Watch the episode on YouTube:

Listen now:

About the Guest: Beth Castrodale

The way she describes her books makes our goth hearts soar. We want to read every one of them right now. Her first novel was about a scandal-fleeing corset maker during the Depression Era (Marion Hatley). The second book is about a former indie rock star turned gravedigger, overcoming his guilt-ridden past (In This Ground). Her third is about sisters reconnecting over their criminal father’s unfinished business (I Mean You No Harm).

Beth’s most recent novel as of this writing is now available for pre-order through Regal House Publishing. The Inhabitants is coming out September 10, 2024. Keep up with all of Beth’s happenings at her website, BethCastrodale.com, or ask her a question on Goodreads. You can also follow her on Facebook and X.

Beth’s Ghost Story

Beth tells us real haunted apartment stories that may have, in part, inspired her fascination with ghost stories. She used to live by the ocean in a little attached apartment. She’d occasionally come home to some very confusing circumstances, even though she always locked her doors and windows before leaving. That’s when she found out that a friend of her landlord’s had died in that apartment. Was there a connection? There’s never been any other forthcoming explanation for the strange happenings she witnessed in that haunted apartment.

What are the architectural features of a haunted house?

Victorian and gothic architecture was, in many cases, specifically designed to soothe the mind and rejuvenate the soul. And then, there are those houses that feel like they must be haunted, just by the way they look. Beth tells us that, at least in novels, the architecture of any haunted house will likely share some specific features. Here are some of the features an evil architect might incorporate into a hauntingly scary house.

• Being difficult to exit, or making inhabitants feel trapped or lost within.
• Liminal spaces like staircases without a clear view of the space beyond.
• Never having quite enough light, or seeming to absorb what little light enters.
• Situations where one might find themselves in absolute darkness, or complete silence.
• Low ceilings.
• Closed-in, claustrophobic spaces.

The psychology of haunted house architecture

These similarities in architecture among haunted houses probably exist for a reason. All of these features have a potential to evoke disturbing emotions, which can make inhabitants feel uneasy. Take absolute silence, for example. There are very few places in life where people with hearing actually experience REAL silence. When the house seems silent to our conscious mind, there are likely sounds still happening that fall outside the audible range. More than one study has found that infrasound at around 19 Hz could cause physical effects in humans. Not just any physical effects, but specifically feelings of anxiety, shivering, and chest pressure, all of which could likely contribute to the perception of a paranormal event.

In addition, the effect of low ceilings might be inferred by examining the inverse. Turns out, there’s actually a name for the feeling of awe and spiritual elevation one feels when inside a large, high-ceilinged indoor venue: the “Cathedral Effect.” Research indicates that high ceilings can actually create a sense of openness and freedom, which can lead to abstract and creative thinking. This is one reason why places of worship usually feature high ceilings.

Why is Gothic Revival architecture associated with haunted houses?

In this interview, Beth tells us that, in Gothic novels, the house itself is a character. Often, the house has agency, a backstory, even a fate. In stories like “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe, or “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë, the house reflects (and perhaps influences) the mental state of the characters. In some cases, like in “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson and “The Woman in Black” by Susan Hill, the house even directly controls or influences the characters, driving the plot. Many Gothic novels exemplify this association between Gothic architecture, haunted houses, and ghost stories, but is it strictly a literary convention, or something more insidious?

Houses in Dreams

Interestingly, in at least one style of dream interpretation, houses and similar environments represent the mindset of the dreamer. Because dreams are the language of the subconscious in a sense, this quantum entanglement of sorts between one’s house and one’s mindset seems programmed deep in our human psyche. Yet, dreams are sort of ghost stories in their own right, are they not? Fictional alternate worlds where the rules of reality don’t apply, featuring people who may not precisely exist, whose main purpose is to represent an idea?

What mindset do OUR houses represent?

