In​ 1991 Jeffrey Stambovsky sued the previous owners of his house in the village of Nyack, New York for failing to disclose that it was haunted. Stambovsky, an out-of-towner, argued that locals had known for years about the ghosts living in 1 La Veta Place: a couple dressed in 18th-century clothing, a naval lieutenant from the Revolutionary era and a poltergeist who would rattle beds in the early morning. The house’s owners were George and Helen Akley. Helen had written accounts of the hauntings for Reader’s Digest and for a local newspaper (she reported that the family lived happily with the ghosts: the poltergeist didn’t shake the beds at the weekend, so they could sleep in). Stambovsky argued that since the Akleys and their estate agent hadn’t told him about the hauntings before the sale (they claimed otherwise), he should be allowed to break the contract without penalty. The New York Supreme Court agreed. ‘As a matter of law,’ its judgment concluded, ‘the house is haunted.’

In Japan, jiko bukken – ‘tainted homes’ in which people have died in violent or unexplained ways – must be advertised as such. In a few American states, estate agents are required to list murders that have been committed in a property, but if you’re a buyer worried about paranormal activity, you’re generally out of luck (though there is a website, diedinhouse.com, on which buyers can check for recorded hauntings as well as whether a property has ever been used as a meth lab). In the UK, there is no strict requirement that sellers disclose a building’s dark past, though legally things can get sticky if they don’t. When the journalist Matt Blake bought a house in Walthamstow after a divorce, the listing said nothing about the previous inhabitants. But the people he bought the house from, and some of his new neighbours, were reticent when he asked them about its history. Soon after moving in, he began to experience strange phenomena: an invasion of slugs and rats; a radio turning on during the night; a doorbell ringing in the small hours with no one at the door. When he pulled up the carpet in one of the bedrooms, Blake found that the floorboards beneath were badly burned, as though someone had started a fire in the middle of the room. He submitted freedom of information requests to the fire brigade and police, but it was from a neighbour that he discovered the house had once belonged to Aman Vyas, the ‘E17 Night Stalker’, who fled to India in 2009 after being identified as a suspect in a series of violent rapes and a murder. Vyas was eventually extradited back to the UK, where in 2020 he was found guilty and sentenced to a minimum of 37 years in prison.

Blake’s book is less about Vyas and his crimes (none of which took place in the house) than it is about what makes the home such a potent site for hauntings. He consults ghost hunters, a philosopher of science (might quantum phenomena provide an explanation for hauntings? Answer: probably not), psychologists and a slightly apologetic exorcist from the Church of England. He visits a couple who live in a flat where Dennis Nilsen murdered some of his victims. They have managed to banish the memory of what happened there to create a happy home. ‘We can choose to live in fear, or we can choose to face our fears,’ they tell Blake. ‘The space is yours. Reclaim it with your own stories.’ Call it the Live, Laugh, Love school of ghostbusting.

Real-life violence isn’t essential to the creation of haunted houses, Caitlin Blackwell Baines argues in How to Build a Haunted House, but it does make ghostly visitations more likely (or perhaps just easier to sell to others). Ghost hunters and parapsychic investigators sometimes invoke the ‘stone tape’ theory of haunting, which holds that the ‘residual energy’ of violent historical events can be recorded by material structures and ‘replayed under certain conditions’, like a cassette. The technological metaphor might give us pause: how were ghosts supposed to have existed before the invention of magnetic tape, and have they now transitioned to MP3s or streaming? But the idea that buildings can retain some trace of the past remains a popular one: 34 per cent of the British population say they believe in ghosts (7 per cent more than believe in any god), and somehow even more people – nearly 40 per cent – believe in the existence of haunted houses.

