A ghost called loneliness

What gives this classic enduring power is not its spirits and spectres, but its exploration of pain and alienation.

The days are getting longer and nights shorter in the northern hemisphere, so of course, by popular, long-standing (read western) tradition, it’s time to scare ourselves silly by keeping an ear out for creaks in the night and ghosts and ghoulies in empty kitchen cupboards and under beds.

Maybe it’s the dying embers of the year — showcased in more temperate regions by the changing colours of trees — that makes October the perfect time to indulge in strange, slightly skewed and melancholic reads.

I first got to know The Haunting of Hill House as a movie — the 1963 black-and-white version. The monochrome palette was probably what heightened the scares and shocks and convinced you that there was more hiding in the deep shadows of an imposing house. There have been many more adaptations of the story since — its rich depth of psychological terror and the brooding menace of the house itself are so brilliantly etched that few haunted mansion stories that came after it could quite match it for its scares.

The story itself sprang from the unparalleled genius of Shirley Jackson, doyenne of American horror writers. In her short life (she died at the age of 48), Jackson wrote some of the classics of the horror genre.

In the book (published in 1959), a young woman, Eleanor, has recently undergone a bereavement and finds herself quite alone in the world (she has a sister who she’s estranged from and no friends). She is invited by a researcher of supernatural manifestations, Dr John Montague, to be part of an experiment at the eponymous mansion. Eleanor and the other participant Theodora, both at some point in their lives, have experienced something of the supernatural. They are also joined by Luke, the heir to Hill House.

As the story progresses, the tensions between the participants — of class, gender and sexuality — all bubble up, and of course, things go bump in the night. Jackson’s sleight-of-
hand narration doesn’t quite tell you whether what you’re reading about is the presence of actual ghosts or the psychological manifestation of the gradually terrified research subjects who have each gone through personal trauma and are not quite emotionally stable adults. This only adds to the feeling of dread that something will soon go horribly wrong. Dr Montague, you think, should really have designed his experiment better, probably with the help of 1,000 watt lights and all working modern communications.

What gives The Haunting of Hill House enduring power as a story is not the presence of ghosts and spirits. Rather, it’s the examination of pain and loneliness and how people hurt each other. Feelings of alienation are not soothed away by mere hugs — they deserve deeper examination and understanding. The ghosts that trouble people are not spectres of the dead but absences; the absence of love, affection, empathy and nurturing human bonds. Those are themes that resonate across time and why The Haunting of Hill House continues to find fans among new generations of readers.

The author is a Bangalore-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. Come, raid the bookshelves with us.