The atmosphere hits your character with trepidation. Consider the houses that might be in your neighborhood. You know which one: it’s the house that pedestrians cross the street to avoid. It is the house where high school students dare to spend a night, past the creaking doors to cautiously explore the strange moans within their undefinable shadows. Although nothing tangible has actually happened, your characters are afraid. This fear comes from the atmosphere: The environment that surrounds your house and your characters. The atmosphere is the mood, and that mood should haunt your readers long after the story is over.
So where do you start? Creating a haunted house story is a scary and daunting task. To make things easier for yourself, set the date and time from the beginning of your story. If you write a foreword, start the story with your date and time, or at least hint at the decade. Maybe your character is listening disco hell just before a psychopath sets fire to the house. Maybe your character is shivering in the shadows, her hat is drenched in sweat, and she’s praying that her flashlight stays on long enough for her to be rescued. Not only does this set the scene for her, but it also gives you the opportunity to add a bit of dimension and foreshadowing to her story.
Torment your readers by using the correct word
Using the correct word can also set the stage in the haunted house story. Consider this phrase:
Beverly Harris entered the house.
It’s not very creative at all. There is hardly any setting and the action is not at all descriptive. Let’s try another set of words:
Beverly, overwhelmed by incipient danger, slipped out the door.
Better. He crawled is a description stronger than the word way. This is an acceptable description that readers will probably enjoy. But could we not write this sentence in fewer and more ominous words? I think we can:
The house consumed her.
Sinister, descriptive and simple. This makes the reader uncomfortable; therefore, that empathetic should be the goal of him as a writer. So that your readers feel what your characters feel.
Rent, Rent, Rent
Your haunted house is a character like the rest of your cast. It must have a personality. It should appeal to your characters, just like a protagonist is looking for a villain. It must have a personality and a history. Your protagonist wants something and your house also wants something. So what kind of personality does your house have? Consider the location. It could be a mansion on a swamp decorated in a French Creole style, or maybe a simple two-story cabin in Washington state like Stephen King’s. Alan Wake. Perhaps it’s even more classic, like a fortified castle perched high on a cliff above a sleepy village. Each of these houses must reflect its geographical location, and its personality must be revealed through the perspective of the protagonist. If your house could talk, would it have an accent? How would you show that? The decoration? The architecture? The location of your haunted house defines its personality. Let me speak. Let him lure your protagonist back into his swampy tendrils.
Another way to give your home personality through ambience is by restoring the environment according to the speech of the people in your geographical area. People in the deep south speak differently to each other in Miami and people in Miami speak differently than people in Montana. People gossip about each other and each person has a different perspective on life. Apply that to your haunted house. No matter the geographic location, your house has a backstory and people will gossip about it. What they say and how they say it can reveal more about the personality of your home. Every time your character hears a story, the perspective of it will change. For example, Infinity written by Douglas Clegg, some of the characters who stay in the Nightmare House see it as a normal house at first. Once they start hearing the strange stories, the paranoia begins to take over and soon the house takes on a more sinister appearance. No, it does not change physically. What changes is the perception that the character has of the house. Your house is another character that deserves gossip. Everybody has secrets; your haunted house too.
Originality is vital
There are already a number of haunted house movies and books taking place in all sorts of settings around the world. There are literally hundreds if not Thousands that take place in an enchanted cabin in the middle of the forest. For your horror story to survive fierce competition, it must be unique. It must bring something new to a concept that has been done over and over again. Being unique is vital for your story to survive. Creative writers must be flexible. Instead of a haunted cabin in the forested Canadian mountains, maybe your story is about a haunted houseboat on Puget Sound. Or maybe consider moving your clichéd southern plantation to the sunny beachfront tropics of Africa, surrounded by palm trees, monkeys and deadly coconut-sized spiders. Originality doesn’t have to be so extreme either. Your setting may be in the colonial American suburbs of Massachusetts, but the architecture is ultra-modern.
One last thing to consider when choosing an original setting for your haunted house story is lighting and setting. Remember that the farther your home is from the equator, the more drastic your hours of day and night become. A haunted house located in the lower parts of South America, for example, will spend at least a full month in total darkness in winter and a full month in total daylight in summer.
come in if you dare
HP Lovecraft was a master at creating atmosphere through the stage. He used the description of the landscapes and neighborhoods to give the reader an ominous feeling long before his character approached the house. Take this example from The image in the house:
… They climb the moonlit towers of the ruined castles on the Rhine and fall down the black cobwebbed steps under the scattered stones of the forgotten cities … The haunted forest and the desolate mountains [are] shrines, and linger around the sinister monoliths of uninhabited islands… But the true epicurean in the terrible and unspeakable horror is the main end and justification of existence, he esteems above all the old and lonely farms of the forests of New England… Its strength, loneliness, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfect portion of the hideous.
This paints a very sophisticated picture using carefully chosen adjectives and a direct approach. Although HP Lovecraft has exceeded expectations for horror at its finest, award-winning author Joe Schreiber writes a more literal description of the Round House in one of his most chilling haunted house stories: No doors, no windows:
… It was sparse, plain, and narrow, with a curved concrete floor and smooth, almost circular, black walls that didn’t appear to have been painted black, but were somehow carved out of a natural black material, some substance that literally absorbed light. There were no doors or windows. Although the passageway appeared to be straight, there was definitely a curve, a sinuous quality just outside the glow of the lighter..
Both of these excellent examples describe the haunted house using atmosphere and setting in different ways. They work well because of the strong word choice and vivid, unnatural descriptions that go beyond the details of how someone would normally describe a house. Joe Schreiber didn’t just cheekily say, “The room was round.” Instead, he painted such a vivid picture that the reader simply got the feeling that this room was unnatural and that no person in his right mind would enter it, especially if he only owned a lighter.
when is it a haunted house no a haunted house?
A haunted house is not always necessarily a house. It can be an apartment or a condo on the beach. Sometimes it is a graveyard where the spirits of the dead live, work and haunt as in Neil Gaiman’s novel, the graveyard book. Haunted factories, sanatoriums, junkyards, prisons, schools, caves, and even sewers could be “haunted house” stories. All the same rules apply.
If you’re serious about writing a haunted house story, then the best thing you can do for yourself and your story is read. Read all the haunted house stories you can find. dozens. Hundreds. See how they set the personality of the house. Notice how each writer takes a different approach. Pay special attention to word choice and sentence fluency. read read, read.
Some great recommendations are:
No doors, no windows by Joe Schreiber
Creepy tales of terror and the macabre by H. P. Lovecraft
hell house by Richard Matheson
Black woman by Susan Hill
The House of Nightmares series by Douglas Clegg