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Are McMansions the New Haunted Houses? Evaluating a Flawed Argument about Why Some Houses Are Scary

10/4/2016

30 Comments

 
Yesterday I read a very interesting but flawed argument in Slate magazine about the origin of haunted houses. Timed to the upcoming Halloween festivities, the article is an excerpt from the new book Ghostland by Colin Dickey, and I disagree with his evaluation of where haunted houses come from, pretty much wholesale. And as somebody who literally wrote the book on the horror genre, I have more than a little experience with the sources from which Dickey draws his argument.
According to Dickey, haunted houses are the product of unusual architecture that does not conform to our expectations about what a “normal” house should look like. To that end, he suggests that the haunted house is one that is aesthetically “wrong,” meaning that it violates that traditional language of architecture or the traditional rules of home design. Consequently, he believes that McMansions, with their unstable floor plans and irregular application slapdash and random architectural embellishments, are prime locations for a new locus of hauntings.
 
To support this argument, Dickey turns to horror literature. He cites Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables (1851), which contains the seven titular gables and a garbled architecture born of its remodeling and reuse over the years. He then cites Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), in which the title house seems to have a “wild inconsistency.” To these he adds Hill House, from Shirley Jackson’s masterful Haunting of Hill House (1959), whose angles were all off-kilter, and finally the McMansion from the 2009 movie Paranormal Activity, whose exterior is never seen in the film but which nevertheless is for Dickey unbalanced and ugly.
What is this connection between odd constructions and ghosts? Perhaps it’s because these strange buildings defy common sense and time-honed principles, creating in us a sense of unease that’s hard to name. The principles of architecture—the ones so readily abused by McMansions—didn’t appear overnight; they emerged from centuries of use and tradition. They reflect how we move through houses and how we are most comfortable in them. They maximize the kinds of spaces where we feel most at home, organized around layouts that facilitate ease of use and movement.
Dickey is partially correct here: Odd angles can be disturbing. H. P. Lovecraft used them in “The Dreams in the Witch-House” to suggest cosmic horror, and they define the unsettling architecture of the Old Ones in “The Cal of Cthulhu.” But notice that Dickey elides his point—moving seamlessly from artistic representations of haunted houses to real-world beliefs about haunted houses—all without acknowledging the change from fiction to fact.
 
As someone who has read more than his fair share of ghost stories, several problems immediately jumped out at me. First, the stories that Dickey chose from literature are examples of psychological horror rather than explicitly supernatural horror. As a result, the odd buildings in which they occur externalize the imbalance within the characters. The houses are not haunted because they are ugly but rather they are imbalanced because they reflect the mental instability of the people inhabiting them. Therefore, these stories cannot be said to represent what people outside of the psychological horror subgenre would consider to be a prototypical haunted house.
 
To evaluate Dickey’s claims, we need to look at what regular folk imagine haunted houses to be, not one small fraction of horror literature. Here we find that there is simply no connection between asymmetrical or architecturally unbalanced constructions and hauntings. In the real world, anything old, decrepit, or associated with negative events or feelings can become a haunted site. Even in the broader world of the media, there is a wide range of haunted house types, or at least there used to be.
Picture
The Family's home, as drawn by Charles Addams
If I asked you to imagine a haunted house, the chances are pretty good that as a Western individual exposed to media messages for your whole life, you pictured a Second Empire-style Victorian with a central tower, arched windows and a mansard roof. This is because Hollywood decided this was what a “scary” house looked like in the middle twentieth century. It was one of several options bandied about in the 1930s and 1940s—alongside expressionist-tinged modernism and historical “old dark” houses, like those of The Old Dark Houses (1932) and The Uninvited (1944). In turn, the Victorian version was canonized by the aesthetic choices Alfred Hitchcock made in his psychological horror movie Psycho, drawing on the Second Empire manse occupied by the gruesome Family in the Charles Addams cartoons of the 1940s. The Psycho House, as Hitchcock’s set became known, appeared in so many productions of the 1960s and 1970s—everything from Boris Karloff’s Thriller to the Western Laramie to Rod Serling’s Night Gallery—that it became synonymous with horror. Indeed, when The Old Dark House (1932) was remade in 1963, Charles Addams designed the new Second Empire home that replaced the original’s vaguely Romanesque design.
Picture
The fearful symmetry of the Psycho house, built from spare parts from the Universal backlot.
Ironically enough, even though Psycho and the Addams Family were not ghost stories, their aesthetic ended up defining the modern ghost genre thanks to some complex interweaving that occurred during the 1960s “monster craze,” too complex to get into here. Suffice it to say that all of these expressions were efforts to translate the hauntings of the European strain of Gothic literature, which centered its ghosts in medieval castles, into an American idiom. We don’t have castles, but we have Victorian castle-like mansions and Hollywood fabricated Universal’s so-called “Deco Gothic” to create modernist castles for movies like Frankenstein.
 
