the floor loudly as I heard someone running towards me. “Hello, who’s there”, I shrieked with fear.

Silence! But suddenly the lights flicked open and the balloons popped out. I saw all the faces I knew. Before I could even realise anything, everyone shouted “Happy Birthday, James!”

English coursework                               Asmita Dhakal         Page  of 4

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• Word Count 1578
• Page Count 5
• Subject English

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A Night in a Haunted House: An Eerie Experience

Table of contents, the haunting atmosphere, unsettling encounters, confronting fear, a morning of reflection.

• Radford, B. (2014). The Science of Ghosts: Searching for Spirits of the Dead . Prometheus Books.
• McAndrew, F. T. (2016). Parsimonious Psychics and Psychological Profiling . Skeptical Inquirer, 40(6), 10-11.
• Braude, S. E. (2019). Thirteen Unpredictable Synchronicities: The Challenges of Studying an Evolving Phenomenon . Journal of Scientific Exploration, 33(4), 611-634.
• Houran, J. (2015). Assessing Haunted Places: A Review of Methods and Measures . Journal of Parapsychology, 79(2), 187-207.
• Carroll, R. T. (2003). The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions . John Wiley & Sons.

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Essay on A Haunted House

Students are often asked to write an essay on A Haunted House in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on A Haunted House

What is a haunted house.

A haunted house is a place where ghosts or spirits are believed to live. These houses often have a scary and eerie feeling. People say they hear strange sounds, see odd things, or feel a spooky presence in these houses. These experiences make them believe that the house is haunted.

Stories about Haunted Houses

Many stories are told about haunted houses. Some are from books or movies, while others are shared by people who claim to have experienced it. These stories often involve ghosts, strange noises, moving objects, and other unexplained events.

Why are Houses Said to be Haunted?

Houses are said to be haunted for many reasons. Sometimes, it’s because something sad or scary happened there, like a death or a crime. Other times, it’s because the house is old and makes strange sounds. People’s imaginations can make them think a house is haunted.

Visiting a Haunted House

Visiting a haunted house can be scary but exciting. Some people do it for fun, especially during Halloween. Others do it to try and see if ghosts are real. But remember, it’s always important to respect others’ property and feelings.

250 Words Essay on A Haunted House

Appearance of a haunted house.

Haunted houses often look old and empty. They may have broken windows, an old rusty gate, and a garden full of dead plants. At night, these houses might seem even scarier with the moonlight casting long, dark shadows.

There are many stories about haunted houses. Some people say they have heard strange sounds, like footsteps or whispers. Others tell of doors opening and closing on their own. Some even claim to have seen ghosts!

Haunted Houses in Movies

Haunted houses are popular in movies and TV shows. They make the story exciting and scary. The characters in these stories often have to face their fears and find out the truth about the ghosts.

Visiting a haunted house can be a fun adventure, especially during Halloween. Some people like the thrill of being scared. But remember, it’s all just for fun. Ghosts and haunted houses are more a part of stories and our imagination than real life.

In the end, haunted houses are interesting because of the mystery they hold. They make us wonder about what might be living beyond what we can see. But it’s always important to remember that it’s just a story, and there’s no need to be too scared.

500 Words Essay on A Haunted House

The idea of a haunted house.

Haunted houses often look scary from the outside. They are usually old and in bad condition. The paint might be peeling off and the windows might be broken. The gardens around the house are often overgrown and unkempt. This creates a feeling of fear and unease. At night, these houses can look even more frightening because of the dark shadows and strange noises.

Inside a Haunted House

Inside a haunted house, things can be even more eerie. The rooms are often dark and filled with old, dusty furniture. Cobwebs hang from the corners and the air is heavy and cold. Some people say they can feel the presence of spirits when they enter these rooms. Strange things can happen in a haunted house. Objects might move on their own or doors might slam shut. People have also reported hearing strange noises like whispers or footsteps when no one else is around.

Stories About Haunted Houses

Visiting a haunted house can be a thrilling experience. Some people go to haunted houses for fun, especially around Halloween. There are also professional ghost hunters who visit haunted houses to try and capture evidence of the paranormal. They use special tools like voice recorders and cameras to try and capture the spirits on tape.

Haunted houses are a part of many cultures around the world. They are a source of fear, curiosity, and excitement. Whether or not you believe in ghosts, the idea of a haunted house can still give you a chill. It’s a reminder of the mystery and unknown that still exists in our world.

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A Life in Haunted Houses

"these are the ghosts whispering in the walls of my haunted house book.".

