Haunted houses and space

You can easily picture a haunted Gothic mansion, with looming towers, a grand and sweeping staircase, twisting echoey corridors and a faceless evil lurking deep within – but how do you get to the kitchen? Can you tell me how many bedrooms it has? What’s the water pressure like? 

Questions about such prosaic things may seem irrelevant, but knowing these details is important for creating memorably creepy settings and setting up sinister encounters for your characters. You might not render all of it on the page, but some exactitude in writing gothic surroundings goes a long way, as it is much more frightening to read about running upstairs pursued by a spectre when you aren’t questioning how the stairs appeared on what you were told was the third and final floor. 

Clear descriptions of the house only serve to increase our mounting unease in Shirley Jackson’s classic The Haunting of Hill House. We know for certain that the floor plan is two concentric circles surrounding an inner room, a strange detail evocative of a labyrinth. When the characters encounter cold spots or cower inside as unknown footsteps thunder along the hallways upstairs, we are building up our mental picture of the most troubled parts of the house along with their paranormal investigation. One of the most terrifying moments hinges upon our being reminded that a room has two twin beds and therefore the hand Eleanor was holding could not possibly have belonged to Theodora. The novel is a master class in writerly restraint, how the accretion of horrible concrete details, recounted without overemphasis, can in fact create a memorably disturbing environment.

Working details of your location into descriptions addressing other narrative concerns can help to avoid being dull or clunky. This way the reader will not necessarily realise that this is why they are learning about the space. One clever method is that of Kate Collins, author of A Good House for Children, who has her characters refurbishing a grand and crumbling house on the English coast. Her accomplished scene-blocking of their futile efforts means that we get to know not only the human characters but also the property that will doom their marriage. Through her descriptions of all their hard work, we come to see it clearly – and to know that it is evil.

Sometimes spatial disturbance is a core part of the horror - it might seem as if a house is constructed according to consensus reality, but in fact there is far more to it than meets the eye. For this to really unsettle the reader, first they need to know what shouldn’t be there. In Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching, the Silver House seems at first like an ordinary bed-and-breakfast in Dover with an unremarkable series of floors. But as one character is attempting to flee, she discovers the hellish alternate dimensions that can only be accessed through the elevator, with unlucky visitors becoming trapped inside. By changing only one major element in their settings, writers can juxtapose the ordinary with the bizarre for maximum uncanny effect.

Scene-blocking is important for all writers – where characters are standing in relation to one another, or avoiding one character holding an apple then someone else across the room biting into it. This goes double when describing interactions with the supernatural. To write about ghosts is to challenge the nature of material reality, and so the other elements of that material reality must be especially vivid and believable. Daisy Johnson’s recent collection of interconnected stories The Hotel has its characters playing hide and seek in the laundry rooms, cleaning up after messy guests and flirting in the lobby. Each precisely observed detail of life working in or staying at an extremely haunted hotel only increases the reader’s dread as it seems more and more like somewhere you could unknowingly arrive, only to become forever entangled.

Creating a believable haunted house was of particular concern when writing my debut novel The Decadence, as almost all the action takes place there. Six friends go on an illegal holiday to a grand, dilapidated mansion in the English countryside during the covid-19 lockdown, not realising they won’t be alone. Over the course of the novel, the haunting becomes increasingly violent, but in order to convey this escalation coherently, I needed to have a clear plan. Holt House is full of historic hidden passageways and my protagonist, Jan, keeps sneaking off for secret assignations with her aristocratic host's girlfriend, but the ghost frequently interferes. Getting this right required me to draw up a floor plan of the house, something that proved invaluable during the copyedit. I also went through my chapter breakdown and wrote down locations for all characters in a scene, so I knew who was about to burst in upon whom and where the ghost was in relation to them all.

Once you know your setting really well, you are freed up to imagine how your characters might move through it and interact with all the different elements. This also creates exciting opportunities for your characters to reveal new aspects of themselves in a challenging and even threatening environment. With your gothic backdrop in place, you can focus on crafting an original narrative which thrills and terrifies the reader.  

Get your copy of The Decadence here!

Leon Craig is the author of queer haunted house novel The Decadence (2025) and gothic short story collection Parallel Hells (2022), both Sceptre Books UK. Leon's work has also featured in Hazlitt, Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, the Sunday Times and elsewhere and is forthcoming in the Berlin Babel anthology. Originally from London, she now lives in Berlin. Follow her on social media @leon_c_c.