Haunted Houses
Rooms that remember. A house is supposed to be the one place you are safe, which is exactly why a story that turns the walls against you works so well. Here are hauntings in manor houses, sublets, duplexes, farmhouses and one small house museum.
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The Other Half
The other half of our duplex has been empty for eleven years. Every night, through the bedroom wall, a couple in there rehearses the conversation my wife and I will have tomorrow.
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The Old Nurse's Story Classic
A young nursemaid takes an orphaned girl to a half-shut manor house on the Northumberland fells, where a phantom child beats at the window in the snow, asking to be let in.
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Self-Guided Tour
Welcome to the Ashcombe House, a historic home museum preserved exactly as the family left it in 1891. Please collect a headset from the front desk. Enter the number posted in each room to hear about it.
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The Fall of the House of Usher Classic
A man answers an old friend's desperate letter and arrives at a crumbling mansion where the house itself seems to be listening.
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The Yellow Wallpaper Classic
Ordered to rest in a rented country house, a young wife starts to study the patterns in her bedroom's ugly yellow wallpaper.
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The Judge's House Classic
A student seeking total quiet to prepare for his exams rents an empty old house in a market town, despite the landlady's horror.
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Afterward Classic
An American couple buy an old house in Dorset, and they are told that it has a ghost, though you never know it's a ghost until long afterward.
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Home Inspection Report, 18 Tamarack Lane
A pre-purchase home inspection report for a 1962 Cape in coastal Maine, shared by the buyer who commissioned it. The roof needs work. The water heater is near the end of its life. The basement stairs have fourteen steps going down and thirteen coming up.
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The Room in the Tower Classic
For fifteen years a man has dreamed of the same country house and the same quiet family, and of a room in the tower he must not enter. Then he is invited to stay there.
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The Open Door Classic
A colonel's son falls dangerously ill after hearing a voice crying in the ruins beside their rented Scottish house.
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The Whistling Room Classic
Carnacki is called to an Irish castle where one room emits a dreadful whistling, and it seems to be getting angrier.
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The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain Classic
A curious gentleman, his servant and his dog spend a night in a London house that no tenant can endure.
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What Was It? Classic
Boarders in a supposedly haunted New York house are amused by the rumours, until one night something unseen attacks one of them.
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The Upper Berth Classic
A seasoned traveller tells how he was assigned stateroom 105 on a transatlantic liner, a cabin whose previous passengers all went overboard.
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Kerfol Classic
A man viewing an abandoned manor house in Brittany is greeted by a silent pack of dogs that do not bark or follow him.
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Continue Watching
A new show turned up in the Continue Watching row on our TV. Season 1, Episode 4. Neither of us had ever heard of it. The thumbnail was our kitchen, from up near the ceiling, at night.
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The Beckoning Fair One Classic
A struggling novelist rents rooms in a shabby old house, and his work begins to flow, as he grows jealous of anyone who interrupts him.
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Caterpillars Classic
A guest at a beautiful Italian villa wakes in the night and looks into the unused bedroom next door.
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Minutes, Regular Meeting
Excerpts from a year of homeowners' association minutes in an Arizona subdivision. The main items are pool hours, a dispute about a basketball hoop, and the house at the end of Mesquite Court, which is not on the plat.
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The Toll-House Classic
Four young men accept a dare to spend a night in an abandoned toll-house where no tenant has survived a night.
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Notes for the Subletter
I sublet a fourth-floor walk-up for the summer. The tenant left me a typed page of notes about the apartment, taped inside the kitchen cabinet. Most of them are about the radiator.
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The Empty House Classic
A man and his formidable aunt spend a night in a house where a terrible crime once happened, armed with a candle and their nerves.
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The Red Room Classic
A confident young man insists on spending the night in a castle's notorious red room, despite the warnings of its three ancient custodians.
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The Middle Toe of the Right Foot Classic
A wager challenges a newcomer to spend a night in the old Manton house, scene of a horrible crime, and fight a duel in the dark.
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The Apparition Classic
An elderly marquis tells how, as a young man, a friend's request to fetch some papers from a shuttered château led to an encounter he never explained.
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Room 7
My robot vacuum builds a map of my house with a laser. My house has six rooms. The map has seven, and every night at 2 a.m. the vacuum spends forty minutes cleaning the one that isn't there.
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The Listener Classic
A struggling writer finds unusually cheap rooms in London, then begins to sense that someone is always on the other side of the wall.
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Number 13 Classic
A Danish hotel has no room 13, so why can a guest in room 12 hear someone singing next door every night?
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Madam Crowl's Ghost Classic
An old woman recalls the winter she was a thirteen-year-old servant girl at Applewale House, where an ancient mistress lay dying upstairs.
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The Gateway of the Monster Classic
The occult investigator Carnacki spends a night in a manor-house room where a door slams itself shut and the bedclothes are flung into corners.
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Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street Classic
Two medical students take cheap lodgings in an old Dublin house once owned by a notorious judge, and begin to dream badly.
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Estate Inventory, Lots 1–64
An estate liquidator's working inventory for a farmhouse in Vermont, sent to us by the heir. Everything in the house came in pairs, one for the man who lived there and one for someone else. Lot 64 is not for sale.
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No. 252 Rue M. le Prince Classic
An American visitor to Paris is offered the chance to spend a night alone in a notorious house whose former owner was a sorceress.