"The House and the Brain" by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton is a well known author of supernatural horror, but also was a politician and active socialite during his life in the mid-XIX century.  HP Lovecraft mentions him in his essay on Supernatural Horror in Literature and admires his sense for the supernatural, but criticizes his obsession with spiritualism and the occult.  This story is different as it deals with a haunted house, but not from cheap-thrills point of view, but from a scientific (for 1850s) stance and with underlying attempt to explain and understand the phenomenon, instead of just reveling in screams and shivers.  I saw several reviews online complaining about the author using "Old English" words and writing in an "old style"??? Duh! It is written in the mid-1800s! Does anyone even research authors they read anymore??

Lovecraft's essay is a wonderful source of books to put on one's reading list if one is interested in how the contemporary horror genre came to be.  Many of the books would be disappointing from today's point of view, used to visual media, quick development, twists and turns - some of the older books from the 1700s and 1800s could seem outright boring, but that's only for the unsophisticated and untrained reader.  Even Lovecraft's books are slow, tedious and even boring by today's standards, but if we take in account the time and mores when they were written (no TV, no Internet, no Instant-Gratification-Culture) - they are straightforward revolutionary.  The author of this blog has read a large percentage of the books mentioned in Lovecraft's essay, including the (possibly) non-fiction Francis Barrett volume.

Lytton's story intimates of a (very) haunted house in central London, where people who stay either run away or die in strange circumstances.  The hero of the story is a researcher in occult matters and stays a night at the house during which frightening visions and apparitions occur, causing the death of his dog and permanent flight of his faithful servant, but he stays and survives the night only by the strength of his will and his knowledge of the occult theories.

He is persuaded that houses don't just get haunted of themselves, but there is a malicious human brain behind it which causes the frights and the misfortunes.  He persuades the owner to completely destroy and dig out a part of the house where he finds strange occult apparatus and a miniature portrait of a person who apparently has lived for several centuries.  Eventually the hero meets this person who is back to England from decades-long interval spent in the Middle East, and accuses him of putting the curse on the house and its inhabitants (including killing a small boy by starvation and abuse) almost a century ago and being the cause of all evil happenings in the house.

The strange man confirms the hero's suspicions but proves too strong and puts the hero in a hypnotic trance and uses him as a medium to see his own future and afterwards puts a spell on him not to be able to communicate about anything that happened for three months.  Within those three months the malicious occultist disappears from England and the hero is afterwards released from the numbing spell and writes this story.