By the middle 1960s, the Second Empire Victorian house was the most widespread popular depiction of a haunted house in pop culture, in Halloween decorations and cartoons and movie comedies. What’s interesting is to look at the difference between haunted houses before and after the influence of Psycho, The Addams Family, and The Munsters, all of which used Victorian architecture to suggest a violation of midcentury social norms. Compare, for example, two media products based on the same idea. In 1963, right before the Psycho influence had bled into pop culture, the Andy Griffith Show did an episode called “Haunted House,” which depicted the aforementioned haunted house as an early nineteenth century farmhouse in a rather plain style. This episode was expanded into The Ghost and Mister Chicken in 1966, at which time the house became a Second Empire-style Victorian mansion, the so-called “Simmons Mansion” or “Harvey House” on the Universal lot. (It was one of the Desperate Housewives’ homes in a later incarnation.) Consider, too, the last great haunted house movie before the canonization of the Psycho house: The House on Haunted Hill (1959). This haunted house was, of all things, done in Mayan Revival style! ​
Picture
Frank Lloyd Wright's "Ennis House" as seen in "The House on Haunted Hill"
I’ll grant you that that one certainly conforms to Dickey’s idea of unusual architecture.
 
It should, I hope, be obvious the idea of the Second Empire haunted house is a recent conception. The Victorian style was itself a locus of horror (and, conversely, Yuletide nostalgia) because after World War I, it became associated with a lost era, one that was simultaneously a reflection of an idealized past and a reminder of the horrific decay of that vanished world. During the 1920s, the Victorian Neo-Gothic and Queen Anne styles were decisively rejected as the antithesis of the modern, and during the Depression, few could afford to keep up the ramshackle Victorian homes, leaving them to decay or to be cut up into skid row housing for the lower classes. Consider an early example that crossed the Halloween-Yuletide divide: the old Second Empire Victorian in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) is widely considered a “haunted” house in its ramshackle state, but after George Bailey restores it, it becomes a Yuletide haven.
Picture
The future Bailey residence in "It's a Wonderful Life"
The long and short of it, though, is that Victorian houses of the Second Empire and Queen Anne style are not unbalanced, usually not unduly asymmetrical, and more or less conform to the traditional language of architecture and home design. Worse, for the Victorians, haunted houses were dilapidated old colonial constructions, often in the Federalist style, which were if anything even more symmetrical and regular in form. We don’t think of them as scary because the colonial revival style of the 1920s, which made up most of the housing stock after World War II due to limited construction in the Depression and War years, became the style depicted on TV sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver, Dennis the Menace, and The Donna Reed Show, canonizing it as what we think of as a “house.”
 
I could go into Edmund Burke’s idea of the sublime and beautiful, and how the elements that Dickey identifies as “unbalanced” and therefore figuratively haunted are some of the same that Burke identified as taking us outside of the normal world to induce a feeling of terror. But I think I’ll keep the point simpler: Every generation remakes haunted houses in the shape of the recent and vanished past, diabolizing that which is just outside of living human memory, the time when gods and monsters walked the Earth. Fifty years after the Victorians, their ruins had become “haunted.” The only reason we don’t do the same with our ruins is because the media froze this folkloric process in time—and also because midcentury tract houses are both too humble to serve as substitute castles and are still in use in a way that Victorian mansions were not at a similar point in their lives.
 
To that end, I can certainly imagine the McMansion becoming the new haunted house, and on that point I will agree with Dickey—if any of those foam and clapboard piles survive fifty or a hundred years to become frightening ruins of a forgotten age.
30 Comments
Residents Fan
10/4/2016 11:42:41 am

"If I asked you to imagine a haunted house, the chances are pretty good that as a Western individual exposed to media messages for your whole life, you pictured a Second Empire-style Victorian with a central tower, arched windows and a mansard roof. This is because Hollywood decided this was what a “scary” house looked like in the middle twentieth century."

