This essay examines Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, texts featuring sentient house hauntings. The author focuses on how the family unit in each text undergoes drastic destruction, arguing that the breakdown of the family is the true source of horror in such hauntings where a traditional ghost is not present.

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