Ghosts have always lingered in human habitations: one of the earliest recorded haunted house stories is Mostellaria, a play from the early second century bce by Plautus, in which an Athenian merchant’s son tricks his father into believing a ghost is living in their house. As a specific idea, however, the haunted house – which Baines defines as ‘a multi-room, multi-storeyed domestic structure, occupied by a nuclear family and haunted by the spirits of its past occupants’ – is a relatively recent, Anglo-American phenomenon. In Japan, ghosts tend to haunt people rather than places. Indigenous Australian spirits favour natural rather than human structures and Mexican ghosts are usually ‘free-floating entities’.

The modern haunted house was, Baines argues, invented almost single-handedly by Horace Walpole, who codified its architecture in Strawberry Hill, his kitschily Gothic Twickenham retreat, and established many of its essential narrative features in The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel, which he wrote while living there. Walpole was a ghost sceptic, and there have never been any reported sightings at Strawberry Hill. Instead, with its papier-mâché battlements and wood and plaster fireplaces, it was what Walpole called ‘a plaything house’: a stage set designed to cultivate a sense of ‘gloomth’, or gloomy warmth.

The Castle of Otranto, too, emphasises its confected artificiality. With a complicated plot involving a long-lost heir, star-crossed lovers and a mysterious death by falling helmet, Walpole promoted it as ‘a new species of romance’, which fused ‘imagination and improbability’ with a ‘strict adherence to common life’. The novel established narrative tropes that have proved remarkably persistent in the haunted house genre ever since: gloomthy location, veiled prophecies and a narrative framing device involving the discovery of a manuscript. More significant than plot was the novel’s setting. Before Walpole, ghosts in English literature tended to haunt people, or generic geographic locations: crossroads, bridges, graveyards. After him, they came inside, haunting domestic spaces.

Baines’s central argument is that the rise of the haunted house in the popular imagination coincided with the emergence of the modern home as a physical and psychic reality: a building designed specifically as a dwelling, separate from farm or workplace, where a single nuclear family lived together in isolation from the rest of society. This led to a turning inward of domestic experience that is, as many historians have argued, reflected across culture more broadly. On this reading, haunted houses are ghostly analogues of the stream of consciousness novel, Impressionist painting or the rise of psychoanalysis. In the essay in which Freud first used the term unheimlich, he pointed out that one of the few successful English translations is ‘“haunted”, in the sense of “a haunted house”’.

Most ghosts, in the UK and America at least, are still domestically coded. Gruesome ghosts and body horror are rare. Instead there are female spectres who walk the same paths night after night searching for lost loves, or dead children who peer unnervingly through windows. Poltergeists are a relatively recent addition to the haunted house pantheon, only really gaining ground in the second half of the 20th century (and exploding in popularity after The Exorcist was released in 1973). Unlike fully embodied ghosts, which tend to favour grander backdrops, they often attach themselves to ‘dysfunctional, disenfranchised or otherwise unhappy families’, Baines writes, so that parapsychic researchers and ghost historians sometimes call them ‘council house ghosts’. This attachment might be exacerbated by the presence in the home of a ‘young, emotionally volatile female family member’ – as with the Enfield Poltergeist, the haunting of a family with two young daughters in London between 1977 and 1979 – to whom such ghosts might be attracted (or who might themselves be responsible for the reported hauntings). But as Baines sees it, lack of ownership is also a significant factor in ‘purported haunted house cases, with people living in borrowed or rented houses tending not to properly “bond” with their place of residence, causing them to feel perpetually ill at ease’. If you’re more likely to be haunted if you rent than if you own, has the housing crisis led to a rise in poltergeist activity?

Freud knew that the family was the ultimate ghost story, a tendency reflected in the narratives that have become attached to ghost sightings, which often concern disputed inheritances, dynastic continuity or betrayed love, like the plots of 19th-century novels. The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall is said to be the ghost of Dorothy Walpole, Horace’s aunt, who after an affair was locked away by her jealous husband until her death (she probably died of smallpox). The ‘grey lady’ of Chillingham Castle is the restless spirit of Lady Berkeley, whose husband was said to have left her for her sister, Lady Henrietta, abandoning her with their baby. The cartoonist Charles Addams intended The Addams Family to be a satire of contemporary American family life, with an uxorious husband living with his beautiful and independent wife and their spirited children in a multi-generational idyll.