Look at this "Weird Tales" cover from March 1947 .

http://www.philsp.com/data/images/w/weird_tales_194703.jpg

A central tower, arched windows, and what looks like a mansel roof on the central tower...ticks all the boxes.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
10/4/2016 11:53:49 am

It would be fascinating to discover who first decided that Second Empire houses with towers were "scary."

Reply
Residents Fan
10/4/2016 01:52:57 pm

Wonder how far back the actual term "Haunted House" goes? A brief search reveals it was in use as far back as 1844 (in the Thomas Hood poem "The Haunted House" ) :


http://www.bartleby.com/337/1142.html

On a horror-related note, File 770 has the transcript of an NPR piece
on "Perchance to Dream", the new Penguin collection of Charles Beaumont's work:

http://file770.com/?p=31021


Reply
crainey
10/4/2016 01:59:51 pm

He only addressed Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel briefly in one sentence and only mentioned its cavernousness. I’m surprised. I would include it any modern discussion of haunted houses. There has been much written about its subtly impossible architecture and how it might contribute to the viewers sense of unease while watching the film. The inside of the Overlook is not “aesthetically” wrong or unsymmetrical (as Dickey argues haunted houses should be), but rather contains Eicher like conundrums such as the impossible window in Ullman’s office. Still, one of the scariest haunted houses ever!

Reply
TheBigMike
10/4/2016 11:10:41 pm

I'd actually argue that the Haunted Hotel and the Haunted House are actually two different and distinct literary constructs. A house is supposed to be safe and warm and filled with positive emotions... it's supposed to be a home. The haunting aspect is a violation of that sense of home. Hotels, like the Overlook are not homes. they are places of transition, of inconsistency, wrapped in a mantle of permanence. The haunting aspect in a hotel is a way of accentuating or exaggerating that.
I'm not sure if Stephen King or Stanley Kubrick drew from this, but one of the all time creepiest buildings ever built was H.H. Holmes' Murder Castle in Chicago. It was specifically designed with murder in mind and it had a lot of architectural weirdness like stairways that went nowhere, doors that did not open, and brick windows. There were also gas lines that could fill any given room with enough gas to kill the occupants and and chutes that led to the basement morgue so that the bodies could be sent there swiftly and quietly.
Just describing the place is creepy as hell, probably because, unlike the Overlook Hotel, the Murder Palace was a real place where possibly dozens (Holmes' claimed once that it was hundreds) of murders took place. Holmes used the place as a hotel for people visiting for the World's Fair. Supposedly he would then take out insurance policies on them, kill them, and strip the flesh from their bones. He'd wire the bones up and sell the skeletons as medical models to medical schools and universities all over the country.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you're of a certain mindset) the Murder Castle was destroyed. A fire in 1895 destroyed the upper floors. the lower floors were turned into shops and were in operation until 1937 when the land was sold to the Federal government. The Feds pulled down the remains of the Murder Castle and built a Post Office on the spot.
That may have all seemed to be a tangent, but 1) it's October, so scary stories are great and 2) it is a real world example of a hotel with odd architecture and it's horror connection.

Reply
Clint Knapp
10/5/2016 03:36:43 am

It's entirely possible King was familiar with the H.H. Holmes story, but his own testimony as to the inspiration for The Shining points directly at a stay he and Tabitha had at The Stanley Hotel (Halloween, 1974) in which they were the only overnight guests.

According to King he had a dream about his son running the empty halls being chased by a fire hose, woke up, had a cigarette, and had the outline for the book in mind before he finished. He melded these experiences into a previously-abandoned story called Darkshine about a psychic boy in an amusement park, and The Shining was born.

Kubrick, on the other hand, unless we're to believe all the conspiracies about him and his secret messages, was just a good filmmaker who sometimes made mistakes. The layout analysis various theorists have done (see the documentary Room 237) about the impossible architecture of the hotel are much more readily explained as the limitations of sound stage design and sloppy editing than any real attempt to create an otherwordly locale where time and space and architecture go out the window.

Nick Danger
10/7/2016 03:34:20 pm

It's interesting to note that while King's novel had the hotel decorated in a theme of vines, trees, and other organic forms, Kubrick's vision was of right angles and geometric shapes.

Reply
Kal
10/4/2016 02:11:12 pm

The X Files attempted to make the Brady Bunch house scary. It didn't work. It ended up being a time warp with a different house on the outside. It was not nearly as scary as the actual house, two houses actually, at the backlot.

