Haunted Homes

Haunted Homes is a short but groundbreaking study of homes in horror film and television. While haunted houses can be fun and thrilling, Hollywood horror tends to focus on haunted homes, places where the suburban American dream of safety and comfort has turned into a nightmare. From classic movies like The Old Dark House to contemporary works like Hereditary and the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, Dahlia Schweitzer explores why haunted homes have become a prime stage for dramatizing anxieties about family, gender, race, and economic collapse. She traces how the haunted home film was intertwined with the expansion of American suburbia, but also explores works like The Witch and The Babadook, which transport the genre to different times and places. This lively and readable study reveals how and why an increasing number of films imagine that home is where the horror is. Watch a video of the author discussing the topic Haunted Homes (https://youtu.be/_irTEfvtZfQ).

“When I was between the ages of five and eight, my sister and I slept in a large attic bedroom. At nightfall the room was filled with gypsies who glided around in clusters. They wore colorful thin flowing dresses and rummaged greedily through my drawers and books as if they would steal everything. I lay in bed as stiff as a board, trying to will myself invisible, praying they would not notice me looking . . . Daylight obliterated the gypsies, rendering them as thoroughly insubstantial as they had been real in the dark. I had a vague understanding that my vision was private, so I never told my family what I saw.” So began Corinne May Botz’s fascination with the invisible, a phenomenon that has profoundly influenced her approach to photography in style and subject matter. For more than ten years, she searched for ghost stories in buildings across the United States. She ventured into these haunted places with both camera and tape recorder in hand; her photographs, accompanied by first-person narratives, reveal a rare glimpse into American interiors, both physical and psychological. This book includes more than eighty haunted buildings, from the legendary to the ordinary, including Edgar Allan Poe’s house in Baltimore, a New Jersey tavern, and a Massachusetts farmhouse, a log cabin in Kentucky, and a number of private residences. The text includes ghost stories told to the author by those who lived through the moving rugs, creaking floors, apparitions, disappearing—and reappearing—objects, cries in the night, mysteriously burning candles, and other unexplained occurrences.

Expanded and with great new stories, this is the biggest and best anthology of ghostly hauntings ever. Over 40 tales of visitation by the undead - from vengeful and violent spirits, set on causing harm to innocent people tucked up in their homes, to rarer and more kindly ghosts, returning from the grave to reach out across the other side. Yet others entertain desires of a more sinister bent, including the erotic. This new edition includes a selection of favourite haunted house tales chosen by famous screen stars Boris Karloff, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Plus a top ranking list of contributors that includes Stephen King, Bram Stoker, Ruth Rendell, and James Herbert - all brought together by an anthologist who himself lives in a haunted house. Stories include: Something unspeakable lurks in a Connecticut apartment closet, in Stephen King's 'The Boogeyman'; An Irish castle holds something truly horrifying in wait, in 'The Whistling Room' by William Hope Hodgson; The lecherous old ghost of a Georgian country house eyes up his latest tenant, in Norah Lofts' 'Mr Edward'; An ancient mansion on a shelf of rock previously occupied by a doomed castle, in 'In Letters of Fire' by Gaston Le Roux; The hunter is hunted in James Herbert's tale of nineteenth-century country mansion, 'The Ghost Hunter'; Psychic phenomena and poltergeists, avenging spirits and phantom lovers - curl up and read on, but never imagine you are safe from a visit...

Examines the origins of superstitions about the creepy creatures that haunt haunted houses, such as ghosts, poltergeists, and the night mare.

This edition of House of Spirits and Whispers features a new preface from the author, photographs, and bonus material We had been instructed to enter by the back door. That's the part of the house where the old man had lived. It was where he still lived. Turns out he was watching us that day, too, silent and heavy as the air, bound to the earth and his former home.We had been instructed to enter by the back door. In 1994, Annie Wilder and her children moved into a 100-year-old house in a historic Mississippi River town. Beautiful but spooky, the house had been on the market for six months with no offers. It felt like-and proved to be-a very haunted house. Essentially the story of a remarkable old Victorian house that seems to be a threshold to the spirit world and the astral realm, House of Spirits and Whispers has a backstory of the Wilder family's relationship with the ghost of the home's previous owner, an old man named Leon. Covering a decade's worth of ghostly activity and supernatural encounters, from whispering radiators to visits and appearances from all manner of spirits and entities, this unusual story is the true account of Annie Wilder's experiences living in a haunted house.

This is a book of ghost stories, and for the most part, ghosts are jealous monsters, intent upon our destruction. They never appear overtly here, yet we gradually become aware of their presence the way spirits in haunted houses trod over creaky floors, slam doors, and issue sudden gusts of wind. The poems are Koan-like—the fewer the words, the more charged they are. The engine driving this sense of haunting and loss is money, which Davis describes as “federal bone” boiling around us. Bison in Nebraska are reduced to bones, “seven/standing men/tall” fodder for the fertilizer used by farmers in the 1800s. Though they often specify dates, there’s an equality to the hauntings—every instance has its moment, and persists, despite being in the past, present, or future. If there really was a 1980 or 1848 or 1499, Davis implies it is somewhere. Index of Haunted Houses is spooky and sad—a stunning debut, one that will surprise, convince, and most of all, delight.

Ghostwriters Nancy Roberts and Taryn Plumb spin fascinating tales about 26 haunted houses all over America. Based on stories told by first-hand witnesses, these stories of ghostly goings-on will keep you on the edge of your seat—and possibly up all night! Read about San Diego’s Whaley House, whose former residents maintain an active presence, as does Yankee Jim, a hanging victim over whose gallows the house was built. Learn about the house in Massachusetts that once belonged to eccentric millionaire and brilliant inventor John Hammond, Jr.—whose practice in spiritualism, say some, continues long after his death. And relive the terrifying battle that claimed the lives of 1,700 Confederate soldiers whose battlefield became their final resting place on Tennessee’s Carnton Plantation.

Rich in history and steeped in blue-collar values, Marion, Ohio, is much like any midwestern city, aside from its abundance of ghouls and unexplained phenomena. From well-known landmarks like the mysterious Merchant Ball to largely forgotten locales like the Quarry Street Cemetery, Joshua Simpkins of Spookymarion.com takes readers on a delightful journey through Marions bizarre history and hauntings. Was President Hardings death forecast by the First Ladys squawking finchits feathered form now stuffed and encased in the Harding Homeon the eve of the presidents ill fated trip to Alaska? Dare to visit the Mongoloid House or see what goes bump at the empty downtown YMCA. Revisit Marions urban legends and discover little-known ghouls that deserve to be heard.

A handbook that gives addresses of places where ghosts have been authenticated, with directions for getting there to see for oneself.

Treasures galore but no storage room—the Historical Museum of Wycliff is facing a challenge as it has been given the opportunity of picking over the furnishings of an old villa. While assessing its inventory, Izzy Watson, the museum’s part-time curator, wonders who is leaving vintage jewelry on her doorstep. Is the mysterious donor connected to the villa? And why is her friend, boutique owner Margaret Oswald, so very much afraid of turning her obvious love for a charming man into a relationship? What ghosts of the past are haunting her?