Haunted Minds

So, why did I just read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House? According to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, it is a truth widely acknowledge that this is the haunted house story par excellence. Not my normal cup of tea.

But, one of my former students recommended it to me, and because her recommendations over the (many) years have never led me astray, I read it having no idea what it was. Perhaps the title should have tipped me off. OK, so I did know there was a Netflix series that was supposed to be scary, but I assumed there was but a loose connection between the Netflix series and the book. (It turns out that I was overestimating the connection between the TV show and the book—some of the names are the same, but that is about it.) After all, I figured, said former student is not the type who would send me off to Stephen King…who, by the way, thinks Jackson’s book is excellent.

It does not take long to discover that The Haunting of Hill House is, mirabile dictu, about a Haunted House. You learn that in the widely, and justly, celebrated opening paragraph:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

The plot: John Montague, an academic anthropologist (is that redundant? Are there any other kinds of anthropologists?), decides to make his claim to fame by investigating a haunted house. Because this is science (insert hushed tone), Montague tracks down people who experienced psychic events and invites them to spend a summer with him in an old house, which he does not say is haunted because that would, you know, taint the scientific nature of these experiments. The most unrealistic event (in, recall, a story about a haunted house) is when two young women show up at the house on the appointed day to be assistants to Dr. Montague. Add in a handsome young man who is the heir of the estate, and you have a cozy summer romp all set up. There are even two elderly servants present to add comic relief.

All the players assembled, the game begins! Weird things happen! Everyone is scared! Even more weird things happen! Even more terror!

I suppose some people get scared reading things like this, but it is honestly hard to see how. Sure, if you were in a room at night in a creepy old house and something started pounding on your bedroom door causing the door to buckle inward as the pounding continued, presumably you might be a bit terrified. Similarly, if you walked into your room and saw a giant message scrawled in what could only be blood across your ceiling, maybe it might give you some second thoughts. Of course, you, being a normal human being, would get in a car and leave, but then you aren’t in a horror story, are you? And therein lies the problem. You are not in a horror story. Why are you frightened reading a fictional book about fictional occurrences?

So, is the book a silly bit of horror fiction? Not at all. While the haunted house gets the title and all the glory, there is a vastly more interesting story here than the ghosts in the night.

Which is more terrifying: a haunted house or a haunted mind? The Haunting of Hill House has both. The house is a red herring, a distraction from the real haunting.

Eleanor, one of Montague’s volunteer assistants, has recently come out into the world after spending years taking care of her invalid mother. In what might be one of the most perfect introductions of a character in literature, here are the two sentences which introduce her:

Eleanor Vane was thirty-two years old when she came to Hill House. The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister.

Perfect. As we find out later in the book, Eleanor may have ignored her mother’s cries for help on the night her mother died. So, start with a guilty conscience. Now add in a vivid fantasy life where she is the center of attention in a world of people who adore her. Then add in a prickly sensitivity to slights, real or imagined, from real people in the real world. Mix together, toss that person into a haunted house, and what do you get? A very haunted mind.

Opinions vary on the existence of haunted houses. I am a skeptic, but I believe in enough entities with non-corporeal forms that I can’t very well mock those whose spirit world has different denizens than mine. But, one thing upon which we can all agree is that haunted minds exist. And that is scary.

Watching Eleanor’s mind as it swirls around in an ever narrowing radius is terrifying. Other than the opening and closing of the book, the story is told from her perspective, so we do not witness this terror third hand. She cannot escape her thoughts and eventually she loses control of where they lead. Over time, it is no longer clear whether what she is seeing is real or not.

Were it not for that opening paragraph and the repetition of those remarks at the close, we would have reason to wonder if any of this story is real. Jackson is remarkably clever, though; we know that the house is indeed haunted no matter which parts, if any, of this narrative were experienced by anyone else.

This is not the story of a descent into madness. This is the story of the madness that is already there in the mind of Eleanor. Reading it, the real terror comes when you start to wonder how much you are like Eleanor. How can you tell whether you are like her or not? You know all those strange things that happen, those bizarre coincidences and unexplained events? Did they really happen?