I have been to the Psycho house at the Universal backlot. It is actually an illusion of scale from the road and is quite small.

Gothic and Victorian houses often are depicted as haunted.

Actually there was a craze of old sanitariums and prisons as haunted, including our local Alcatraz.

The Winchester Mystery House still does tours, as an old Victorian with fearful angles.

Fearful Symmetry is of course from Blake's the Tyger.

The cartoon film Monster House makes the house literally the monster.

Now there are old libraries and old universities that could come off as haunted and be great places for making Halloween haunts. Before it was torn down, the Whalquist at San Jose State was creepy to those that didn't even believe in ghosts. It was rebuilt as a neo modern Martin Luther King Library in the 2000s, but the top floors are still spooky. Wooooo.

So does the author think that the newer houses built on old sites can be haunted, ala Poltergeist?

The Addams family house and the Munsters place were obviously parodies though, of the classic horror house.

Actually the old creepy orphanage in Mrs. Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is also like a haunted house. It even has a reanimated corpse, and a ghoulish kid who can bring back the dead as zombie like things. Yikes.

The Harry Potter castle of Hogwarts is big time haunted castle motif. It even has resident ghost teachers! Ha.

The scary old firehouse in Ghostbusters, actually two sets, and an exterior, and the library, are part of the modern kind of haunted building idea.

Also that politergeist motif is there when in the 1984 Ghostbusters they find a mystery apartment that 'no human would build such a thing' kind of thing, where the ghost demigod Zool attempts to take over Earth from in the film.

I don't know if modern abandoned homes can be considered spooky houses, although some of the abandoned attractions in Florida and Louisiana are pretty scary. The Hollywood studios have been using a lot of flooded out parts of the swamp mall and stuff in movies. It looks like doomsday happened there.

They can't actually film in Chernobyl, Russia, but it is probably also eerie.

McMansions are a little too young to be considered haunted, scary or otherwise though. Usually it's something old. Something from the 1960s is not quite old enough to be 'scary', unless it has been left to see since then.

And Hitchcock did some amazing things with black and white mood lighting music that just worked, and tapped into the psyche. As you said, psychological horror. Pyscho, but not its sequels, was a literal interpretation of that. You didn't know what was actually happening. Your mind would fill in the horror scares, much more effective than current jump scare horror.

A modern Paranormal Activity type mansion is not nearly as foreboding as an old classic Gothic that is a century or more old, and creaking and damp.


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Reply
Kal
10/4/2016 02:24:29 pm

Actually you all bring up an interesting point, the haunted mansion idea, ala Disneyland too now that I thought of it, is an extension of the scary old castle.

Seen even in Lord of the Rings, the scary old castle is where the ghosts of the deal ruler and his lords were, and might be even older than our modern haunted house/mansion/place idea.

It is probably even present in the late middle ages when after the black plague, the westerners that resettled the land had found abandoned ruins from another age before them, and assumed them haunted.

It may even be a universal human thing, as Egyptian tombs and old buildings are assumed to be haunted, (because dead people are entombed there).

This also goes for old tombs and pyramids in Meso America, and old forbidden sites and such in China and India and elsewhere also.

The modern house though, that castle like house idea, might very well stem from latent memories and stories of the end of the first millennium in the west.

Also there are Roman ruins, of an empire that is effectively no more, which could be considered haunted.

It is probably not exclusive to western minds though, as there are 'haunted places' like forests in Japan and everywhere, or haunted jungles, that are scary to those that are spooked by such things..

But the haunted castle/haunted mansion is an Americanized version of earlier eras, and forgotten times, following wars and plagues. American 'castles' are mansions.

It makes sense old British houses and such would be similar, as would old German, Italian, Spanish and other houses.

But the Gothic Victorian seems to be the de facto go to haunted house.

Reply
Residents Fan
10/4/2016 03:01:10 pm

"there are Roman ruins, of an empire that is effectively no more, which could be considered haunted. "

The Anglo-Saxons who found Roman ruins in Britain thought they had been built by supernatural creatures (giants):

https://books.google.ie/books?id=4YKrpH222eYC&pg=PA233&lpg=PA233&dq=%22anglo-saxons%22+%2B%22+roman+ruins%22+%2B+%22giants%22&source=bl&ots=chY-5dDNEd&sig=Bp9FPKDHF2553hlCf4KuurJIbZw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjkufyE6sHPAhXqAcAKHblwAT4Q6AEILzAD#v=onepage&q=%20%22giants%22&f=false

Also, many medieval Arabs thought the Pyramids had been built by Djinni.

