The Haunting Of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

"One of the few positive letters Shirley received after the publication of The Lottery came from a man whose name Shirley was sure she had seen in print. Assuming he was a fellow writer, she wrote back, 'Thank you very much for your kind letter about my story. I admire your work too.' Later, she found out he had been accused of murdering his wife with an axe."
- Jack Sullivan

   Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House stands like a sign post that marks the end of all good horror writing. Before it looms the great ghost stories of J. S. LeFanu and Henry James. After it comes the total shit of Stephan King and Anne Rice. Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming Shirley Jackson (You can call her Ms. Jackson - if your nasty) for this decline. In fact, I'm a huge fan of her writing. The Lottery is my favorite short story of all time and I think that We've Always Lived In The Castle is simply brilliant. I'm just saying that, if you're reading a ghost story written after 1963, you might as well be getting your scary thrills from a Lands' End Catalogue.
   That said; I've only got two problems with The Haunting of Hill House. And these are my problems - not Ms. Jackson's. The first is that I've seen the movie The Haunting (copied almost word-for-word from The Haunting of Hill House) about thirty times, so the film played in my head as I read the book. My second problem is that I don't believe in ghosts, so, for me, it was a little difficult to imagine what it would be like to spend the night in a haunted house.
   I say that it was difficult because my wife and I decided that, in the interest of fair literary criticism, we should spend the night in the most haunted house that we could find. After an exhaustive search, we settled on the Lizzie Borden house in Falls River, Mass.

This was no boating accident. The late Andrew Borden (Left) takes a long, well deserved nap after having his skull bashed in with a hatchet. (Right) The author's many attempts to contact Mr. Borden (Yep, that's me on the same sofa formerly occupied by Mr. Borden) met with little success; however, Kurt Cobain sends his love.

   Yes, the Lizzie Borden of "Lizzie Borden took an axe…" fame. Her former home is now a Bed and Breakfast and it's been declared haunted by the highest authority on scientific and spiritual matters in the land - Unsolved Mysteries! On the day after Halloween, Vienna and I drove for over 300 miles just to spend one night in one of the most famous crime scenes in America (Our second choice was Cher's house.).
   I'll cut to the chase. All of you want to know if anything of a "Boo, I'm a ghost and I sure am scary" nature happened during my stay at the former Borden residence, don't you? Sadly, the answer is no…and yes.
   When we arrived we were shown to our room on the third floor. All of the other guests were out having dinner, so, except for Vienna, the woman who ran the tour, and me, the house was empty. The tour guide went downstairs, Vienna went to our room to unpack and I headed straight for the bathroom (Hey, it was a 300 mile trip. I'm surprised I held it as long as I did.). While I was draining "little Anonymous", the door to the bathroom began to shake like someone was trying to get in. Thinking that it was Vienna, I yelled out "Honey, I'll be done in a minute…fer Christ sakes." The door shook for a few more seconds then stopped.
   I finished up, washed my hands (partly to serve as a good example to my younger readers), and headed down the hall to our room. When I opened the door, Vienna was unpacking. "You can use the bathroom now", I told her.
   "That's OK, I'm fine", she said. "But you were trying to get in." "No, I wasn't". FYI - my wife has no poker-face. She wasn't kidding. There's a moment in The Haunting of Hill House were Eleanor is convinced that she's holding Theo's hand...
   The really strange thing is that the "phantom door shake" not only happened to me, but also to a young woman who was staying next-door to Vienna and I. We were all convinced, of course, that there was a rational explanation behind this. The woman who ran tours also had a rational explanation for the shaky door. Apparently, five years before the Borden murders, the woman who lived next-door (and who was related, by marriage, to Lizzie) threw her three children into a well - killing two of them (All I can say is that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, Falls River was one twisted town. At the time of the Borden murders, there were, allegedly, dozens of axe-wielding madmen roaming the local woods.). So, according to our tour guide, what we had experienced was the mischievous spirits of the two murdered children. OK, whatever.

Separated at birth?(Left) Insane party girl, Andrea Yates. Someday, smartass musicians will fork over $200 a pop to take a bath in the tub where she drowned her kids.(Right) Shock from Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas.

   Armed with this new found knowledge, you would think that I would've spent the rest of the night sitting up armed with a crucifix and garlic. The truth is that I fell right to sleep and slept, like a rock, through the whole night. I've been telling all of my friends that until you've spent the night in a house where two grizzly murders have been committed, you haven't really gotten a good night's sleep. The odd thing is that all of the characters in The Haunting of Hill House also always got a good night sleep - no matter what happened to them. From this we may deduce that Ms. Jackson, unlike Mr. King or Ms. Rice, did her homework.