The Haunting of Hill House
Dr. John Montague, a scholar of the supernatural, rents Hill House for a summer to study its notorious reputation, inviting a small group of assistants he believes may be sensitive to its influence. Among them is Eleanor Vance, a lonely, fragile young woman who has spent years caring for her invalid mother and who has never truly belonged anywhere. For Eleanor, the strange, wrong-angled house feels, unnervingly, like the first place that has ever wanted her.
As the group settles in, Hill House begins to make itself known through cold spots, pounding in the night, and messages that seem addressed to Eleanor alone. Shirley Jackson keeps the horror ambiguous, leaving the reader uncertain whether the house is haunted or whether Eleanor's own mind is coming apart, and letting the two possibilities feed each other.
First published in 1959, The Haunting of Hill House is one of the most influential ghost stories ever written and a masterclass in psychological dread. Restrained, elegant, and deeply unsettling, it locates its terror less in what appears than in loneliness, longing, and the fear of being unwanted.
A thirty-two-year-old woman who spent eleven years nursing her invalid mother and has never had a place of her own.
The idle young heir to Hill House, sent by his family to keep an eye on the investigation.
A doctor of philosophy studying psychic phenomena, who rents Hill House and assembles the group.
A vivid, bohemian artist with apparent psychic sensitivity who becomes Eleanor's companion and rival. Jackson gives her no surname.
Dr. Montague's overbearing wife, who arrives partway through convinced she can reach the house's spirit with a planchette.
It was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1960. It did not win, but the nomination cemented its reputation as one of the most influential haunted-house novels ever written.
No. Mike Flanagan's 2018 Netflix series borrows the title, the house, and character surnames from Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel but tells a largely original story about a family, not Jackson's small group of paranormal investigators. The novel has also been adapted twice as a film titled The Haunting (1963 and 1999).
