The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson--Blogpost by Griffin Mangerson

 

            Shirley Jackson’s iconic novel The Haunting of Hill House has become a staple within her body of work as much as it has become a household name in the horror genre. Her depiction of the ‘Haunted House’ has cemented itself as the standard conception of what makes something a haunted house. In investigating the conception of Hill House itself, the real life inspirations it draws from are one of the most intriguing aspects of the novel itself. While not a part of Jackson’s lived experience, the two houses that led Jackson to creating the Hill House give us insight into how houses are intricately connected to our humanity and are shaped by how we go through the world.

            The first house Jackson found inspiration in for the novel is an infamous and understandably alluring one, the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California.

            The Winchester house has a mythology surrounding its creator, Sarah Winchester, the heiress to the founder of Winchester Firearms’ fortune. The ‘myth’ comes in the rumor that Sarah Winchester continually had new rooms, stairwells, and hallways constructed constantly until her death to house the souls of those who died due to the Winchester guns her fortune comes from. Many of these sets of stairs and hallways led to nothing, with seemingly no logic to them, giving the house itself an uncanny feeling and feeding this idea of a structure intended for ghosts. Despite this, Jackson was not too impressed with the spiritual claims that surrounded the Winchester House, as they were pretty unfounded in reality and were not what spurred her toward Hill House. Jackson would still take aspects from the house, however, specifically in its abstract design which is likely the seed of Hill House’s nature as alive and ever changing.

            The other house that, while not as recognizable as the Winchester House, would be the actual call to creation of Hill House. This house, on the opposite coast in Harlem, New York, exuded no outward significance to Jackson with the exception of the fire that befell it while Jackson was visiting in the city. She described it as an oddly spiritual experience, something she did not believe in outside of this, and felt particularly compelled by the 3 people who were reported to have died in the fire. This is likely what led to the focus on haunting and residual trauma that comes in houses that is seen in The Haunting of Hill House, and, in synthesis with the Winchester House, is responsible for the creation of the novel at all.

            It feels important to provide the origins of these aspects of the novel because I think it makes a revealing framework to where Jackson derived the extremely iconic and influential imagery that would become tropes of the genre. It is clear that Jackson injects much of her own home life into the novel, especially in the specific traumas of the characters in the novel, but the significance of how she uses aspects of these two houses she did not live in can not be understated because it is such a deliberate choice to use them instead of the house she wrote not only The Haunt of Hill House in, but also every other book she had ever written. I think this speaks to how Jackson uses houses and the people in them in such a cyclical way, such that the house itself is reflective of the interiority of the residents, and similarly the the residents are shaped by the environments they are put into. Throughout the novel, we see how the characters’ traumas are brought to the house, but we also see how the house brings it out of them in turn.

            All of this to say, Jackson’s use of these houses, in conjunction with the literal content of the novel itself, are indicative of a wider cultural conception of what houses say about the people within them. Hill House is as much of a personification of the horror in the novel as a house in real life can become an image of the lived trauma that is experienced within it.

 

Sources:

Sills, Joe. “‘The Haunting of Hill House’ Was Inspired by a Real-Life Mansion and a Deadly Harlem Fire - Here’s Everything You Need to Know.” Insider, Insider, 31 Oct. 2018, INSIDER article.

Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. Penguin, 1984.

28, Kathye Fetsko Petrie          September. “In Search of Shirley Jackson’s House.” Literary Hub, 27 Mar. 2019, lithub.com/in-search-of-shirley-jacksons-house/