HOW TO BUILD A HAUNTED HOUSE

In her debut, art historian and podcaster Blackwell Baines explores the haunted-house phenomenon through eight homes—five in England, three in the U.S.—tracing how a loosely defined building type became a remarkably stable cultural symbol, a space that “subvert[s] our expectations of the house (or ‘home’) as a place of safety and privacy.” Each dwelling anchors a different chapter and wider inquiry: The birth of Gothic revivalism is examined in a chapter on Strawberry Hill House, the “glimmering white miniature castle” where Horace Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto (1764); and a chapter on Chillingham Castle, marketed as “the Most Haunted Castle in Britain” with its “candlelit ghost tours” and “spooky overnight stays,” explores Victorian spiritualism through the story of Leonora Bennett, a “relatively ordinary upper-middle-class American” who married into British aristocracy and became the mistress of Chillingham. Blackwell Baines explains how spiritualism offered a “tantalising opportunity to reconnect with lost loved ones,” a desire especially acute after the staggering death tolls of the Crimean and Civil Wars. The chapters on plantation tourism in the American South and Sarah Winchester as a convenient lightning rod for contemporary anxieties about firearms and westward expansion are especially sharp. The author is a personable and engaging guide, comfortable in archives and attics alike. She mines letters, legal records, and architectural plans but also interviews tour guides, descendants, and modern “ghost guides,” occasionally inserting herself into the narrative. During a visit to Hampton Court, the onetime residence of Henry VIII, she notes that her ability to assess the supernatural qualities of the Haunted Gallery was hampered by a “nasty cold.” She neither endorses nor dismisses the supernatural, treating ghosts as meaningful cultural artifacts rather than subjects for belief or debunking.