A Haunting on the Hill

by Elizabeth Hand

In memory of Peter Straub Beloved friend and tireless guide through the dark

This workaday actuality of ours—with its bricks, its streets, its woods, its hills, its waters—may have queer and, possibly, terrifying holes in it. —Walter de la Mare

Most houses sleep, and nearly all of them dream: of conflagrations and celebrations, births and buckled floors; of children’s footsteps and clapboards in need of repair, of ailing pets and peeling paint, wakes and weddings and windows that no longer keep out rain and snow but welcome them, furtively, when no one is home to notice.

Hill House neither sleeps nor dreams. Shrouded within its overgrown lawns and sprawling woodlands, the long shadows of mountains and ancient oaks, Hill House watches. Hill House waits.

I also felt an odd restlessness, a nagging sense that there was somewhere I needed to be.

It was beautiful up here. The long winding journey along the river, the city’s sprawl giving way first to outer exurbia—apple orchards, pastures repurposed as solar farms, and warehouses, all those not-yet-gentrified, sketchy-seeming river towns, poisoned by brownfields and decades of poverty.

Little towns long since colonized by self-styled artists and artisans who are really just people rich enough to flee the city and call themselves whatever they want. Craft brewers, textile designers, glass artists specializing in bespoke bongs and neti pots. Dog chiropractors. Masons who would demolish a centuries-old fieldstone chimney, number each stone, and then rebuild it, piece by piece, in an adjoining room.

“There must be a problem with the water supply or something. That whole town’s been depressed for as long as we’ve been coming here. You’d think they’d be happy to expand their tax base, but they really, really hate outsiders.”

The air had the intoxicating bite of early autumn: goldenrod and dry sedge and the first fallen leaves, cut with the river’s scent of fish and mud.

Running lines with them; watching them slowly gain confidence; witnessing the magic that never failed to take over, when they finally put on costumes and makeup and looked at themselves in amazement, realizing they had become someone, something, new and wonderful and strange.

autumn again felt like possibility—a chance to be someone else, not who I’d been just weeks earlier. A shift in attitude and wardrobe. New shoes; a new career. Being out of the city now, following the river north, made me feel like wonderful things were about to happen.

You know your town has hit bottom when even the dollar store has closed.

I ATE THIS CHURCH —SATAN I frowned, then realized a letter was missing. I HATE THIS CHURCH—SATAN.

When you’re confronted with something deeply strange or obviously implausible in a book or movie or painting, you know it means something. It’s a symbol, a clue. A warning.

Everything about this morning had taken on a strange tone—distance, time, even the sunlight, which now looked more like sunset than sunrise, a continuous crimson flicker through the branches of centuries-old trees.

Yet I felt a peculiar, almost perverse, exhilaration, the way I used to feel when I’d sit down at my laptop to write.

Besides, all writers talk to themselves. Especially playwrights. It’s an occupational hazard. With all those voices in your head, you long to hear the words.

For me, that was the most magical moment in theater—the first instant during a reading when an actor disappears and your character takes their place. That moment of transformation had always felt like ecstasy, like a ritual of transubstantiation. “Or possession,” my friend Stevie Liddell had retorted, when I’d tried to explain the sensation to him. “Like you’re not giving any agency to the actor. Like it’s some woo-woo thing that you make happen.”

I wish I could say that The Witch of Edmonton was a lost gem, but I thought it was a mess. A misogynistic patchwork of Jacobean melodrama, unfunny rustics, thwarted romance, and a bigamist who murders one of his wives to collect a larger dowry from the other.

Witches were totally in Stevie’s wheelhouse, along with psychotropic herbs, Victorian toy theaters, obscure Eastern European horror films, and social media accounts belonging to dead Hollywood starlets.

“So then this minister, Henry Goodcole, wrote a pamphlet about Elizabeth’s story, as a warning for other witches.” “Right! Because otherwise, they would all be lining up to get burned at the stake.”

Like we have true crime series now? Back then, there were broadsheets and murder ballads about all kinds of shit.

“Remember, I’ve seen Witchfinder General seven times. The M.O. is always to find an unmarried woman, blame her, and execute her.”

No one ever went broke showing blood and guts and sex. Four hundred years later, we’re still listening to podcasts about the same kinds of stuff.”

The well of misogyny never runs dry.

