Day 3

By now, the idea that a haunted house itself possesses a kind of malevolence has become a horror-movie trope. But Jackson may have originated it with Hill House: the idea that the house, not whatever is haunting it, is the source of the evil. Jackson was inspired by various real-life houses said to be haunted, including the Winchester Mystery House in California, which has a disorienting layout like Hill House’s, as well as European castles like Neuschwanstein and houses like this one designed by her own great-great-grandfather, one of the first architects of San Francisco. But while Hill House includes elements from many of her models, she invested it with an emotional valence that was distinctly hers.

“No Human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair.”

The house’s “face”—she doesn’t call it a façade—seems “awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice”; it rears “its great head back against the sky.” Eleanor feels the house has it in for her. Even her bedroom has “an unbelievably faulty design which left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions, so that the walls seemed always in one direction a fraction longer than the eye could endure, and in another direction a fraction less than the barest possible tolerable length.” Suddenly all her ideas about this visit—like the new clothes she has bought for the occasion—seem laughable.

The arrival of Theodora—“Just Theodora”—brightens Eleanor’s mood, and the novel’s. Although indeed, as Eleanor will soon experience, it’s difficult to be around someone who can read your mind. Theodora seems to be using her gifts here for positive purposes. “Don’t be so afraid all the time,” she tells Eleanor, stroking her cheek. “We never know where our courage is coming from.” Can she be trusted?

Eleanor and Theodora are having a lovely time on the Hill House grounds, admiring the brook and the “great hills” beyond, when they see, or think they see, something in the grass.

“Frozen, shoulders pressed together, they stared, watching the spot of hillside across the brook where the grass moved, watching something unseen move slowly across the bright green hill, chilling the sunlight and the dancing little brook. ‘What is it?’ Eleanor said in a breath, and Theodora put a strong hand on her wrist.
‘It’s gone,’ Theodora said clearly, and the sun came back and it was warm again. ‘It was a rabbit,’ Theodora said.”

Notice the musicality of that first sentence. Watching the spot of hillside… watching something unseen… chilling the sunlight and the dancing little brook. A lesser writer couldn’t get away with a phrase like “watching something unseen,” on its face an absurdity. How can you watch something that remains unseen? How can something remain unseen, even as you watch it? That, in a phrase, is the paradox of Hill House.