E X T E N S I O N OLD DARK HOUSES The tradition of the spooky old house goes back to Edgar Allan Poe, father of the modern mystery story. In 1839, in describing the house where the action of the famous tale The Fall of the House of Usher takes place, he wrote: I know not how it was, but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. Poe was one of the first authors to give a house a physical persona, telling us it had eyelike windows that looked down upon the visitor, filling him with dread. Barely a decade later, Nathaniel Hawthorne described Pynchon House in a similar fashion, saying, The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressing, also of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within. Hawthorne s central setting for The House of Seven Gables was meant to be a metaphor for the depravity within its walls over the generations. When he tells us we couldn t walk by the house without passing through the shadow of that weather-beaten edifice, he was delivering the same message as Poe: old houses seem to have absorbed evil and that s why they have always made such wonderful settings for stories intended to frighten us. The same message is to be found in another story by Le Fanu, The Wyvern Mystery, which can be considered an early milepost of the old dark house genre. The walls of Carwell Grange, the country mansion where the newly married Alice (the heroine of the book) arrives, seem to drip menace. The young woman is greeted at the front steps by a cluster of glum-looking servants: Welcome to Carwell, Milady, says the dour housekeeper, with all the warmth of a prison warden. The old dark house genre didn t really get that name until after 1908 and the coming of Mary Roberts Rinehart s first bestseller, The Circular Staircase. In that book, a middle-aged woman moves into a large old country estate called Sunnyside. That name is full of irony, of course, because there s nothing sunny about what happens there, starting with the discovery of a dead body at the foot of the circular staircase. Rinehart s novel later became a successful play called The Bat, which was also filmed several times. It popularised the notion of the old dark house filled with secret corridors, hidden panels, spiral staircases and hooded killers, who usually tormented overnight guests whose car had broken down during a rainstorm. In the 1920s, there were lots of such stories, including John Willard s 1922 play The Cat and the Canary, which became one of the most famous of all silent movies. They continued into the 1950s. 91