“Every town has a haunted house.” This is the thesis statement of my new novel, Killer House Party . And I believe it to be true. Not that every town has a house with ghosts, but that every town has a house that is haunted. A house that is infamous or legendary. It evokes a very human fear of the unknown, an abyss that–if it catches your gaze–you may never look away from.

A haunted house is a folktale. Its retelling defines a place. You can find a city/town/neighborhood’s deepest fears in the story of its haunted house. Maybe it’s the betrayal of the safety we expect from a home. Or the suffocation of being pinned down to one place. What is the house keeping out? What is it keeping in?

Writing a novel about such a well trod trope means being in conversation with every haunted house you’ve ever come across. A haunted house symbolizes different things to different people. A haunted house is only ever a symbol.

These are the houses that haunted me, in fiction and in life. These are the ghosts whispering in the walls of my haunted house book.

Haunted House by Jan Pieńkowski

Jan Pieńkowski’s Haunted House (1979) was my first scary story, the foundation of what I came to understand as the horror genre. The book itself appeared in my life with no origin. There was no loving inscription on the first page nor eager cousin watching, waiting for my reaction. In my memory, I read it hiding on the side of a couch with black and white Beetlejuice stripes, heart in my throat.

The front cover is the front door (or vice versa, the front door is the front cover), making the act of opening the book a kind of breaking and entering. The prose is in second person, the text casting the reader as a doctor who has been invited into a house of horrors. Eyes follow you from behind paintings. Slime drips down the stairs. The house is full of animals, monsters, and an alien crashes through the bathroom wall. And at the end, you cannot leave . There’s no denouement. No “whew, it was all a dream.” The last thing you hear is your patient screaming for you while you’re trapped in the attic with a huge bat and a box from Transylvania being sawed open from the inside. (Here, the pop up aspect of the book becomes auditory, as the saw truly grinds against the heavy paper box). Closing the book, you find the door has been nailed shut, trapping you inside the story forever.

Welcome to Dead House (Goosebumps #1) by R.L. Stine

Creating this list is sort of like carbon dating myself. One can look at the pop culture markers of my life and probably guess my age within a year. (Feel free to play along at home! Check my wikipedia to see if you’re correct.)

Goosebumps books to me were pure junk food. (I say this with all due respect to Mr. Stine as someone who also tries to write fun, scary books best read in one sitting.) Welcome to Dead House (1992) does what all great middle grade novels must and creates a world in which the children are right from the start and the adults are stodgy, stuck in their ways, and wrong.

Josh and Amanda’s family have inherited a creepy old house from a relative no one’s ever heard of. It’s old. It’s brick. It’s definitely haunted. Every new person they meet has the same name as someone in the town cemetery. Nothing weird here! Enjoy your free mansion! Dead House doesn’t have the silly sense of humor typical of Goosebumps, making it feel more sinister like Stine’s Fear Street books for older readers. Josh and Amanda’s dog is murdered. The town is full of ghouls in need of a human sacrifice. And, in the end, as the heroes are getting away, they see another family being brought in to take their place and they do nothing to stop it. Horrifying.

The Winchester Mystery House

Ah, the Winchester Mystery House. Notable to any Northern California resident for its Grim Reaper billboards (now sanitized to be less threatening). Recognizable outside of the 100 mile advertising radius because of a Helen Mirren film about the mansion’s spooky origin.

The Winchester House, as a concept, is a great haunted house story. Sarah Winchester married into a family of gun magnates and was so haunted by everyone their company’s products had killed that she built a big ass mazelike mansion (then called Llanada Villa) in San Jose, California to hide from the ghosts. The house had thousands of short stairs, some leading straight into the ceiling. It had over a hundred small rooms. The front half of the house was boarded up, even while the rest was still being constructed.

Except. Well. Anyone who has been tricked into taking the tour of the house can tell you that the answer to most things is that Sarah Winchester was a very rich, very infirm little old lady who built her house in a place with a lot of earthquakes. The many tiny stairs were due to her debilitating arthritis. Part of the house was boarded up because of earthquake damage. Using the house to confuse ghosts wanting to take revenge against her family? It wasn’t even the only house she lived in–she also had a houseboat.

Haunted houses are always less interesting when they are explicable.