In architectural terms, the modern haunted house owes much to a particular place: Carson Mansion, a gloomy Queen Anne Revival villa built for a lumber magnate in Eureka, California in 1886. Its appearance – higgledy-piggledy towers, oversized decorative details and an asymmetric frontage – was soon appropriated by ‘haunted house’ fairground rides across America. Disneyland’s first ‘Haunted Mansion’ attraction, which opened in 1969, was based on a number of real buildings, including the sprawling, neo-Gothic Llanada Villa – the ‘Winchester Mystery House’ – in San Jose, California, built over 36 years by Sarah Winchester, a recluse and heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company fortune. After the death of her daughter and later her husband, so the story goes (this kind of disclaimer recurs throughout books about ghosts: hearsay may not be a defence in libel law, but it is in the telling of ghost stories), a psychic warned Sarah that if she were ever to finish the building, the ghosts of all the people her family’s rifles had killed would return to torment her. Baines points out that this was just propaganda against unmarried women: more than a decade separated the deaths of Winchester’s daughter and husband, and there is no evidence at all of the psychic consultation or the curse. Winchester was just an architectural enthusiast with time and money on her hands.

The​ crisis of faith that accompanied Darwinism and the march of science contributed to the rise of the haunted house from the late 19th century. While belief in God was challenged by evolutionary theory and deep-time geology, it was replaced in some quarters by the spiritualist movement, which by the end of the 1800s had around eight million adherents in the US and Europe. The two world wars made the prospect of direct communication with the dead attractive to many. One of the places Baines visits on her haunted house tour is Borley, a nondescript red-brick rectory in Essex that gained a reputation in the 1920s and 1930s as ‘the most haunted house in Britain’. The ghosts of Borley Rectory were first reported in 1900 by the Bull sisters, daughters of Rev. Harry Bull. They claimed to have often seen a woman wearing a nun’s habit walking in the garden; others said they had seen a headless coachman and a figure wearing a monk’s habit.

After learning about the hauntings, an enterprising ghost hunter called Harry Price was dispatched by the Daily Mirror to investigate. Price had begun life as a fraudster, talking his way into a job as curator of numismatics at Ripon Museum despite having no real knowledge of coins. He later became a paper bag salesman and joined the Magic Circle before rebranding himself as a paranormal investigator with a loose affiliation to the University of London (his archive forms the basis of the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature at Senate House). By the time Price became involved, a story had become attached to the Borley ghosts: a nun and a monk had fallen in love and arranged to elope from the monastery that once stood on the site of the rectory. A friendly coachman arranged for a carriage to be waiting for them in the woods one night. In some versions of the story, the nun and her lover quarrel before he strangles her in the woods. In others, all three are caught by the other monks, who behead the monk and coachman, and bury the nun alive in the walls of the monastery.

All of this, as Baines points out, is typical haunted house fare, and historically impossible. There is no evidence that a monastery ever stood on the grounds of Borley Rectory. The underground passageways that Price thought he had discovered, which would have allowed for secret meetings between the nun and her lover, were in fact Victorian flood drains. The detail of the nun being entombed in the monastery’s walls was probably taken from Walter Scott’s Marmion: there is no record that immurement was ever used as a punishment in England, though it was often deployed as anti-Catholic propaganda. Even the presence of the coach and coachman was anachronistic. The dissolution of the monasteries was completed by 1541, and horse-drawn coaches remained rare and expensive until the early 19th century.

