They are the backbone of millions upon millions of horror stories, they’ve been brought to life countless numbers of times on the silver screen and everybody reading this is probably aware of one – if not from personal experience, then certainly from local folklore. Haunted houses are so deeply ingrained in the human psyche, that any old stack of bricks has the potential to send a shiver down your spine.
Caitlin Blackwell Baines has taken it upon herself to dive headlong into some of these stories, to try and find out what really makes up the elements of a haunted house. In How To Build A Haunted House, she focuses on some of the better-known buildings associated with this phenomena – providing the scares, in the course of chronicling some of their more infamous stories, but balancing this with well researched facts about the building and often leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions.
Borley Rectory – arguably England’s most famous haunted house, claimed by some to have the corpse of a nun bricked up in its walls – is given the once-over, as is Long Island’s Amityville house. Occupied by the Lutz family in the 1970s in the wake of a grisly mass shooting there, and now known worldwide thanks to a book and movie series, the house comes under Baines’ microscope; while she recognises something was afoot, she also questions whether the framework of the this could have been made up years prior and has influenced others since.
How To Build A Haunted House is an intriguing read that delves deep into the cultural obsession with the haunted house, and while Baines isn’t afraid to play devils advocate, she’s more than happy to scare the reader to death in the process. Perfect Halloween fodder.