The Zodiac Shack

What is a haunted house but a place where a Bad Thing happened? In my hometown of Vacaville, California the local Bad Thing was the Zodiac Killer. (Our state mental hospital also housed Charles Manson. David Fincher was obsessed with us for a few years.) Inactive for twenty years before my birth, the Zodiac Killer was known for killing women and couples in isolated areas of Solano County and then sending ciphers to the local newspapers about it. In my childhood, the name would just get thrown around, associated with otherwise innocuous locations. The lake. The park at the top of a hill.

The so-called “zodiac shack” was a house and a barn out on a country road. There were stories about how the Zodiac Killer brought victims there or stored their bodies. It was haunted. It was terrifying. It was titillating. It was a local legend with no basis in fact. The shack (and the barn) were remnants of a local well-off family’s farmhouse, abandoned in the early 20th century. There’s no evidence that the Zodiac Killer ever set foot there.

I’m no true crime girlie and this is the only haunted place on my list that I’ve never seen or been to. I drove past it once, flying in a friend’s mom’s convertible in the middle of the night. “That’s the Zodiac Shack,” he said. To me, it was just part of the darkness of the landscape.

Shirley Jackson Trio: The Haunting of Hill House/The Sundial/We Have Always Lived in the Castle

No one writes a haunting quite like Shirley Jackson. Perhaps it’s because no one understands the act of haunting their own house better than an agoraphobic (she says, from experience). The houses in Jackson’s books (Hill House, Halloran House, the Blackwood Family Estate) are all truly haunted by the same thing as every house in the world: a family. The house is the site of all a family’s woes, their secrets and peculiarities, the things they hide from the outside world. The house is the only witness to the horrors a family perpetrates against each other: the poisoning of the sugar bowl, the push down the stairs, the grief of an orphan who does not miss her abusive parent.

Within the house’s walls, a family is an organism that imprints itself on every room even after death. Every house keeps impressions of those who lived inside it before. The floor under the carpet. The handprint in the cement. The ghost in the attic. Echoes and reminders.

Every house is a haunted house.

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Home — Essay Samples — Geography & Travel — Haunted House — Descriptive Paper On A Haunted House

Descriptive Paper on a Haunted House

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Published: Jun 6, 2024

Words: 644 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

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A Haunted House

Waters: The Little Stranger

In this course, Professor Lucie Armitt (University of Lincoln) explores Sarah Waters’ 2009 novel, the Little Stranger. We begin by thinking about the novel as a haunted house narrative, focusing in particular on what, if anything, the house is actually haunted by. After that, we think about the social and political reforms that were at work in the mid- to late 1940s, the period in which the novel is set, and the ways in which the reflects on these changes, before turning in the third module to the representation of children in the novel. In the fourth module, we provide a close reading of the scene in chapter five in which Roderick encounters the ghost, before moving on in the fifth module to think about the representation of communications technology in the novel – particularly the telephone and the speaking tube. Finally, in the sixth module, we focus on the narrator of the novel, Dr Faraday: is he as trustworthy and impartial as he would like us to believe?

In this module, we think about The Little Stranger as a haunted house narrative, focusing in particular on: (i) what Hundreds Hall is actually haunted by – if anything; (ii) the gothic genre and the idea of the decoy narrative, i.e. telling one story as a way of avoiding another; (iii) the conventions of the ghost story, especially the figure of the narrator, and the ways in which Dr Faraday conforms to and subverts these conventions; and (iv) the concept of the uncanny – popularised by Freud in his 1919 essay, ‘Das Unheimliche’ – and the importance of the home in the novel.

Cite this Lecture

Armitt, L. (2019, October 07). Waters: The Little Stranger - A Haunted House [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/waters-the-little-stranger

Armitt, L. "Waters: The Little Stranger – A Haunted House." MASSOLIT , uploaded by MASSOLIT, 07 Oct 2019, https://massolit.io/courses/waters-the-little-stranger

Prof. Lucie Armitt

Lincoln University

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A Haunted House

Virginia woolf.

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A Summary and Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Haunted House’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘A Haunted House’, by Virginia Woolf, both is and is not a ghost story. In less than two pages of prose, Woolf explores, summons, and subverts the conventions of the ghost story, offering a modernist take on the genre. ‘A Haunted House’, which first appeared in Woolf’s 1921 short-story collection Monday or Tuesday , can be read here .

