How To Build A Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession

In fact, this picturesque little pocket of England, nestled in the Stour Valley, is known as ‘Constable country’. She existed as a kind of ghostly vestige of a mysterious and commonly misunderstood bygone era: a mythical figure that probably seemed all the more romantic to a family of middle-class Protestants living in a decidedly ordinary modern home. The ghost tour has been put forward recently as a fresh form of income generation available to the plantation house, one that more directly confronts the dark history of these properties, shakily bridging the gap between entertainment, leisure and uncomfortable historical truth. Over time, however, she evolved into a much more potent symbol of the antebellum South, shifting from a benevolent entity to a malevolent one, and finally to a richly nuanced anti-heroine.