The best novels about life in a haunted house

Shirley is set in author Shirley Jackson’s rambling Victorian house in Vermont, adjacent to the Bennington College campus. This is a story of psychological intrigue and intertwined creative and destructive influences, families in trouble, and ghostly presences. The story is narrated by a young faculty wife, Rose. She and her husband, a new professor at the College, live with Jackson and her husband, Professor Stanley Hyman. The house and the household are attractive and sinister, emotionally fraught and seductive. Merrell and I met as classmates in the Bennington Writing Seminars. We exchanged manuscripts for our then novels-in-progress. Now, as I re-read Shirley, I remember our walks past the house.

Housekeeping is Marilynne Robinson’s first novel. The narrator, Ruth, looks back on the last days of her childhood in the family’s lakeside home. Following her mother’s suicide and her grandmother’s death, her vagabond Aunt Sylvie returns to take care of Ruth and her sister. Sylvie cannot bear the confinement of domestic life, and under her benign neglect the once cozy house reverts to the wild. The story is almost a fable of the conflict between yearning for security and yearning for escape. Families, as well as houses, can change and decay—and both kinds of ruins are haunting. This is one of my favorite books, a magical reading experience, a complicated fractured fairy tale. 

In So Long, See You Tomorrow, an adult narrator looks back at childhood and the lingering effects of childhood loss and displacement. He recalls his mother’s death, his father’s remarriage, and moving from a beloved home. The author also tells a parallel story of the scandal that befell his friend Cletus: his father shot his mother’s lover, and then drowned himself. For the narrator, his lost boyhood home is recalled like a dream of paradise lost, a mirage of another life: “I dream about it, the proportions are so satisfying to the eye and the rooms so bright, so charming and full of character that I feel I must somehow give up my present life and go live in that house: that nothing else will make me happy.” This novel about haunting memories of a lost place and past will haunt the reader. This was one of my father’s favorite books, and it is one of mine as well. Books connect us to our own past, become a way of continuing conversation with people—ghosts if you will—who are gone.

Wright Morris believed that we are “inhabited” by the places where we have lived.

The Home Place is set on the plains of Nebraska where Morris was born. The text is combined with his photographs of farm buildings, farmhouse interiors, farming implements, cooking utensils, and furniture. Narrator Clyde Muncy returns from New York to the farm in Nebraska where he grew up, bringing his own family. He re-experiences the farm through the eyes, ears, and especially noses of his city wife and children. When his son sniffs a croquet ball and says it smells like the subway, Muncy observes, “Two thousand miles from New York a city boy turns up something in a farmyard, it smells damp and earthy, like a storm cave, so he calls it the subway smell.” Morris eschews sentimentality. His plain prose and black-and-white photographs are austere, like the farm itself. “Home is where you hang your childhood,” his protagonist says. This is a must-read for anyone who knows how a childhood home never lets you go.

Godwin’s psychological mystery Flora takes place in a remote, isolated house, a former mountaintop sanatorium in Tennessee. Adult narrator Helen looks back on her ten-year-old self, and her premature coming of age the summer she lived there with her young adult cousin and temporary guardian, Flora. Helen’s father has gone to do war work, her mother is dead. Flora and Helen cannot leave the mountaintop due to a polio threat in the valley. Both child and caretaker fall under the spell of a charismatic jack of all trades, Quinn. The consequences of their unconscious competition play out in the shadowy rooms of the big house.

This is a tale of psychological possession in a lonely estate; Godwin’s homage to Henry James’s Turn of the Screw. Years ago, I visited my great-aunt in her mountaintop summer home in Tennessee. Reading this book unlocked memories of that mysterious house. Good novels tell a particular story—but also may stir up ghosts we have forgotten.