‘A Haunted House’ is at once easy and difficult to summarise; how we analyse the story depends on which aspects we emphasise. In summary, the narrator describes the house where she and her partner live. Whenever you wake in the house, you hear noises: a door shutting, and the sound of a ‘ghostly couple’ wandering from room to room in the house. The narrator (whom we can assume, tentatively, is female) claims to be able to hear this ghostly couple talking to each other. It’s clear they’re looking for something:

‘Here we left it,’ she said. And he added, ‘Oh, but here too!’ ‘It’s upstairs,’ she murmured. ‘And in the garden,’ he whispered. ‘Quietly,’ they said, ‘or we shall wake them.’

Next, the narrator describes reading a book outside while hearing the ghostly couple, in the background, hunting for this mysterious thing around the house. But as soon as she drops the book and goes to look for them, there is no sign of the ghostly pair – just the sound of the wood pigeons and the threshing machine.

The narrator confides that you could never see the ghosts, just reflections of apples and leaves in the sunlit windows. The house itself seems to be speaking, saying something about buried treasure. The light is fading, and the rooms are darkened. The narrator imagines the male ghost leaving the female one behind for some reason. It is now night-time, and the ghostly coupling continue to ‘seek their joy’. They appear to reminisce over the bed (where the living, present-day couple now sleep) where they once slept, centuries ago.

The narrator then imagines the ghostly couple standing over her as she sleeps, and, holding a lamp over the bed of the living couple, the ghosts pause, still seeking ‘their hidden joy’. Then, the narrator wakes up and feels that she has solved the mystery, and now understands what this ‘buried treasure’ is what the ghostly couple have been seeking: ‘the light in the heart’.

‘A Haunted House’ seems to be Woolf’s attempt to convey the feeling of sensing something just on the edge of hearing or sight: something you cannot see head-on but which you sense in the house with you, just on the periphery of your vision. We can probably all relate to the experience of being alone in a house and feeling that every creak, every hum, every far-off sound betokens something – a ghost, or an intruder, for instance.

Woolf’s story seeks to encapsulate that experience. That title, ‘A Haunted House’, is ripe with potential irony. And it is only ‘potential’ – for all we know, there may have been a ghostly couple in the house with the story’s narrator.

But it’s suggestive that the narrator seems most attuned to the presence of the ‘ghosts’ when she’s in states of semi-consciousness or her mind is somewhere else: just waking up, or engrossed in a book, for instance. Consider the very first sentence of the story: ‘Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting.’

Three things suggest themselves here, at least. First, the use of the second-person pronoun ‘you’ attempts to involve us in the narrator’s experiences, as if to suggest that we have all felt something similar to this, things on the margins of our conscious experience. Second, the fact that she begins by talking about just waking from sleep – something that will come again at the end of the story – suggests waking from a dream.

Third, the fact that she mentions waking at any hour is indicative of someone who might fall asleep at any moment – someone who daydreams in the most literal sense, falling asleep during daytime, and therefore (arguably) more prone to confusing dreams with reality.

‘A Haunted House’ might be described as a short story – and, in one way, as a ghost story – but its language is almost that of a prose-poem. The rhythmical prose beats like a heart with the repeated refrain: ‘“Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat softly.’ This mantra reappears later, with ‘softly’ changed to ‘gladly’, and then again in the final paragraph as the couple are reunited, with the adverb changed to ‘proudly’ and ‘pulse’ upped to ‘heart’ – and, suggestively, the tense shifted from past to present, as ‘beat’ morphs into ‘beats’:

‘Safe, safe, safe,’ the heart of the house beats proudly. ‘Long years—’ he sighs. ‘Again you found me.’ ‘Here,’ she murmurs, ‘sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure—’ Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. ‘Safe! safe! safe!’ the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry ‘Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.’

Was it all a dream? The pulsing sound that beats through the prose in its almost poetic rhythms could almost suggest the quickening heartbeat of the narrator as s/he awakes. The accumulation of active present participles, of ‘sleeping’, ‘reading’, ‘laughing’, ‘rolling’, and ‘stooping’, only intensifies the here-and-now of the moment being crystallised in prose.

That final phrase, ‘The light in the heart’, looks back to the use of both ‘heart’ and ‘light’ earlier in the same paragraph. Woolf’s ‘story’ positions itself neatly between dream-vision and ghost story, reinventing both using the new style of modernism and that movement’s interest in shifting tense and perspective. As with much modernist fiction, perception, rather than objective reality, is foregrounded.

In an essay on Henry James’s ghost stories, published in 1921 – the same year as ‘A Haunted House’ – Virginia Woolf called for new writers to find fresh and original ways of arousing fear and terror in readers of ghost stories:

To admit that the supernatural was used for the last time by Mrs. Radcliffe and that modern nerves are immune from the wonder and terror which ghosts have always inspired would be to throw up the sponge too easily. If the old methods are obsolete, it is the business of a writer to discover new ones. The public can feel again what it has once felt—there can be no doubt about that; only from time to time the point of attack must be changed.

