When she stood still in the middle of the room the pressing silence of Hill House came back all around her. I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.
The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
This haunting is architectural. It is not about you. It is about where you are. There are bones in the foundation. This house is a graveyard. This house is a corpse. You are inside the corpse. That makes you the maggot.
āWHY ARE YOU HAUNTED? A survey,ā @filmnoirsbian
Some places are born, not built. Such a strange thought to have. And I donāt know what came next, but I was still muttering the words to myself when they stopped my car and broke the glass and dragged me out. Born, not built. Born, not built.
ā¦for of all that āĆtre humainā the real human beings in these houses and cities become normalized termites, or within a ādwelling machineā they become foreign cells, still too organic.
āBuildings in Empty Spaces,ā Ernst Bloch tr. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg
The house, heavy with history, is burying the bodies before they even know they are bodies.
āiām going through a bunch of old essays and tbh this slapped,ā @nedlittle
Thereās only so much that hate can build up in a place before it starts hating you back⦠I donāt know whatās in the attic, or if thereās anything up there at all, and I donāt think I want to.
Have you not been paying attention? Did it not occur to you that as an organism existing within a greater organism, your intrusion would be felt? And still you harass. And now, like the wayward spider who witlessly settled on a sleeperās tongue, you will be swallowed. Because the truth is this: When a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth.
ANATOMY, Kitty Horrorshow
Despite all their efforts to the contraryātheir impossible architecture, their threats of betrayal, their lesions in the wallsāwe keep coming back. We keep exploring them and charting them and trying to bend their distinctively un-human design to our will. These houses are hauntedātheyāre haunted by us.
āControl, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House,ā Jacob Geller