In her debut, art historian and podcaster Blackwell Baines explores the haunted-house phenomenon through eight homes\u2014five in England, three in the U.S.\u2014tracing how a loosely defined building type became a remarkably stable cultural symbol, a space that \u201csubvert[s] our expectations of the house (or \u2018home\u2019) as a place of safety and privacy.\u201d Each dwelling anchors a different chapter and wider inquiry: The birth of Gothic revivalism is examined in a chapter on Strawberry Hill House, the \u201cglimmering white miniature castle\u201d where Horace Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto (1764); and a chapter on Chillingham Castle, marketed as \u201cthe Most Haunted Castle in Britain\u201d with its \u201ccandlelit ghost tours\u201d and \u201cspooky overnight stays,\u201d explores Victorian spiritualism through the story of Leonora Bennett, a \u201crelatively ordinary upper-middle-class American\u201d who married into British aristocracy and became the mistress of Chillingham. Blackwell Baines explains how spiritualism offered a \u201ctantalising opportunity to reconnect with lost loved ones,\u201d 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 \u201cghost guides,\u201d 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 \u201cnasty cold.\u201d She neither endorses nor dismisses the supernatural, treating ghosts as meaningful cultural artifacts rather than subjects for belief or debunking.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In her debut, art historian and podcaster Blackwell Baines explores the haunted-house phenomenon through eight homes\u2014five in England, three in the U.S.\u2014tracing how a loosely defined building type became a remarkably stable cultural symbol, a space that \u201csubvert[s] our expectations of the house (or \u2018home\u2019) as a place of safety and privacy.\u201d Each dwelling anchors […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6016,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6015"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6015\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}