Ghosts Are Not Undead: On Healing Trauma Through Writing The “House Character”

The 2006 computer-animated horror film Monster House was a household favorite when I was a child. It was rated PG which meant that my mother and father, still terrified of parenthood, would allow me to watch it. I was a bit obsessed with horror movies, ghost stories—anything that would give me a fright. My parents must not have enjoyed my fixation on things that go bump in the night because I’d always scare myself a little too much and end up sleeping in their bed. 

I don’t even know if I understood what Monster House was really about back then. I was four when it came out, five when it was released on DVD. Now that I reflect on the film as an adult, I can’t help but admire the idea: a woman’s all-consuming trauma being personified into a living, horrific home, and the effects that it had on the people close to her. The house is just as much of a character in the story as the humans are but is able to represent so much more because of its position as both character and setting. 

I love writing the “house character” into a story. Or rather, I love writing the story into a house character. Setting in narrative is often used to reflect the character’s views, and to clarify the themes of the text; but when the setting itself is a character, the elements of the story change completely. If the house character is a personification of trauma, such as it is in Monster House, then the essentials of the story now revolve around the other character’s reactions, attachments, and abilities to leave or stay in their environment. 

Turning towards an example of the house character that is represented in a more positive light, we have Casita in Disney’s 2021 film, Encanto. The house of the Madrigal family is alive; it holds memories and stories. And in turn, it holds the traumas of the family that resides in it—the family that is a part of it. Encanto uses its house character in a very Disney-esq way, giving it flamboyance and color and above all, a happy ending. 

The house character is not only rooted in trauma, but it cannot exist without it. With stories like Encanto, we are given a story about working through generational trauma with your family. It is a heartwarming and emotional story, but the end really gives you an underlying sense of hope. If these characters could work through their trauma, through their pain, and rebuild their house character with love and compassion, so can you, right? It is an important and timely story to tell. 

But there are house characters, possibly more subtle ones, that reflect the ugly side of trauma—the side that, more often than not, is deadly and inescapable. 

Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House, based on the novella of the same title by Shirley Jackson, and The Haunting of Bly Manor, based on the novella Turn of the Screw by Henry James, both feature these dark, deadly house characters. Unlike Monster House, where the house character is portrayed as an evil being, these mini series’ portray their respective house characters as indifferent to the evils that occur under their roofs. Both Hill House and Bly Manor know the power that they hold—they are inescapable, they torment their inhabitants without remorse, but also without enjoyment. It is just how they (the houses) are. This is much like how trauma acts. If you’ve ever seen a mental health professional, you have probably heard that “trauma is held in the body”, but I like to see it more as the other way around: the body is held in trauma. It’s why people with post-traumatic stress disorder often feel like they are constantly on edge, like at any moment they will need to fight or flee. They are in houses of trauma. 

One of my favorite examples of the house character is the castle in Studio Ghibli’s Howl’s Moving Castle, an animated film based on the children's book of the same title by Dianna Wynne Jones. Our main character Howl, a powerful wizard, is said to have been abandoned throughout his childhood, first by his parents, then by his uncle. People who have experienced abandonment as children will often exhibit the “flight” side of the “fight or flight” trauma response, running away from situations in which they feel like they might experience that same sense of abandonment. Howl created his castle to hide from the trauma of his past—the moving castle is literally a personification of his attempts to flee the threat of abandonment by society. He lives in a house of his fear and trauma.

It is why I feel that the house character can be so therapeutic to write. Visualizing your trauma as a house that you are living in reshapes the power it has over you. Houses have windows and doors that you can leave through, and maybe it takes a lot of work to open those windows and doors. Maybe it might take a while to find the keys, but it is something that you can move on from. Much like a childhood home, trauma is something you may always remember, but it is something that can be lived with comfortably. We build new homes, we create new house characters. 

You cannot separate trauma from your foundations, but that doesn’t mean it has to haunt you. Not all houses built on old foundations are haunted. Writing your house character may just show you how to move out.