The Haunted House

Samhain, and the thin places

Halloween is All Hallows’ Eve, the night before All Saints’ Day on the first of November. It sits on top of something much older: Samhain, at the end of the harvest, when the light half of the year turned into the dark half.

According to traditional beliefs surrounding Samhain, this was a liminal time when the boundary between the world of the living and the spirit world was thought to become thinner, allowing greater contact with the Otherworld and with those who had passed away.

The old word for a threshold, the strip of floor in a doorway between one room and the next, is the Latin limen, and it is where liminal comes from. The folklorist Arnold van Gennep used the idea in 1909 for the middle of a rite of passage: the part where you have left one state and not yet arrived in the next. A doorway, dusk, the turn of the year.

This house is built out of that idea. Every wall is a flat, and every seam is a threshold with the light on the other side of it. The other side is right there. It is the work lights, and the people who built the house, sitting on upturned crates behind the parlour wall.

Whether you understand this literally, symbolically or simply as an invitation to pause and reflect, there is something profoundly beautiful about the idea.

Where haunted houses came from

This is what a haunted house is supposed to do. They exist to scare people.

Chris Heller’s short history of the haunted house, for Smithsonian Magazine, starts in London. In 1802 Marie Tussaud showed the wax heads of the French Revolution’s guillotined, made from the death masks she had cast of them, and called her permanent show the Chamber of Horrors. Around the turn of the century the Grand Guignol theatre in Paris staged dismemberment on its stage. In 1915 a fairground at Liphook, in England, opened one of the first ghost houses.

The Halloween haunted house is American, and it arrived in the Great Depression at about the same time as trick-or-treat, as a way to stop young people’s pranks from turning into vandalism. Lisa Morton, who wrote Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween, put it plainly:

Cities looked for ways to buy these kids off, essentially.

The first ones were basements. Families decorated their cellars and children went from house to house, from one scene to the next. A 1937 party pamphlet has fur and strips of raw liver on the walls, wet sponges hung from the ceiling, a crawl through a long dark tunnel, and at the end a black cardboard cat outlined in luminous paint.

The tradition could not exist without Halloween; Halloween would not be the same without it.

Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion opened in 1969, its ghosts made with Pepper’s ghost, an old stage illusion of reflected light, and Morton calls it the start of the haunted attraction industry. Within a few years the Jaycees, the United States Junior Chamber, were raising money with haunted houses across the country, built by volunteers.

Then the professional houses came, with film tie-ins and advertising. A fire at a haunted house in New Jersey killed eight teenagers who could not get out. The rules got stricter, and many of the volunteer houses could not keep up. Larry Kirchner, of the Haunted House Association, told Heller:

It was based on the premise that people would volunteer, but when you have people opening big haunted houses with lots of advertising, that's hard.

That fire is why every room in this house has its way out written in it, and why the way out is never called anything but the way out.

Built by hand, in empty warehouses

Ryan remembers them on the outskirts of town, in warehouses that were usually empty, built by the people who turned up to build them.

I recall being impressed by the DIY spirit of some of them. Folks put a lot of work into making a compelling experience. They poured craft into the effort.

This one is a set and does not hide it. You can see the screws in the flats, the timber jacks propping up the sides, the tape on the seams and the light coming through them. That is the frightening part and the good part at once: a few people with no budget made you feel something in the dark, and you can see exactly how. It is the same thing Show Your Work says about showing the work while it is still being made.

Eldritch, weird, and who gets made the monster

Eldritch is an old Scots word for unearthly: in Robert Burns’s Tam o’ Shanter, in 1791, the witches give an eldritch skreech. Where its first half comes from is not settled. One guess is elf, and another is an old English root meaning foreign, strange, other. H. P. Lovecraft brought the word back into fashion, and much of the horror he made with it was his fear of people unlike himself.

That is the oldest trick in horror, and the cheapest: make the frightening thing somebody who is different. Disabled bodies, minds that work differently, queer people and strangers have all been made into the monster, and the freak show charged admission for it. Our own write-up for an evening of chimeras heard it happen in a video about monsters:

It is a throwaway line, and it is exactly how the freak show worked: a human body, described as part animal.

Weird is the word we kept. Our Weird page is a long argument for weird pride, and it quotes Ferrous, aka Oolong:

A lot of neurodivergent kids learn early on that they’re ‘weird’. The lucky ones learn to embrace it before they’re forced to internalise the implied shame.

Weirdmisia — hatred of the weird — is the enemy of diversity.

So this house is eldritch, and nobody in it is the monster. On Halloween everybody wears the strange, and here the different are the ones who built the place. Our Halloween playlist, two years ago, said it in four words:

Death, divergence, and whimsy.

The darker half of the year

Samhain closed the harvest and opened the dark half of the year, when the fields rest.

The darker half of the year can become a time of introspection, rest and spiritual renewal.

Remembering belongs here too. Ryan’s brief names remembrance of ancestors, and the people we have lost are part of why a thin veil is a lovely idea rather than a frightening one. Other peoples keep their own days for their dead, in their own ways; this house does not borrow them.

On this street rest is owed, not earned, which is the Healing Checkpoint’s whole argument. The house stays up all year, so there is no hurry. Come back in the spring if the dark half is for sleeping.

Bring something to the house

Somebody in our community asked for this house in the Sandbox’s suggestion box: a place to share haunted things we have made and things we love, pictures and links, with one way to look for them like a scavenger hunt and one way to scroll through them all.

Bring a picture or a link to the house’s channel on the CB. The channel takes pictures and links, like every channel, and keeps them two weeks unless our administrators set it otherwise. Sign on, tune the radio to This room in here, or open the house’s channel on the chat page, and say what it is and whose.

To put something in the house for good, hidden in one of its rooms and in the list with the lights up, say so on the channel or in the suggestion box. It goes in with the name of whoever made it, the way they want to be named, and the day they said yes, and it comes out the moment they ask, deleted rather than hidden. Something you love that somebody else made goes in as a link with their name on it, never as a copy of their picture.

What is not in this house

• Nothing jumps out. No sound unless you press play on the soundtrack, nothing moves at any setting, and nothing appears unless you looked for it. A haunted house is allowed to frighten people; this one does it slowly and you can always see the light.
• A way out of every room. Every room in the hunt ends with the way out: back to the road, or the lights up. It is never called a chicken exit, and leaving early is a real way through the house.
• Nobody is the monster. No madness, no asylum, no disabled body and no difference is the scare in here, however old the trick is.
• Nothing counted. No score, no tally of what you found, and the house never says how many things are left to find.
• Nothing kept. The house remembers nothing about you. What you found is put back when you leave, and the next visit starts with everything hidden again.

Who reads the channel, and for how long

• Everybody signed on to the CB can read this room’s channel, so share only what you would show a room with all of them in it. It keeps the house norms, like every channel, and a picture is part of its message and goes when the message does.
• Unless our administrators set this channel otherwise, every message on it goes two weeks after it was sent, and the radio says what it keeps, first under In this channel.
• Say what is in it when what you share has blood, a jump or a flash in it, so somebody can choose before they press.

Next door

• The Outskirts, the road this is a turning off, where nobody was sent and everything keeps its own hours.
• Black Leather Lagoon, turning 01, where it is always Halloween and our Halloween playlist lives.
• Sithen, turning 02, for the Otherworld seen from outside the ring.
• Show Your Work, for what our community is making, shown before it is finished.
• The Sandbox, where somebody asked for this house, in the suggestion box.