Diana’s house is streamlined and spartan. Most of the things she furnishes and decorates it with were found objects, hand-me-downs, or handmade crafts. She prefers to have a designated place for everything to hide away when not in use. The few exceptions to this frugal minimalism are a handful of mementos with little intrinsic value besides the people, places, and experiences they abstractly remind her of. Even though the aesthetic of the home hints at the deep well of darkness below the surface, Diana values having a well-organized home full of natural light, which filters into rainbows through translucent prisms of privacy film on the windows.

The only landscaping Diana cultivates is either fast-growing vines, or easily-moved potted plants. Diana has never lived in a home long enough for larger, slower plants like trees and shrubs to germinate and mature. Amazon Music is often playing on shuffle, or there’s dead silence; there’s never a TV on in the background.

What things about Diana does her home reflect?

Similar to her house, Diana’s mindset values light, in the form of enlightenment and education. Her aesthetics are more of a game than a standard: whereas she might wear a ballgown to a casual dinner, most days she wears only pajamas. Her house reflects this with walls of intensely subversive creepy artwork, that, when you get closer, you realize is mostly Halloween decorations she didn’t bother putting away. She values privacy, and lets very few people in. And like her house, she’s much nicer inside than her rough exterior would imply. Like her plants, Diana doesn’t enjoy putting down roots, preferring to be trans-locational when possible. She’s quiet and introspective for the most part, and has a habit of going with the flow instead of making distinct choices and following them to fruition.

Becky’s house reflects her nature.

Becky’s house is more open, with very high ceilings and quite a bit of natural light, coming through clear, floor-to-ceiling windows that offer no privacy, which is fine because it’s set far back from the street in a small copse of old trees. All the entrances are convoluted, especially the front door, making it a little daunting to enter the house for the first time.

Inside, her belongings are out and about, wherever she likes to use them. Every wall shines with professionally curated art and family portraits. There’s usually a record spinning on the turntable, and the delectable smell of things frying in butter wafting out of the warm, roomy kitchen. There’s always a whirlwind of activity inside, as several 2- and 4-legged children romp within. She’s also recently discovered a surprise, hidden behind a wall for the past 40 years, which you’ll hear about in this episode.

What parts of Becky’s personality does her home reflect?

Like her house, Becky is an open book. Yet, she’s one so far off the beaten path that not everyone attempts to read her. She has a penchant for catching people off-guard with non-sequiturs, which feels like she’s revealing secret passageways between parts of her own mind. Like Diana, she also values education. She tends towards pursuing the A in STEAM more than the other letters. Her wide open spaces full of useful and whimsical belongings lend themselves to creative expression and flow states. Like her established arbor, Becky is settled and doesn’t mind having some roots, even feeling like her current city offers her opportunities for growth. Also, like the constant movement in her house, she tends to mainly pass through her home as part of a wider, global orbit. She’s always planning the next trip out of town before the previous trip even starts.

Based on the architecture, is your house haunted?

Hainted Loves, what do you think? Does architecture influence hauntings? Are some buildings just irresistible to wandering spirits? Have you lived in a haunted house with any of these architectural features? If you have a true ghost story about haunted houses, why not submit it to tell on Homespun Haints? We’d love to have a spooky day with you!

The post How to Build a Haunted House appeared first on Homespun Haints.

Draw a haunted mansion with me

The most reliable way to draw a haunted house is to draw a real one that everyone already associates with ghosts. The Winchester Mystery House is a great example of one of these famous haunted places. This quirky real haunted mansion is iconic in the eyes of haunted house aficionados.

The Winchester house itself also embodies many of the basic tenants of how to draw a scary drawing. Here is a video of Becky’s step-by-step realistic line drawing of the Winchester Mystery House, which Diana got to take a ghost tour of a few years ago.

Becky uses a straight edge to make clean lines and angles, because this is a realistic drawing. Almost all real houses feature standard architecture techniques, like right angles, straight lines, and peaked roofs. There are many parts of the Winchester House that are quite standard, which we think makes the more unusually constructed parts of the house even more intriguing.

