Hell House

Richard Matheson's Hell House (1971) opens with a dying millionaire, Deutsch, who wants proof of life after death and will pay for it. He hires four people to spend a week in the Belasco House in Maine, a mansion long sealed up and nicknamed Hell House after the sadistic debauchery of its former owner, Emeric Belasco.

Dr. Lionel Barrett, a physicist interested in parapsychology, leads the team and trusts science and a machine of his own making to clear the house. With him are his wife Edith, the mental medium Florence Tanner, and the physical medium Benjamin Franklin Fischer, the sole survivor of an earlier investigation. As the week wears on, the house works on each of them through their weaknesses and sets them against one another, and the question becomes whether any of them will leave with their sanity intact.

A classic haunted house novel, it was adapted for film as The Legend of Hell House (1973), with Matheson writing the screenplay.