Reply
Time Machine
10/4/2016 03:45:54 pm

The greatest haunted house of them all
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057129/

Reply
Paul S.
10/4/2016 04:59:42 pm

Good point about haunted houses being associated with the architecture of the past just a little earlier than living memory. I wonder, though, if one reason that people continue to associate Victorian architecture with haunted houses more than any other type is the fact that there has never really been a "Victorian revival" in the way that there was a colonial revival. Because of this, there are relatively few houses built in the last 100 years that are Victorian in style, so any house that looks Victorian is assumed to be old (at least by USA standards), with the psychological baggage of mystery and decay that old age tends to add to a building.

Isn't there also fairly common trope of the haunted former insane asylum? Although the haunting rumors come from the fact that these asylums were sometimes places of great suffering and tragedy, a lot of these asylums were built in the later 19th century in a Victorian architectural style. I wonder if that made any contribution to the perception of Victorian architecture=creepy and scary.

Reply
V
10/4/2016 06:25:53 pm

Actually, there are entire neighborhood built in "Victorian style" houses. You can go to sites like ePlans.com and search by "Victorian" for your house plans. There's also a chain of higher-end assisted living facilities I used to quality check for that uses a distinct Victorian style. They're not particularly rare. They're assumed to be old because they're "Victorian style," which is basically synonymous with "old fashioned.".

I actually think the association comes out of the Romantic art movement and Spiritualism, personally. Those things were Victorian, so it makes sense that the architecture would be entwined with the idea, too.

Reply
Paul S.
10/4/2016 09:34:10 pm

True, I was grossly over generalizing from my limited experience. Good point that the Victorian style might be associated with ghosts and horror because it originated in the same historical period that gothic fiction and spiritualism did.

flip
10/4/2016 09:20:53 pm

Asylums, prisons and hospitals come up a lot in ghost mythology. I doubt it has to do with architecture, it's more likely about stigma, a sense of danger, and probably a Christian view of the soul and one's unfinished business in life. I do think the 'run down' aspect has a lot to do with it though. I can think of a number of places here where ghost tours are done: colonial prisons which are no longer used, the mines from the 19th century gold rush, the earliest streets of the inner city with the oldest buildings. I can't think of any place or ad for a tour that's modern.

Reply
Paul S.
10/4/2016 09:45:04 pm

I agree that asylums, prisons, etc. aren't associated with haunting because of their architecture. I was just wondering if the Victorian architectural style might have become associated with haunting because there were a lot of asylums, prisons, built in this style. Then again, I'm thinking mainly of my little northeastern corner of the USA. This may not apply to other parts of the country. It's probably more likely something like what Jason suggested - that just as Hollywood was starting to make early horror movies, there were a lot of old Victorian houses that were falling into disrepair because of age and people with money not wanting to buy a house of that style.

Weatherwax
10/6/2016 04:04:27 pm

"Asylums, prisons and hospitals come up a lot in ghost mythology. I doubt it has to do with architecture, it's more likely about stigma"

I'm going to disagree to a point. The large, sprawling, maze like architecture, combined with few windows and a lot of hidden areas makes them creepy. The stigma makes it worse.

Ken
10/4/2016 05:27:48 pm

It seems that you are leaving out the most fundamental characteristic of haunted houses, and that is that they are all large. Lots of rooms, places where one rarely goes, places for ghosts (and whatever) to hide, etc. For example, it is hard to imagine making a credible haunted house out of a single-wide. Perhaps a haunted out-house, but the scary part is whats outside, not inside.

Reply
PaulN. link
10/5/2016 01:24:43 am

Another aspect is the surrounding setting. A spooky looking mansion doesn't look so scary if it is in an open sunny setting with well manicured lawn and foliage and populated with other houses nearby. But, if it was single story ranch style or two story cracker box set in an isolated area, with delapidated and abandoned look, surrounded by overgrown vines and weeping willows, then you got something. To top it off there should be a gnarled old oak tree with a nest of owls and bats in the attic. Of course a dark stormy night is the cherry on top.

Reply
Time Machine
10/4/2016 05:55:09 pm

Another good haunted house
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083907/

Reply
Shane Sullivan
10/4/2016 06:09:31 pm

"Every generation remakes haunted houses in the shape of the recent and vanished past, diabolizing that which is just outside of living human memory, the time when gods and monsters walked the Earth."