Woolf sought to do this with ‘A Haunted House’, a story which is both a ghost story and a riposte to, or analysis of, the conventional ghostly tale. But, given that final phrase, ‘The light in the heart’, it is also a love story, and – given its relative plotlessness, its brevity, and its prose-poetry style – barely a ‘story’ at all.

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4 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Haunted House’”

I hadn’t read this before and thought when it started that it was going to be the narrator herself taking on a male and female persona and looking for love. Because it seems like to me if she only hears them when she wakes or when she’s reading that they only exist in her mind and not in “reality.”

Reblogged this on Greek Canadian Literature .

Oh, this is definitely going on my TBR list. Thanks! I wonder that she suggests Radcliffe, rather than Poe, as the last “supernatural” horror writer, though. I suppose didn’t much go in for ghosts, per se, but it still seems an odd oversight.

I loved this story. I discovered it last year and read it several times, then featured it on my blog as well. I had never read a ghostly story like this before and it truly stands out. One of the lines that has remained with me was ‘Death was the glass; death was between us …’ Love the brevity of the story too—kind of like being given a private glance into the other side of reality.

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3 People Share Their Real Haunted House Experiences

For many people in the US, owning a home is the American dream. But what if that dream starts to sour and becomes a nightmare? Sure, a dream home could be a money pit that requires a steady stream of constant upgrades and expensive fixes that were never indicated in the original listing. However, there’s another way in which owning a home can turn into a frightening experience—when the house is haunted.

Haunted houses, in scary movies and books at least, tend to come with a slew of the same spooky elements. These are places where lights flicker, barely audible disembodied voices are heard, and items seemingly move by themselves. The haunted house itself might be a large old Victorian enveloped in fog, a remote farmhouse with creaky floors and neighbors many miles away, or even a more modern house in the suburbs if it happens to be built on a forgotten graveyard. Whatever the house style, though, the home typically has a history of violence and weird goings-on.

But what’s it like living in a truly haunted house in real life? And why would anyone want to share their home with ghostly roommates? More often than not, the people we talked to never expected that the beautiful home they just bought would be inhabited by ghosts. For these homeowners, their experiences varied widely, and not every apparition had bad intentions. One presence has even been described as warm and inviting.

The historic plaque for Demarest-Lyle House in Tenafly, New Jersey.

Unfortunately, for Violette de Ayala and Stephen Sproul—designer enthusiasts and historic preservationists who share their love of old homes on @oldhouseaddiction —their ghost wasn’t friendly like Casper. At the time, the couple owned a design-build business and had always been drawn to historic homes. So in 2004 they bought a Victorian mansion built in the 1880s in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the historic Oakwood neighborhood, after feeling like the home was quite literally calling to them. Located about four houses down from the governor’s mansion, it came with all you’d expect from a grand, old home: crown molding, tall ceilings, solid wood doors, and six fireplaces. “The home had a gentlemen’s parlor, a women’s lounge, and a rose garden,” adds de Ayala. “And the dining room still had a chandelier that utilized both gas and electricity.”

The couple fell in love with the abode and were eager to start renovating it, hoping to flip the house . “When we bought the home, we moved right in,” de Ayala says. The rooms were livable if a bit drafty, but that didn’t matter, as the couple got the home at a good price: Many of the rooms were already renovated—apparently the immediate prior owners had begun construction but suddenly changed their minds. In hindsight, it was a red flag, but at the time, the pair shrugged their shoulders and set to work, thinking they could renovate the building room by room.

It wasn’t until a few months in that Sproul and de Ayala realized something was off. Apparently, the couple could feel a presence in the house; it always felt like they were being watched. “It felt very eerie unless we had people over, and the home seemed the happiest when we had 200 friends celebrating life and holidays,” de Ayala says. At first, only small things out of the ordinary would happen, like the coffee maker would slide off the table by itself, or the security system would go off for no reason. “We always felt like it was the ghosts playing with us and sounding off the alarms for fun,” she adds.

The biggest confirmation of a malevolent presence happened one day when the couple was downstairs. “We were in the kitchen and we heard a really loud smash upstairs, so I went to look in our bathroom,” she recalls. “I found that our heavy wall mirror had not just fallen off the wall, it had flown across the bathroom. But it didn’t shatter, it was like it made the sound. And there was no way it could have flown all the way across the room without breaking.”

