The Haunting of Hill House Trivia

Stephen King loves him some Haunting of Hill House. Just loves it. In his survey of the horror genre, Danse Macabre, he calls the novel "one of the finest books ever to come out of the genre" and says Eleanor is "the finest character to come out of this new American gothic tradition." But the love doesn't stop there. King once wrote a TV mini-series titled Rose Red. It's about a professor who invites a group of psychics to a haunted house to study paranormal activity. Sound familiar? That's because the project began life as the remake of The Haunting (1963) before shifting to TV. Also, it's basically a giant love letter to Shirley Jackson's novel. The difference lies in Stephen King's evil house, Rose Red. This title haunt is more Winchester Mystery House with ghosts than psychological horror-show.

Jackson was inspired to write a haunted house story after reading about some 19th-century researchers who rented a haunted house to study psychic occurrences—probably the same Victorians who inspired Dr. Montague's experiment. Things got all eerie, though, when Jackson started researching haunted houses. She came across a California house that struck her as perfect fit for her novel. Hoping to receive more information, she called up her mother—a Cali native—to ask if she had any information on the place. Boy, did she. Turns out the house was built by Ms. Jackson's great-grandfather. Coincidence? Maybe. Deserving of an ominous lightning strike? Definitely. (source, cited here)

We're not ones to say an author's life needs to be known to "get" her work, but Shirley Jackson's relationship with her mother sure parallels Hill House in some interesting ways. Jackson's mother, Geraldine Jackson, was a bit... domineering. An insensitive woman, Geraldine made little to no attempt to understand Shirley, trying instead to force her ideals of womanhood upon her daughter. She even sent her daughter corsets because she took issue with her weight—after Jackson was an adult and a mother herself, mind you. Geraldine's letters to her daughter even include dietary advice. Did we say insensitive? Perhaps callous would be a better word. (source)

At one point in the novel, Dr. Montague says, "'It is still perfectly possible that it is all caused by subterranean waters'" (5.21). Unfortunately, the good doctor never follows up on that comment, so we did some sleuthing to find out what he exactly this enigmatic comment meant. In parapsychology circles, it is believed that some paranormal experiences can be explained by subterranean waters. The idea is that water moving underground also moves the metal ions dissolved within it. These metals create electromagnetic fields, and if the field is large enough, it can create an experience-inducing field (EIF). This EIF can cause people living in houses above the subterranean water to hallucinate, and these hallucinations might take the form of ghosts and the like. Some fault lines can manifest similar EIFs. We aren't entirely certain how much science went into this supposed, um, "science." But, at least we know what the heck Dr. Montague was talking about. (source)