How To Build A Haunted House by Caitlin Blackwell Baines: My night of terror in a haunted house

When she awoke in the dead of night in the unfamiliar bedroom, Caitlin Blackwell Baines had the strong sensation that someone – or something – was standing over her. She was overcome by an intense feeling of overwhelming dread; the certain knowledge that something awful was about to happen. And then she heard it, the unmistakable sound of a child crying. She screamed in terror at the top of her lungs: ‘Help me!’

It’s not as though she’d had no warning. The Myrtles, the 200-year-old former plantation house in Louisiana in which she was staying, bills itself as ‘one of America’s Most Haunted Homes’.

Before going to bed, Blackwell Baines had videoed the room on her phone so that she could tell if anything moved while she was asleep. She took special care to include the unnerving set of antique Victorian dolls on the mantelpiece. She had even jokily invited the ghosts to make themselves known. To complain when one apparently did might be thought a little ungrateful.

Blackwell Baines was actually there researching this entertaining book. How To Build A Haunted House is a ‘social, cultural and architectural history’ of haunted houses. The author, an art historian, is less interested in whether ghosts are real than in how they and their dwellings gained such a grip on our imaginations.

The Roman writer Pliny the Younger (AD61-113) recorded in a letter what is believed to be the first written account of a haunted house, so the idea is far from new and there are examples all over the world. As cultural icons, they loom the largest in the West, particularly the UK and the US, and these are the areas that Blackwell Baines focuses on. She considers a number of celebrated haunted houses, looking at how they embody the haunted house ideal.

Her subjects include London’s Hampton Court Palace, where a supposed ghost was captured on CCTV in 2003. The leaked footage went viral. To my mind, this particular phantom doesn’t look that otherworldly but I’m no expert.

Hampton Court is home to the ‘Haunted Gallery’, along which Henry VIII’s fifth wife Catherine Howard supposedly ran screaming months before her execution. A team of psychologists carried out a study of around 400 visitors that suggested there were locations in the gallery where participants consistently sensed something uncanny. However, the scientists also concluded that many of these experiences were caused by nothing more ghostly than a chilly updraught.

Another port of call is Norfolk’s Raynham Hall, where one of the most famous photographs of a ghost – the ‘Brown Lady’ – was taken in 1936. Raynham’s mistress at the time actively promoted the haunting, seeing it as a connection to a more glorious past.

‘After all, having a ghost meant having a history,’ writes Blackwell Baines. ‘And now more than ever, having a ghost was invaluable to once great families desperately clinging to their ancestral homes.’ Perhaps it’s no surprise that, over the course of a century or so, the ‘Brown Lady’ evolved from being a terrifying, eyeless figure to a benign, ethereal presence.

Then there’s Borley Rectory, in Essex, typically described as ‘the most haunted house in England’. (A high premium is placed on quantity rather than quality in the haunted world. Northumberland’s Chillingham Castle is marketed as ‘the most haunted castle in Britain’.) Borley became infamous as the result of long, heavily publicised monitoring by paranormal investigator Harry Price in the 1930s. Its ghosts included a lovelorn nun – a fairly standard fixture in the ghost pantheon. Legend had it that the rectory had been built on top of the ruins of a medieval monastery. Haunted houses being built on top of some sort of sacred space is another common trope in the lore. As Blackwell Baines points out, the house in the hit movie Poltergeist was built on an old graveyard.

We pick up all sorts of fascinating titbits on this supernatural safari. For example, Mary Queen of Scots is one of the hardest working inhabitants of the afterlife, said to haunt ten old piles in Scotland and the north of England. Anne Boleyn is almost as industrious. She frequents six different properties. In America, another woman who died an unnatural death is an equally prolific haunter. Marilyn Monroe has been spotted at a favourite bar, coffee shop and restaurant, two former residences, two hotels, an amusement park and a cemetery.

Blackwell Baines is an engaging writer but she can be somewhat credulous. She takes a ghost tour of Chillingham Castle with a guide who used to be a police detective.

‘You could hardly ask for a more reliable witness and guide than a man who spent 30 years of his life exposing fraud and sniffing out criminals,’ she writes. Really? She’s clearly not read much about the police recently. This former copper also claims to have been in regular communication with a late chatelaine of the castle via the medium of ‘divining rods’ so I’m not convinced we can consider him a complete neutral.

In other instances, Blackwell Baines seems surprisingly incurious. In the chapter on Borley Rectory, she mentions in passing and without further explanation that ‘The gruesome discovery of a human skull hidden in a cupboard did nothing to calm Mrs Smith’s already jangled nerves’. Mrs Smith found what hidden in a cupboard? Surely this extraordinary find requires at least another sentence or two.

There are also some errors, such as misspelt names and incorrect dates. Nevertheless, this is just the sort of book to read over Halloween, as the shadows lengthen and the candle flickers.

Blackwell Baines describes herself as a hopeful agnostic when it comes to ghosts. Her interest began when she was ten years old and on holiday with her parents in the American Deep South. Their hotel was a gleaming white antebellum mansion once serviced by slaves. She was shown to her shadowy attic room, complete with a four-poster bed and an antique rocking horse. She took one look and was so convinced that it was haunted that she couldn’t be persuaded to cross the threshold. Fair enough – I wouldn’t want to sleep in the same room as a creepy antique rocking horse either.

Her experience with the weeping child at the Myrtles – another location in the American South – is recounted in a postscript. Blackwell Baines’s scream woke her husband, who reassured her that it was ‘just a nightmare’. Of course, other explanations are available…