I mentioned above that the Winchester house itself exemplifies the basic components of a scary drawing, making it an excellent example for this tutorial. But what are the basic components of how to draw a scary haunted house?

What is the difference between drawing a haunted house and a regular house?

Unnatural distortion

Unnatural distortion makes your drawing feel wrong and uncomfortable. This works best when it’s subtle. When something is mostly normal, but just a little bit off, we may not consciously notice the oddity. But our subconscious lizard brain is terribly uncomfortable with the dissonance. As we feel the subconscious discomfort, we could associate that with an intuitive sensation, much like the intuitive way we first recognize a haunting.

Translocation

Translocation makes your drawing feel strange and dangerous. The Winchester House’s famous Door to Nowhere is a very plain and normal doorway. It has a frame, a standard wooden door, a doorknob. Everything seems very banal and predictable about it. But when the door opens, it reveals not a room, or a hallway, or even a few steps down to a back garden. The Door to Nowhere actually leads to a tiny bit of the roof that was never meant to be stood on. Another step out would lead to a sheer drop off onto the pavement a full story below.

The same is true for the stairs that lead directly up to a solid ceiling in the Winchester. These seemingly normal architectural details put in entirely the wrong place or context tell us a house is beyond our comprehension. They imply either some mystical arcane knowledge we can only guess at, or a degree of unhinged behavior, which both feel dangerous and frightening.

Disparate meshing

Disparate meshing makes your drawing feel monstrous and paranormal. What are some things that just don’t belong on a house? This might be easy to add to a cartoon drawing of a haunted house. One could extend the front walkway to end in a giant dripping tongue, or turn the broken slats of a basement storm shelter door into the teeth of a jarring rictus.

Disparate meshing is a little more challenging on a realistic drawing, but a successful result is even spookier. Maybe the front windows and doors align in a way that subconsciously mimics an angry face. Even a vague face shape will trigger a natural human response called pareidolia. This phenomenon causes us to see human faces in random patterns.

This simple house displays a few different moods, does it not?

The front of the Winchester house is it’s most conventional part visually. Yet still, there are those two small, round windows, set symmetrically on either side of an arched doorway, with a small set of balusters only in front of the doorway, and a triangle shape above it. It’s not a very accurate face, so it wouldn’t immediately strike the viewer as an intentional face. But the subtle suggestion of a face can be enough to subconsciously imbue the house with a creepy sense of anthropomorphic agency.

Another example of disparate meshing is adding a disturbing situation to your house drawing. What could you add to the drawing to imply that some tragic event has taken place there? Remember, all haunted houses were normal houses before they became haunted. What event or circumstance created the haunting, and is there a way to display that in your picture? There are many ways to make a normal house look haunted because of the situation it’s in.

How to draw a unique, realistic haunted house

Realistically drawing the outside of a haunted house requires significant creativity. After all, most houses look pretty generic from the outside. It takes technical skill and imagination for an artist to imbue a sense of hauntedness onto a technically “normal” image of a house.

You don’t have to draw a real haunted house to create a realistic haunted house drawing. Indeed, the best haunted house drawings come from the imagination. The simplest way to start is to draw a mundane structure that people associate with creepy ghost stories. Perhaps you could sketch a cabin in the woods, or a classic Victorian cottage. Then, incorporate the above techniques as subtly as you can to create a subconscious sense of wrongness. The key to a creepy realistic scary house drawing is when you and I both know that the house is haunted, but we can’t quite put our finger on why we know.

Want to hear a story from a real-life medium who cleanses houses of ghosts before they go to market? Listen to this interview:

How to draw an easy, cute haunted house for beginners and kids

Even beginner artists can draw a cute cartoon Halloween haunted house using the above advice. For very little kids, a quirky house drawing embodies all the important elements that a haunted house drawing does for adults (disparate meshing, translocation, and unnatural distortion), but much more obviously, and minus the spooky elements.