Case in point: The Castle of Otranto, taking place in the terrifying and brutal Medieval period, when weird prophecies came to fruition in dank Germanic castles, and mysterious and exotic creatures known as Catholics roamed the land.

Reply
GEE
10/4/2016 08:19:43 pm

I believe the idea of haunted mansions comes from the idea of rich people and their strange life styles and how there children grew up... bad things happened in those houses. The idea of the victim dying in the house and the "cover up" -the soul of the deceased locked in its home, never to leave... thus the haunted house.. do I believe? I have to say yes, I am a believer. I love this one Jason. Thank you

Reply
SouthCoast
10/4/2016 09:22:46 pm

Rather than neo-Babylonian, the House on Haunted Hill was a very nice piece of work by Frank LLoyd Wright, (the Ennis House) done in a neo-Mayan style.It also appeared in Bladerunner.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
10/4/2016 09:56:35 pm

I'll get that fixed. My reference book called it neo-Babylonian (actually, I think it said "neo-Assyrian"), but clearly wasn't aware of the actual house in question.

Reply
flip
10/4/2016 09:29:28 pm

1. If you're going to suggest that haunted houses are some sort of uncanny valley, it's probably a good idea to look at some sort of psych research to back up your argument, not literary references

2. It's fairly clear to me that horror movies aren't at all about visuals, but about music. If we change it to 'asymmetric' music then it makes sense, because horror usually uses a lot of random-sounding changes in pitch, tempo, etc with usually discordent violins or piano (probably due to Hitchcock too!). Watch the movie with the sound off and the haunted house stops being so creepy. - Doesn't explain much about literature but I think maybe the creepiness there too would have to do with sufficient pacing and dramatic tension.

Ps. Great post Jason! I like these forays into obscure cultural artifacts

Reply
PaulN. link
10/5/2016 01:45:43 am

Another type of haunted house is the old decaying southern antebellum mansion, sitting near a river or bayou, surrounded by ancient magnolias and weeping willows. An excellent version of this is 1964's "Hush... hush sweet Charllotte". It has a very nice theme song for a very disturbing movie.

Reply
Kal
10/5/2016 12:27:33 pm

The Shining hotels were two different buildings, and one of them is in Colorado. The confused sets and corridors were likely on purpose. Even so, it was the 1970s an they didn't have the money to make it literally ghostly, and really doing so in a modern sense, such as the remake miniseries, wasn't nearly as interesting. It had an asylum feel actually. Was Jack actually just crazy?

Mood music does have something to do with haunted stories, and movie and pictures also do, so it's all of that which goes into making a proper spooky house.

In the bay area there are quite a few Victorian style houses that are still there, often chopped up into apartments. They had a resurgence in the 1950s and none of them are all that old.

The older homes in the midwest and east coast are actually spooky.

The oldest and weirdest Victorian style is that Winchester Mystery House, which was built because old lady Winchester was nuts and would make rooms with no way out, and stairs going nowhere, and doors into walls, because she was afraid of ghosts before her.

Reply
Kal
10/5/2016 12:28:10 pm

Not the oldest ever, the oldest in San Jose.

Reply
Denise
10/11/2016 12:54:54 pm

Having a master's in Historic Preservation, I find it interesting that second empire mansard roofed mansions are among the rarest styles in the USA. They had a very short period of popularity. My husband gets amused every time I see one and get excited. Kind of how he gets excited when he sees a Lotus Europa or a Super Seven. 😀

Reply
Charles
9/16/2019 03:19:07 pm

Raunted!?! Ruh-roh! As a child I loved Scooby Doo Where are you? And my favorite episode was one of the earliest: A night of fright is no delight. The episode was set in a Second Empire Mansion out on an isolated Islet. That's how I learned about Haunted Houses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlG6PoFekEw

Later on, I learned that old Mansions were spooky too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umj0gu5nEGs

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          • Man During the Stone Age
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          • Fossils and Myth
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        • Fragments on Giants
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          • Volume 1: Cosmogenesis
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        • Phoenicians in America
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        • Chronology and the "Riddle of the Sphinx"
        • The Faith of Ancient Egypt
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        • "Flying Saucers"? They're a Myth
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        • Air Force Academy UFO Textbook
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      • H. P. Lovecraft >
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    • Miscellaneous Documents >
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