The Haunting of Hill House

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson Page A

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Authors: Shirley Jackson
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“Without telling them where or what, of course.”
    “Presumably your friends feel less strongly about scientific experiments than mine. Yes.” The doctor sighed again. “Camping. At my age. And yet that they believed. Well.” He straightened up again and fumbled at his side, perhaps for a yardstick. “I first heard about Hill House a year ago, from a former tenant. He began by assuring me that he had left Hill House because his family objected to living so far out in the country, and ended by saying that in his opinion the house ought to be burned down and the ground sowed with salt. I learned of other people who had rented Hill House, and found that none of them had stayed more than a few days, certainly never the full terms of their leases, giving reasons that ranged from the dampness of the location—not at all true, by the way; the house is very dry—to a pressing need to move elsewhere, for business reasons. That is, every tenant who has left Hill House hastily has made an effort to supply a rational reason for leaving, and yet every one of them has left. I tried, of course, to learn more from these former tenants, and yet in no case could I persuade them to discuss the house; they all seemed most unwilling to give me information and were, in fact, reluctant to recall the details of their several stays. In only one opinion were they united. Without exception, every person who has spent any length of time in this house urged me to stay as far away from it as possible. Not one of the former tenants could bring himself to admit that Hill House was haunted, but when I visited Hillsdale and looked up the newspaper records—”
    “Newspapers?” Theodora asked. “Was there a scandal?”
    “Oh, yes,” the doctor said. “A perfectly splendid scandal, with a suicide and madness and lawsuits. Then I learned that the local people had no doubts about the house. I heard a dozen different stories, of course—it is really unbelievably difficult to get accurate information about a haunted house; it would astonish you to know what I have gone through to learn only as much as I have—and as a result I went to Mrs. Sanderson, Luke’s aunt, and arranged to rent Hill House. She was most frank about its undesirability—”
    “It’s harder to burn down a house than you think,” Luke said.
    “—but agreed to allow me a short lease to carry out my researches, on condition that a member of the family be one of my party.”
    “They hope,” Luke said solemnly, “that I will dissuade you from digging up the lovely old scandals.”
    “There. Now I have explained how I happen to be here, and why Luke has come. As for you two ladies, we all know by now that you are here because I wrote you, and you accepted my invitation. I hoped that each of you might, in her own way, intensify the forces at work in the house; Theodora has shown herself possessed of some telepathic ability, and Eleanor has in the past been intimately involved in poltergeist phenomena—”
    “I?”
    “Of course.” The doctor looked at her curiously. “Many years ago, when you were a child. The stones—”
    Eleanor frowned, and shook her head. Her fingers trembled around the stem of her glass, and then she said, “That was the neighbors. My mother said the neighbors did that. People are always jealous.”
    “Perhaps so.” The doctor spoke quietly and smiled at Eleanor. “The incident has been forgotten long ago, of course; I only mentioned it because that is why I wanted you in Hill House.”
    “When I was a child,” Theodora said lazily, “—‘many years ago,’ Doctor, as you put it so tactfully—I was whipped for throwing a brick through a greenhouse roof. I remember I thought about it for a long time, remembering the whipping but remembering also the lovely crash, and after thinking about it very seriously I went out and did it again.”
    “I don’t remember very well,” Eleanor said uncertainly to the doctor.
    “But why? ” Theodora

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