How to draw a simple haunted house

The average cartoon haunted house drawing is more cute than scary. The overtly so cute additions and bright colors are why these types of kindergarten haunted house drawings aren’t scary per-se. Yet the elements that make them uncomfortable and unsettling subconsciously are all there. The following how-to video should make spooky house drawing easy for beginners.

A big benefit to learning to draw haunted house pictures with your kids is that children have such unbridled imaginations. Kids come up with wild concepts that are too illogical or fantastical for our censored and jaded adult brains to easily conceptualize. Quickly scribbling wildly distorted and unpredictable houses with your kids can be a great way to brainstorm for haunted house drawing ideas that could become more polished artwork later.

What are some ways to incorporate ghost folklore into a house drawing?

There may be circumstances where you want to illustrate a house within a universe where ghosts exist, but you don’t want to imply that house is haunted. In that case, adding some details associated with ghosts and folklore can be useful. One example from the American South is the addition of haint blue paint to the porch ceilings, doors, and window frames. (You do know what haint blue is, right? And what a haint is?) These videos of Becky painting houses with symbolic haint blue window frames are good examples of how to draw a non-haunted house in a scary horror scene that implies the threat of real ghosts getting in.

The house above isn’t necessarily haunted. In fact, one could argue it’s less likely to harbor spirits than an average house, given that there’s an obvious ghost repellant apparent in the image. The imagery invokes the thought of ghosts and the paranormal, without necessarily implying that the house in the image is haunted.

What should you draw on the inside of a haunted house?

If drawing the outside of a realistic haunted house is challenging due to its technical subtlety, that implies that the inside of a haunted house is much easier to portray. But why would this be?

How do you draw a haunted house on the inside?

What is the one thing every haunted house has in common with every other house? It’s that at some point in the past, it wasn’t haunted; it was just a regular house. The house became haunted at some point, either because of something that happened there, or because of something that came into the house. That means objects, people, and scenes within the house can clearly convey a sense of hauntedness by depicting the act of becoming haunted, or the consequences of a haunting.

Drawing a house full of haunted objects

There are only a certain number of items that are realistically visible from the outside of a house. Maybe a porch swing, with a pitcher of ice-cold lemonade set upon a white wicker side table. But not many of these items imply a haunting; at least not without delving into the absurd, like a potted venus flytrap, or the fantastical, like a spectral silhouette gazing out a window.

But there are thousands of items that could realistically be inside a house. What types of items might you find inside a haunted house? Maybe tools for occult rituals, that might be used to summon a specter. Or maybe objects that people feel are more likely to be haunted themselves, like antique furniture, or creepy dolls. The inside of a house also evokes a sense of vulnerability, which can contribute to that subconscious feeling of unease we associate with haunted house drawings.

Drawing people and ghosts

Another way to imply a haunting in a drawing is to include characters. Again, subtlety is key to a realistic drawing. Are the characters set apart in time from the rest of the drawing? Are they wearing period dress? Do they lurk in strange places wearing woeful expressions? Or do they show fatal injuries? Are they floating above the floor?

This step is risky if you’re going for realism. It’s hard to draw a realistic image of a ghost. That’s because, at their most realistic, ghosts just look like normal people. Drawing a normal person who is slightly transparent works, but that just doesn’t come across as easily in a black-and-white sketch the way it does in a photograph. The more obviously you try to draw a ghost, the more cartoonish the drawing is going to look.

How to draw a funny haunted house

Sometimes, adding images of ghosts to your drawing can make it instantly less realistic. But that’s not always a bad thing, depending on the desired effect. Becky’s drawing of a haunted bathroom is intentionally unrealistic to emphasize the hauntedness in a comedic fashion. The checkered floor, clawfoot tub, and shower curtain rod subtly imply that this bathroom exists in an old house with renovations. This is, to those in the know, a circumstance very associated with hauntings.

But to clue in the casual observer, Becky has decided to add some unrealistic macabre details. She includes a skeletal hand, a ghostly reflection, blood oozing from the toilet bowl, and emphasized sharp claws on the tub’s claw feet. The artist didn’t necessarily feel that the image wasn’t scary enough. Nor did she necessarily need those cheesy details to get the point across. She wanted to intentionally draw a silly, comedic picture of a haunted house.

