I have been working with houses professionally for over forty years. They intrigue me. They talk to me. I feel their pain when they are neglected or badly constructed or torn down and thrown in the dump like a pile of discarded bones. When bad things happen to the occupants, it’s not the house’s fault.
A house is an assemblage of wood, stone, metal, glass, pipes, wires, and mechanical equipment—just like Frankenstein was an assemblage of body parts. His evil qualities were imbued by those that didn’t understand him. The framing of the house is the skeleton. The wires are the nerves. The pipes and the ducts are the veins and the lungs. The boiler or furnace is the heart.
There is no question that houses play major roles—often title roles—in many novels. They become part of the story in a variety of ways just as the other characters do. Wuthering Heights begins, “I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with.” Susan Howatch, the author of Penmarric, introduces the house as soon as she introduces the protagonist. Shirley Jackson, the author of The Haunting of Hill House, wastes no time, “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 its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.”
If the occupants care, battle nature, and maintain the paint, roof, windows, and conditioning systems, the house can last a very long time. There is a wooden house in the Faroe Islands that is presently occupied by the seventeenth generation of a family who have lived in the house for almost five hundred years.
The houses that have been in a family for generations are replete with all the family’s own ghosts and skeletons in the closets. But another theme of nasty house related stories involves houses that are new to the subjects of the novel, families moving into them to escape memories of some tragedy or other. The death of a child seems to be common one. It becomes abundantly clear in these escape stories that the memories move along with the souvenirs of Niagra Falls and Disney Land. The family is attempting to start a new life and leave the old memories behind, but they are often about to inherit someone else’s family horrors.
Many of the old family houses are grand mansions, meant to impress, with hundreds of rooms. (Some mysteriously have more space inside than outside.) Some of them are as simple as a London flat as in Jemma Wayne’s To Dare or the cottage in Billy O’Callaghan’s The Dead House. In Noel Vindry’s locked room novel, The House that Kills, the stone house is definitely an innocent bystander that gets attacked by investigators with picks and shovels seeking a secret passage. I found it particularly telling that the investigators in this 1932 novel used a perfume as a tracer gas to find air currents.
In 17 Church Row, James Carol takes evil spirits connected to a house to a whole new level. The evil persona in this novel was created by man but takes on a life of its own. This persona is the disembodied soul of the house. A nice young family, suffering from the tragic loss of a child think they can escape their memories by moving to a brand new, state-of-the-art house with no door knobs.
The virtual assistant in this book has been taught to think, reason, and feel at least to the level of a six-year-old’s consciousness with almost infinite access to the world’s knowledge base, connected by wires, fiber optics, and satellites. ‘She’ does open doors and drawers and make coffee on command, but ‘she’ is a character. There is an immediate connection in the opening sentence: “Father attempted to murder me once.”
Houses are shelters. Not killers. They carve out a safe place to protect us from wind, rain, and snow. There are indeed mysterious places in houses—under the stairs, under the eaves, down in the basement, in the back corner of the attic where no one ever goes. But it is the ghosts in the occupants’ imaginations and the guilt in their memories that are the real killers.
There will be a podcast episode about this on February 11, 2022 on https://www.buildingHVACScience.com Give it a listen.