Montague hopes to find scientific evidence of the existence of the supernatural. John Montague, an investigator of the supernatural Eleanor Vance, a shy young woman who resents caring for her demanding, disabled mother Theodora, a bohemian artist, and Luke Sanderson, the young heir to Hill House, who is host to the others. The story concerns four main characters: Dr. Hill House is a mansion in a location that is never specified but is between many hills. Jackson also read volume upon volume of traditional ghost stories while preparing to write her own, "No one can get into a novel about a haunted house without hitting the subject of reality head-on either I have to believe in ghosts, which I do, or I have to write another kind of novel altogether."Īs part of her process, Jackson sketched floor plans of the downstairs and upstairs of Hill House and a rendering of the exterior.
According to Jackson, her mother identified the house as one the author's own great-great-grandfather, an architect who had designed some of San Francisco's oldest buildings, had built. She asked her mother, who lived in California, to help find information about the dwelling. She later claimed to have found a picture in a magazine of a California house she believed was suitably haunted-looking. What Jackson discovered in their "dry reports was not the story of a haunted house, it was the story of several earnest, I believe misguided, certainly determined people, with their differing motivations and background." Excited by the prospect of creating her own haunted house and the characters to explore it, she launched into research. The author decided to write "a ghost story" after reading about a group of nineteenth century "psychic researchers" who studied a house and somberly reported their supposedly scientific findings to the Society for Psychic Research.
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