She was enthralled with the Child Ballads, the classic collection of ancient songs she loved as if they were all her own, especially the more gruesome murder ballads.

Like me, Elizabeth Sawyer had been unfairly condemned by others. Like me, she was an older woman—I was barely forty, but in Elizabeth’s time the average life expectancy was only forty-two. The fictional Elizabeth had made a pact with the Devil to secure her success, but I didn’t need to go that far.

Space—that was what I sensed now, driving up that road to nowhere, below a sky that seemed to promise some powerful, nearly inconceivable revelation. Endless space. Endless possibility.

In theater, you’re occasionally confronted with set designs that don’t work. Backdrops where the perspective is skewed, color choices that make you cringe, furniture that doesn’t suit the setting. Perhaps the stage itself is off: a two-hander that calls for intimacy drowns beyond a huge proscenium, or a full-cast musical suffocates within a black box. Often, something just doesn’t feel right—the theater was poorly constructed, the sight lines are terrible, the stage is raked so steeply that actors stumble. Yet now and then, the space itself feels wrong.

Just looking at the gray house made me feel both exhilarated and queasy, like wearing a pair of VR goggles that haven’t been adjusted correctly.

It’s jolie laide, I told myself, like one of those actors whose unconventional features shouldn’t conspire to beauty but somehow do.

I felt a sudden pang, a yearning for something I hadn’t known I wanted.

My initial revulsion—that feeling that the house held some subcutaneous wrongness, like cancerous cells manifesting in the body years before detection—had disappeared.

Luck had brought me here, I decided, luck or fate or some other impulse I couldn’t name. A few hours ago, I couldn’t even have imagined a place like this. Now I could think of nothing else.

Sunlight now flooded the veranda and upper stories, turning the windows to gold. Only the front door remained in twilight, the knocker now a black smear, its face lost to shadow.

Nisa loved murder ballads the way some people love show tunes. Instead of belting out “Let It Go” at parties, she’d sing “Child Owlet” or, in a rare nod to the twentieth century, “Cell Block Tango.”

“It’s an old house,” replied Ainsley. “It breathes.”

“‘Demented’?” Nisa started to giggle, then quickly covered her mouth at Ainsley’s expression. “Sorry! I never heard someone say that about a house. Maybe in a movie but not in real life.” “Is this real life?” Ainsley stared at each of us, so keenly I thought she must be joking. But then I recalled how she’d looked moments ago—contemptuous but also angry. Composing myself, I stared back at her and replied, “You tell me.”

Every old house has a history,” Ainsley said, her sharp features even more sphinxlike. “Hill House plays to people’s expectations. Usually they think it’s going to make them happy. A beautiful old mansion! Views for days! Et cetera, et cetera. Then they move here and they’re just bored and miserable.

I listened, enthralled as, gradually, the song’s tone changed—not the tune but the words, and the way that the singer made them come alive, as though awakening something that might have better been left sleeping. The room filled with a susurrus of whispered and half-sung words that formed an eerie counterpoint, voices twining around the singer’s in a harmony I found unsettling.

“Are you having second thoughts?” she asked me. “No. I’m still processing my first thoughts. What about you?”

“People project their own expectations onto it. Old houses can be noisy. They settle. The beams and walls expand and contract with the weather. Raccoons get into the attic; there are mice and flying squirrels and critters everywhere. House shrews, voles. That’s country life. If you live here, you get used to it.”

“The woman whose husband built the place was killed when her carriage ran into a tree. That was in 1880. Then another woman was killed about sixty years ago when her car ran into the same tree. Same thing happened again with another woman in the eighties. They finally cut the tree down.”

“Haunted houses never have cell reception.” Nisa turned to face Stevie. “That’s how you know they’re haunted.”

“Is love dysphoria a thing?”

Yet when she’d just touched his hand, she’d felt that familiar shock of recognition—intense desire and longing, not just to be with him but to protect him.

With Stevie, it was easy to feel young, the way she had when she’d first started singing at open mics and seen the wonder in people’s eyes. Who wouldn’t want to feel like that all the time? That was why she loved him.

Nisa had grown up with those songs, steeped in their charged beauty and terror, in the legacy of violence that haunted women and children. She loved that tragedy could be transformed into works of uncanny, unsettling beauty, passed down for hundreds of years.

People think that old ballads are about love, but really, they’re about blood.

the world outside felt both familiar and unknown, shimmering with some secret meaning.