Haunted Houses vs. Living Houses

*Originally published on 9/21/09



I recently finished reading The Shining (for the third time in case you were curious), For those of you who have been living under a rock and don't know what the book is about, a family visits a hotel and, as it turns out, the hotel is a sentient being.

Living buildings have been used in fiction several times. More often than not, ghosts are involved. This would be fine, except that a vast majority of the cases of "living" buildings result in what is essentially a haunted house.

Two prime examples come from Stephen King, with his short story, 1408 and his novel, The Shining. One involves a room coming to life and another involves a living hotel. Both the room and hotel essentially function as any haunted house would.

The story makes a point to say that there aren't any ghosts involved, just an evil room. Yet, the room functions in much the same way a haunted house would. Even ghosts have been shown to have reality warping powers, making hallways extend or turning a door into a solid brick wall so the more extreme phenomenon falls under the possibility of a simple, albeit powerful, haunting.

The one instance I've come across of a true "living building" came in the CGI film Monster House. Again, a ghost was involved, but rather than simply haunt the place, the soul actually bonded with the building, turning the house in to a being that could eat, run and roar.

If you haven't seen the film, I do recommend it as it is quite good.

Ghosts seem to be the only viable means of bringing a house, hotel, or building to life. It's the only way you can add a soul or spirit to something that is inanimate. Unless somebody conjured up some other worldly entity and it either bonded with the building. Even then, you could call it a sort of haunting. Or maybe the being, whatever it was, just manifested in that shape (like Gozer manifested as Stay Puft in Ghostbusters) as a trap.

Then again, maybe sentience could be attained by having a lot of ghosts like the Overlook did. Machines have often gained sentience after collecting a certain amount of information or having certain experiences, maybe enough resident psychokinetic energy would be enough to spark life in a building. Wouldn't that be something?

If a building is given life, it should act like it. Simply mimicking a haunted building just gives people the false impression that haunted and living are synonymous when they really shouldn't be.