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Flashback: Shirley Jackson—The Haunting of Hill House

Chris Well

“Jackson’s novel relies on terror rather than horror to elicit emotion in the reader…”

Published in 1959, the gothic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is considered one of the best literary ghost stories published during the 20th century. It’s been made into two feature films, a play, and is the basis of a Netflix series. “Jackson’s novel relies on terror rather than horror to elicit emotion in the reader,” notes Wikipedia, “using complex relationships between the mysterious events in the house and the characters' psyches.”

The Haunting of Hill House

The classic supernatural thriller by an author who helped define the genre. First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a “haunting;’ Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

The Haunting of Hill House was inspired by real-life paranormal investigators.

Jackson was inspired to write the novel after reading about a group of 19th century “psychic researchers” who rented a house they believed to be haunted in order to study paranormal phenomena. The researchers studiously recorded their experiences in the house in order to present them in the form of a treatise to the Society for Psychic Research. In her essay “Experience and Fiction,” Jackson explained that she was most intrigued by the way the researchers revealed their own personalities and backgrounds throughout the study. “They thought they were being terribly scientific and proving all kinds of things,” she explained. “And yet the story that kept coming through their dry reports was not at all the story of a haunted house, it was the story of several earnest, I believe misguided, certainly determined people, with their differing motivations and backgrounds.” SOURCE: 11 Chilling Facts About Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (Mental Floss)

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