Not long afterwards, the couple wanted out of the house. “It was a fire sale,” de Ayala laughs. “I don’t think we stood a chance. I think the presence that was in there was unhappy from the beginning, knowing our intentions were financial. We did bring the house back to life beauty-wise, but it was still unhappy.” Looking back, she now believes that the ghost evicted the immediate owners before them because they also wanted to flip the home. “I think the presence made it unbearable for them, so they just left in the middle of construction,” de Ayala adds.

The whole ordeal was so traumatizing that it took de Ayala and Sproul 15 years to even start thinking about buying another house. (They eventually purchased a 100-year-old home in Miami.) “I had a lot of my spiritual friends stop by to look at the house before we bought it,” de Ayala says. “We just wanted to make sure the house was clean before settling on it.”

Lyle Lounge is named after the original owners of the house.

It’s not uncommon for new homeowners to check if a house they’re interested in is haunted. In addition to being the principal at Stellar Public Relations, Brenda Christensen is a psychic and used to own a spiritual bookstore in Los Angeles. While occupying the space, she gave readings and cleared haunted houses for a number of rich and famous clients in Calabasas, California. Christensen would use her tarot deck as a radio to tap into different “spiritual frequencies,” which eventually led to customers asking if she could clear a house from ghosts/spirits. “Word would just get around that I could perform these services, and before I knew it I would clear out mansions of strange energy,” she explains. “More homes than you think have these sorts of problems.”

In fact, Christensen was dealing with her own ghost problems while living in a beautiful custom-built home located right on Santa Monica beach. While she loved the Tudor-inspired style complete with lovely, exposed beams, almost immediately she began experiencing supernatural issues, like things mysteriously breaking without any explanation and random items moving to areas that she hadn’t originally placed them at. “I had a 100-gallon solar water heater that just exploded one day,” she recalls. Christensen sensed there was an energy in the home, so she started clearing the house with the help of some of her medium friends. “Even psychics need help sometimes and call in for assistance in removing an unwanted presence,” she notes.

It wasn’t until sometime later when Christensen became friends with another shop owner who had a friend familiar with the home’s original owners that she found out someone had committed suicide from the rafters in her primary bedroom. “It may explain the presence,” she insists. “A ghost can set up residence in a home when someone in the house dies tragically or they don’t know they’re dead.” At the same time, hauntings aren’t always so…dramatic. You might begin to suspect a home is haunted when subtle but bad things unfold. “These can be subtle, like sudden fighting or stress in the family. This is oftentimes the result of the negative spirit,” she explains. “Like all of a sudden the family will experience plenty of discord among family members, financial problems, or a string of bad luck.”

Not every haunting has bad intentions or is mean-spirited though. For Jon Krieger, owner and founder of Spring House , his ghost proved to be a friendly one. The restaurant is housed in the 230-year-old historic Demarest-Lyle House residence, the oldest house in Tenafly, New Jersey, and it’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Before becoming a restaurant, the home used to operate as a day care center. “The moms whose kids attended it would come in and ask if we had ever seen ‘her,’ i.e. the ghost,” he says. “All the kids used to talk to her, but it looked like they were talking to the air. Shortly after finding this out, we all started experiencing something.”

For example, wait staff and guests started feeling a strong but positive feeling coming from the stairs. “This feeling would just fill the space and almost make you smile,” he explains. “There’s one room especially that if you sit there and talk about this feeling or the ghost, the lights start to flicker.” Even so, none of these occurrences are unwelcome—in fact, they’re far from it. Spring House customers regularly comment on their experience inside the building, sharing how warm and welcoming it always feels. “Hauntings usually have such a negative connotation, but this one is very celebratory,” Krieger insists. “The presence seems to be most active on Thursday after sundown. We have a cocktail lounge called the Lyle Lounge and a second dining area upstairs.” Guests can ask to be seated in these spaces if they are interested in experiencing the presence too.

Wanting to locate some old images of the house, Krieger dug into the town archives and discovered the original owners were John and Julia Lyle—the same first names of the house’s new owners, as it turns out. “Julia had a reputation of hosting wonderful gatherings, apparently,” says Krieger, who believes he is carrying on this tradition of welcoming guests into the abode. “It’s part of why we have been so intentional with every single detail,” he says. “You really must be respectful to the process of carrying on the original owners’ intention with the house for the sake of their prior residents who may still be ‘living’ here.”