Shirley Jackson

I think what makes Shirley Jackson's The Haunting if Hill House so creepy and effective as a ghost story is: first, her direct approach to the issue of specters, gathering a group (4) of interested skeptics, people willing to believe in ghosts but needing to be convinced through evidence or experience, which is to say much like her readership - we can identify w each of the participants and we can say, like them, that we're not afraid of ghosts but that's because e don't believe in them. What would our reaction be if we came across evidence of a spirit? Probably much like theirs - shock and fright to the degree possible only because of our initial disbelief. Second, she's great at indirection. She doesn't condescending does she have physical manifestations of a ghost appear in the night (at least not in the first 2/3 of the novel); rather, the 4 are wakened in the night by banging noises and the evidence seen afterwords are words written in chalk and a strange area of coldness that the men fruitlessly try to measure. The working principal is that things not seen or barely perceived are the most frightening (and most credible - who hasn't heard a mysterious banging in the night?). Similarly, they're not "locked in" to the haunted house - there's a sense they could leave at any time, which just makes it more frightening because we sense if they did try to leave something would go wrong - car won't start or gate will be frozen shut. We want to tell the to get the hell out of this creepy house but we know they will not and should not run out into the night - and in the daytime everything looks ok anyway: that's when their courage is up and when they think, sure, what's another night, nothing's happened - yet.

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