Finally, if you prefer to have things drawn for you, rather than drawing them yourself, we get it. This massive detailed haunted mansion wasn’t an easy drawing to make. Diana doesn’t draw much at all either; she leaves that to Becky. Becky sells prints of some of her haunted house drawings, including the one of the Winchester mansion below, in our merch store.

Which video of how to draw a haunted house was your favorite?

We hope this tutorial has illuminated how to draw haunted houses, from easy cartoon haunted house sketches for beginners, to realistic and psychologically unsettling printable horror drawings for advanced artists. Rather than just an easy, step-by-step guide to the physical pieces, we wanted to provide you with deeper concepts. We hope that understanding these elements sparks your own unique artistic creativity.

If you haven’t already, please check out our YouTube haunted house direct draw videos, embedded above. Hopefully, they fill you with haunted house ideas to draw. Let us know if you can spot the three basic elements in the YouTube comments! Your feedback helps make our day a spooky day!

The post How to Draw a Haunted House With Process Drawing Videos appeared first on Homespun Haints.

Winter is a scary time of year. The days grow short, the nights grow long, and the world goes through a strange transition as living things tunnel under the earth and prepare for their rebirth in the spring. While the earth may look dead on the outside, it is in fact teeming with change, preparing for the new life to come once the snow has thawed.

The Winter Solstice—the longest night of the year—occurs on December 21, just a few days before Christmas. Many use this period of time to reflect upon their shadow selves—the darkness that lies within. For many more, these days represent the unseen, the unknowable, and the supernatural. The longest, darkest night of the year is the perfect time to talk about ghosts.

But why Christmas ghost stories?

In days before electricity and widespread literacy, people’s work days would be cut short by the encroaching nights, and they would gather around the fire for warmth and tell stories to keep themselves entertained. And, of course, the dark cold nights were the perfect time for ghost stories.

While so many oral traditions have been lost through time, the Christmas ghost story has not, thanks in large part to the Victorians. Improvements in printing and increased literacy sparked widespread publication of ghost stories around the holidays, and the public gobbled them up. But this love for the macabre didn’t just stem from the Victorian’s memories of telling ghost stories in the past; this was a time of great technological change, and people were fearful of what that meant for God and country. Remember, this is also the time period that produced classics such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So it’s no wonder that the industrialized population would gobble up ghost stories alongside their Christmas goose.

And how about today? Why do we still crave scary stories this time of year? The reasons have not changed, and we are still as human as our ancient counterparts. We know the world is changing, transitioning from life to death to life again. We feel the chill in the air. We see our breath in the dwindling sunsets. And we know, next to the twinkling tree and the glittering presents, the shadows, and the ghosts, are near.

The post Why do we tell ghost stories at Christmas? appeared first on Homespun Haints.

If you enjoy this, please subscribe to our YouTube channel here and you can view our other videos here!

The post Why are Victorian houses haunted? appeared first on Homespun Haints.

During Victoria’s reign in the 1800’s, though, Christmas became the celebration that we know today. But what made the Victorians so good at the Christmas ghost stories and haunted tales? And how did these ghost stories become such an important part of holiday gatherings?

Multiple reasons for Victorian Christmas ghost stories

As with most explanations, it turns out that there isn’t just one. Christmas celebrations took off the way they did partly for economic reasons. Due to the Industrial Revolution, many rural residents migrated into the cities for work. Many people found themselves in unfamiliar surroundings, and they craved the old stories that reminded them of home.

Also, a brand new middle class came about from the transition, and they had servants who were routinely using secret passageways and avoiding detection throughout the house as they worked. They were using gas lamps that produced carbon monoxide and caused hallucinations. It was a perfect setting for some brilliant and pretty trippy stories.

