“We are the stones of a living fabric.”

The High Priest of the Assembly of Dead Builder and Dead Victims in Grant Allen’s Wolverden Tower

Setting – Place

Currently without a tenant. An absurdly low rent. Servants who refuse to stay the night. A previous occupant who came to sticky end. These aren’t exactly the requirements of a haunted house, but ghost story writers repeatedly make use them in their tales. And appropriate names helps. If there were prizes for such things I’d give them to ‘Chillingsworth’, the inherited property in Gertrude Atherton’s The Bell in the Fog, ‘Pit End’, the hamlet in Amelia B. Edwards’ Was it an Illusion? and ‘Brickett Bottom’, the narrow glen in Amyas Northcote’s tale of the same name.

In the Gothic tradition hauntings went on mainly in abbeys with overgrown graveyards and castles with tall towers, but over years there’s been a bit of downsizing. The castle of Sir Walter Scott’s The Tapestried Chamber (1828) and the manor house of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s At Chrighton Abbey (1871) have given way to Ralph Adams Cram’s No. 252 Rue M. le Prince (1895) and O. Henry’s The Furnished Room (1904). By the Edwardian era the typical setting of a ghost tale was a rented property. You could even say that the haunted holiday-let is to E.F. Benson what the supernatural ancient artefact was to M.R. James. Think here of Home, Sweet Home, The Corner House, The Temple, The Gardener, The House with the Brick-Kiln and Roderick’s Story.

An important development in the ghost tale has been to make the haunted place not just background setting, but an active player in the tale, as in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and Stephen King’s The Shining (1977). Early examples of a house having some sort of human-like capability can be found in Edith Wharton’s 1910 tale Afterward, where the narrator says ‘the house knew’ and the library ‘could have borne witness’. Ellen Glasgow’s 1916 story The Shadowy Third is narrated by a very down to earth nurse, who has the vivid impression that ‘the old house was listening,’ a line picked up by Miss Osborne when she does a candle lit reading of that tale in ‘I Was Once a Haunted House’.

But the haunted place needn’t always be made of brick and mortar. There’s the ghost-on-the-road, as in Ambrose Bierce’s The Moonlit Road (1907), Richard Middleton’s On the Brighton Road (1912) and more recently Nicole D. Sconiers’ A Bird Sings By the Etching Tree (2023), which is one of the tales in Out There Screaming, Jordan Peele’s anthology of new horror stories by black writers. There’s also the Ann Bridge ghost tale The Buick Saloon (1931) where it’s the car that’s haunted. Nowadays your ghost can pretty much haunt anywhere they like and in Visiting Hattie it’s Adam and Calvin’s downstairs toilet. However, I have yet to find a ghost tale set in a nudist colony or a fish and chip shop in Scarborough or a ghost that haunts an air conditioning unit or condom. As to why this is the case, well, I’ll leave that to others to draw their own conclusions.