Writing Haunted House Stories – Building an atmosphere through the setting

The atmosphere hits your character uneasily. 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 in which high school students dare to spend a night, past the creaking doors to cautiously explore the strange moans within its indefinable shadows. Even though 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 ends.

So where do you start? Creating a haunted house story is a scary and daunting task. To make things easier for you, 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 give hints about the decade. Maybe your character is listening hell disco just before a psycho sets the house on fire. Maybe your character is trembling 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. This not only sets the scene for her, but also gives you the opportunity to add a bit of dimension and foreshadowing to her story.

Torment your readers by using the right word

Using the correct word can also set the stage in the haunted house story. Consider this sentence:

Beverly Harris entered the house.

It’s not very creative at all. There is hardly any setting and the action is not descriptive at all. Let’s try another set of words:

Beverly, overwhelmed by looming danger, slipped out the door.

Better. He crawled is a description stronger than the word path. This is an acceptable description that readers will probably enjoy. But couldn’t we 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, empathetic that 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 story. 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 swamp mansion decorated in a French Creole style, or perhaps a simple two-story Washington state cottage 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 should reflect its geographic location, and its personality should be revealed through the protagonist’s perspective. 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 him speak. Let him lure your protagonist back into his swampy tendrils.

Another way to give your home character through ambiance is to re-set the mood according to the speech of the people in your geographic region. 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 others and each person has a different outlook 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 of your home’s personality. 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 Nightmare House see it as a normal house at first. Once they start hearing the strange stories, paranoia begins to take over and pretty soon the house takes on a more sinister appearance. No, it does not physically change. 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 all over the world. There are literally hundreds if not Thousands which take place in a haunted cabin in the middle of the woods. For your horror story to survive the fierce competition, it must be unique. You 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 wooded Canadian mountains, maybe your story is about a haunted houseboat on Puget Sound. Or perhaps consider moving your cliché 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 American colonial 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 ambiance. Remember that the further your house is from the equator, the more drastic your day and night hours become. A haunted house located in the lower parts of South America, for example, will spend at least one full month in total darkness in winter and one full month in total daylight in summer.

Come in if you dare

HP Lovecraft was a master in creating atmospheres through the stage. He used the description of the landscapes and neighborhoods to give the reader a sinister feeling long before his character came near the house. Take this example of The image in the house:

… They climb the moonlit towers of the ruined Rhine castles and tumble down the black cobwebbed steps under the scattered stones of forgotten cities … The haunted forest and desolate mountains [are] sanctuaries, and linger around the sinister monoliths of uninhabited islands… But the true epicure in the terrible and unspeakable horror is the main end and justification of existence, 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 terrifying.

This paints a very sophisticated picture using carefully chosen adjectives and a direct approach. Although HP Lovecraft has exceeded expectations in horror at its finest, award-winning author Joe Schreiber pens a more literal description of the Round House in one of his most chilling haunted house stories: No doors, no windows:

… It was sparse and simple and narrow, with a curved concrete floor and smooth, nearly circular black walls that did not appear to have been painted black, but were somehow sculpted from a naturally 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 curving, sinuous quality just out of the glow of the lighter..

Both excellent examples describe the haunted house using the 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 say cheekily, “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 sane person would enter it, especially if he only possessed a lighter.

when is 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, sanitariums, junkyards, prisons, schools, caves, and even sewers could all 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 to read. Read all the haunted house stories you can find. dozens. Hundreds. See how they establish the personality of the house. Notice how each writer takes a different approach. Pay particular attention to the choice of words and the flow of sentences. read read, read.

Some excellent recommendations are:

No doors, no windows by Joe Schreiber

Creepy Tales of Horror and the Macabre by HP Lovecraft

hell house by Richard Matheson

Black woman by Susan Hill

The House of Nightmares series by Douglas Clegg