All of that said, it was more than just a massive shift in the population of the cities, a resurgence of the holiday, and environmental factors that lead to the birth of this unique genre of literature. It always comes down to giving the people what they want right? Throughout history, storytelling—particularly ghost stories—has been an oral tradition. For as long as there have been humans, we have been telling each other stories, passing them down through generations and creating lore.

The prevalence of the periodical press, though, gave a new outlet to these stories. Ruth Robbins, professor of English literature at Leeds Metropolitan University says that “publishers suddenly needed a mass of content, and ghost stories fitted the bill – short, cheap, generic, repetitive, able to be cut quite easily to length.”

Christmas is back in fashion. People are creating and consuming creepy stories, especially around the Christmas season when the nights are long and dark and everyone is trapped inside. There is a press that is eager for content, and they’re ready to give people what they want: Christmas ghost stories. And with that, we have the birth of a genre and resurgence of a spine-chilling tradition.

Some Christmas Ghost Stories we recommend:

Here are some of the best creepy ghost stories we could find, and they’re definitely worth the read:

The Kit-Bag
by Algernon Blackwood

A young man works for a prominent lawyer who is in court defending a murderer. Ready for a break, he is looking forward to Christmas. When he asks his employer to borrow a kit-bag for his travels, things go very, very wrong.

The Open Door
by Mrs. Margaret Oliphant

When the narrator’s young son starts ranting about an intolerable that recurs outside their Victorian mansion at night, people begin to think he’s losing his mind. Everyone except his father, that is.

Top Image: Winslow Homer. Christmas—Gathering Evergreens and The Christmas-Tree. 1858. Wood engraving on paper, published by published by Harper’s Weekly. The Art Institute of Chicago.

The post Christmas ghost stories and why the Victorian era was creepy AF appeared first on Homespun Haints.

And maybe it makes sense. We’re with our loved ones. We’re remembering friends and family and talking about our shared histories. When people gather, they tell stories and revisit the past—and of course, we all love to scare each other. But the connection between the spirit world and Christmas time is a little bit deeper than that.

The darkest day of the year

Winter solstice is the darkest day of the year—the time when the veil between the worlds is thought to be the thinnest. Some believe that this may help blur the line between the living and the dead—that spirits may have particularly good access to the living during the darkest day of the year. Christians chose December 25th for good reason—there is a parallel between the pagan celebrations of the death and rebirth of the sun and the birth of a savior. Perhaps the undead were celebrating at Christmas time before there was a Christmas to celebrate.

Our Best Podcast Episodes of Christmas Ghost and Paranormal Stories

• The Holiday Ghost Stories Episode
• The Weirder The Better
• A Christmas Ghost Story
• It’s the Most Scariest Time of the Year
• Butt-dialed from the Afterlife: A Christmas Ghost Story

A very Victorian Christmas tradition

All of this said, Victorian Christmases had a strong tradition of gathering around a fire and telling ghost stories. It’s a tradition that has disappeared from our modern Christmas repertoire of baking and singing and decorating trees, but British literature is full of scary Christmas stories. British humorist Jerome K. Jerome wrote an introduction to an anthology of Christmas Ghost Stories, “Told After Supper,” in 1891. He said that whenever five to six English-speaking people met around a fire on Christmas Eve, they would tell ghost stories. We even sing about the tradition in “The Most Wonderful Time Of the Year,” which contains the line “There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.”

For some reason, of all of the traditions we’ve kept from the Victorian era of Christmas, this is one that has died off. Yule logs, Christmas trees, and carols have all withstood the test of time, but rarely do people sit around those fires and lights and try to scare the pants off of each other.

More About Creepy Christmas Traditions

• Christmas ghost stories and why the Victorian era was creepy AF
• Why do we tell ghost stories at Christmas?
• Have You Been Naughty or Nice?

So, if you should choose to watch A Christmas Carol and spend some time visiting old ghosts, you wouldn’t be the first. And we’re definitely here for a Christmas ghost story resurgence. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a spooky day!

The post The Long Lost Tradition of Telling Ghost Stories at Christmas appeared first on Homespun Haints.