None of these inconsistencies deterred Price, who put an advert in the Times to recruit ‘intelligent, intrepid, critical, unbiased’ participants to act as ‘official observers’ of the paranormal phenomena reported at Borley. At first the observers didn’t notice much: a matchbox moved a millimetre or two; some reported a smell of lavender. So Price organised a series of séances. During one, contact was made with Rev. Bull (he had died in 1927, joining the other Borley ghosts), who told him that the restless nun’s bones could be found buried beneath a tree in the garden. Price began excavations, eventually finding a jawbone under an old septic tank, which most people dismissed as the mandible of a pig.

These days, even among ghost hunters, the story of Borley Rectory is widely considered a hoax, though this doesn’t stop visits to the site (the building was demolished in the 1940s), much to the chagrin of local residents. Why might this be? Baines is good on people’s motivations for believing in haunted houses: comfort, intrigue, but most of all money. The rise of what she calls ‘Gothic tourism’ in the UK during the 20th century made ghosts a profitable proposition. Stories of historic hauntings were often dusted off by the heirs of crumbling stately homes that had become too expensive to run: it was an easy way to drum up interest and visitors, or even buyers. In the years between 1870 and the outbreak of the First World War, Baines notes, 430 American women married into the English aristocracy. A ghost in the attic was particularly sought after. ‘A really well-authenticated ghost,’ the antiquarian Allan Fea wrote in Old English Houses in 1910, ‘fetches a big price.’

One of the most enterprising Americans was Leonora Bennet, the daughter of a wealthy dentist from Spokane, Washington. She married the 7th Earl of Tankerville in 1895 and moved to the crumbling Chillingham Castle in Northumberland soon afterwards. There had been stories of ghosts at Chillingham – ‘a forlorn countess; a little boy dressed in blue; a pallid woman desperate for a drink of water’ – long before Leonora arrived, but she did much to document and promote the Chillingham ghosts, asking the housekeeper for stories about sightings, organising séances and eventually describing her own experiences in The Ghosts of Chillingham Castle, including the ‘grinning skeletons’ she saw in her writing room and the ‘grey lady’, who escaped from a portrait and wandered the castle, looking for her lost love.

Lady Tankerville was as much entrepreneur as lady of the manor, and Chillingham still advertises itself as ‘Britain’s Most Haunted Historic Castle’, with ‘some of the highest levels of paranormal activity in the country’. For many stately homes and historically significant buildings, ghosts continue to be marketable commodities, even if this sometimes makes things awkward for historians and curators. Many National Trust properties run ‘ghost tours’ in October, even in buildings that don’t have much of a documented history of hauntings. Baines interviews a guide at Hampton Court who began offering ghost tours in 2002, at first just for staff as a bit of fun. He now regrets their popularity, particularly the bit where people dressed as ghosts jump out at visitors to frighten them.

More troubling are those haunted houses that use stories of ghosts not just to increase visitor numbers but to obscure or downplay real, uncomfortable histories. The Myrtles Plantation is a historic plantation house in Louisiana now run as a private museum. One of the stories visitors are told is of ‘Chloe, the green-turbaned slave’, the purported ghost of an enslaved woman who had plotted to poison the children of the house before being lynched. Tour guides are still happy to tell her story, despite there being no evidence that Chloe ever lived. Her real function, Baines suggests, is to domesticate the horrors of slavery, making its history more palatable for visiting white tourists.

Haunted house stories tend to end in one of two ways: either the family flees, or the ghosts are soothed, and everyone – living and dead alike – is allowed to move on. Freud called this process, at least as it obtains in psychoanalysis, ‘abreaction’: the overcoming of past trauma by bringing it into the light. Baines preserves a degree of credulousness in the face of all the historical evidence she assembles, effectively inviting us to make up our own minds. Not quite a sceptic, Blake also keeps open the possibility that what he was experiencing was paranormal. His book ends on a slightly different note. Having consulted various people in an attempt to understand his experiences, he performs – slightly self-consciously – a cleansing ceremony with his ex-wife, wafting burning sage around the house. With his new girlfriend he also gives the house a lick of paint and replaces window frames and floorboards. This seems to stop the slugs and rats getting in. And it also stops the haunting.