The most famous haunted house in literature is about six miles from Hillsdale.
At least that’s where Shirley Jackson puts it in “The Haunting of Hill House,” her 1959 novel of ghosts and ghostbusters. A character sends driving instructions to Eleanor Vance, so she can travel to Hill House: “You will come to the small village of Hillsdale.”
Even in the fictional Hillsdale, it’s the people: “I am making these directions so detailed because it is inadvisable to stop in Hillsdale to ask your way. The people there are rude to strangers and openly hostile to anyone inquiring about Hill House.”
It’s also a dump: “a tangled, disorderly mess of dirty houses and crooked streets.”
This creepy village unsettles Eleanor. “I will not spend long in Hillsdale,” she thinks to herself.
Here in the real Hillsdale, we stick around. Most students spend years. Faculty and staff can spend careers. It becomes home.
Haunted houses threaten us because they upset the idea of home. Rather than a place of warmth and comfort, a haunted house is a site of darkness and dread.
Tis the season for enjoying the haunted houses of literature, as days shorten, nights lengthen, temperatures drop, leaves fall, and everything dies.
Shakespeare offers a glimpse in “Hamlet,” on the ramparts of Elsinore, where a ghost appears at midnight with a disturbing message. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe reveals a structure with “empty eye-like windows” and the weirdness within. In “The Shining,” readers and movie-watchers check in to the Overlook Hotel, Stephen King’s resort of madness and terror.
Jackson’s haunted house, near the fictional Hillsdale, is among the most menacing: “It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or love or hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.”
The main characters decide to move in. What could go wrong?
Jackson’s book inspired one of my own recent adventures. After a couple of days last month at the college’s Blake Center in Connecticut, my wife and I drove to Vermont. Our destinations included Bennington, a town with a good brewery, an excellent museum, and the grave of the poet Robert Frost. Just beyond lies North Bennington, where Jackson lived and wrote for most of her adult life, until her death in 1965.
We gazed upon her two residences, which did not look haunted. We also visited the market where she shopped for groceries. I bought a bag of coffee beans.
Eleanor does something similar in the novel: “I will stop in Hillsdale for a minute, just for a cup of coffee, because I cannot bear to have my long trip end so soon.”
After a waitress at a diner pours a cup, Eleanor asks a question: “Do you like it here?”
“It’s all right,” says the girl. “Not much to do.”
Just when you’re thinking that perhaps the two Hillsdales are the same, a character in the story speaks up: “People leave this town,” he says. “They don’t come here.”
In the story, his words are a warning. In the real Hillsdale, of course, people come and go all the time.
They may be the ghosts of Hillsdale’s haunted future.
