Haunted House Quotes

“The past never leaves us; there's always atmosphere to consider; you can wound air as cleanly as you can wound flesh. In this way, the Dream House was a haunted house. You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“There had stood a great house in the centre of the gardens, where now was left only that fragment of ruin. This house had been empty for a great while; years before his—the ancient man's—birth. It was a place shunned by the people of the village, as it had been shunned by their fathers before them. There were many things said about it, and all were of evil. No one ever went near it, either by day or night. In the village it was a synonym of all that is unholy and dreadful.”
― William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland

“It was achingly sad. A grand house that would never be a home again, abandoned and unloved, left to its own devices.”
― Kelly Covic, Insomnia

“The house had claimed many victims in its two centuries. Ate them, consumed, and devoured. Tortured souls like idle playthings. Terrorized visitors by the whim of its moods.”
― Kelly Covic, Insomnia

“Alone. The idea of it hit her square in the breastbone and culminated into irrational thought. That she was utterly, despairingly alone. The feeling nurtured until it swamped her, until a silly idea turned into thought and had become knowledge.”
― Kelly Covic, Insomnia

“It was as if the previous owner had covered everything and…left. Not only abandoning the house, but their belongings, also.”
― Kelly Covic, Insomnia

“It had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight, it had broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton wonderment: it met him there--and this was the image under which he himself judged the matter, or at least, not a little, thrilled and flushed with it--very much as he might have been met by some strange figure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house. The quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with him, when he didn't indeed rather improve it by a still intenser form: that of his opening a door behind which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk.”
― Henry James, The Jolly Corner

“There were so many dolls in there, waiting for her. Somewhere, in a less rational part of her brain, Louise felt that nothing could look so human and exist for so long without starting to develop thoughts on its own. What did the dolls think about?”
― Grady Hendrix, How to Sell a Haunted House

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I have marked in traveling how lonely houses change their expression as you come near, pass, and leave them. Some frown, others smile. The Bible buildings had life of their own and human diseases; the priests cursed or blessed them as men.”
― Emma Frances Dawson, An Itinerant House, and Other Ghost Stories

“You Sure this is it?" I said. "It looks empty."
"Empty? No way, there's loads of shit in there," worm replied”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“IS The Mansion haunted, do you think?"

"Naw. There ain't no REAL haunted houses--just in the fuckin movies. But if there ever WAS one, it'd be The Mansion. I heard that a couple of years ago, two kids from Norwood Street went in there to bump uglies and the cops found em with their throats cut and all the blood drained out of their bodies. But there wasn't any blood on em or around em. Get it? The blood was ALL GONE."

"You shittin me?"

"Nope. But that wasn't the worst thing."

"What was?"

"Their hair was dead white. Both of em. And their eyes were wide open and staring, like they saw the most gross-awful thing in the world."

"Aw, gimme a break.”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

“We are all ghosts, hiding our hollow selves beneath spurious sheets of virtue.”
― Linda Santos

“She would not, she absolutely would not be run from her home because of a dead girl’s tantrum.”
― Katherine Ginbey , Valkyrie’s Sight

“Claire had been a teenage catalogue model in the mid-nineties and even after she was shot six times in the chest, she would never let you forget it.”
― Katherine Ginbey, Valkyrie’s Sight

“Then we shall say it in this manner,” he replied. “Every day I shall wait on this bridge, at this time. If you are able to come, then come. If you are not able, I shall understand, but I shall be here every day regardless. How does that sound?” “It sounds too much for me to ask of you,” she said, smiling even as she felt tears welling in her eyes. “But I am too grateful to turn down your kind offer, so I must accept.” - 1722 (The Haunting of Hadlow House Book 2)”
― Amy Cross

“Rosie, you’re the Stephen Hawking of the real estate business.”
― Jonathan Dunne, Rosie

“One hell of a love spell that witch cast on me.”
― Jonathan Dunne, Rosie

“But no, Miss Rigor Mortis, the mother of all potters, had moulded her face into the face of the immortal.”
― Jonathan Dunne, Rosie

“The felines grew restless, mewling and crying like feverish babies.”
― Jonathan Dunne, Rosie

“ The four of us, all dead, sat eating in silence. Our dinner plates, I saw, were filled with small bones. A big platter in the center of the table piled high with gray-green bones, human-looking bones.”
― R.L. Stine, Welcome to Dead House

“But it is in death where we find sweet things, Mr Ryan.”
― Jonathan Dunne, Rosie

“Brimfield stood before him with all its majesty, welcoming him into the drafty recesses of its embrace. Sometimes home seemed too large, like it was a place where someone could scream and never be heard.”
― Melodie Ramone, Falls the Breath

“No wonder they come to your house looking for ghosts. Ghosts are spilling out of the walls.”
― Tania De Rozario, Dinner on Monster Island: Essays

“The house is certain of just one thing: it won’t go out that way. It will scream, and bleed, and convulse, and even if the only scars it leaves are imprinted on psyches, it will make them all remember.”
― Isobel Aislin, This Thing is Starving

“That is another classification of a haunt— one that is tied by a place, rather than an emotion. We can find those hauntings at places of disaster or historical significance.”
― Byrd Nash, Delicious Death

“I entered the narrow foyer smelling of beeswax, shadows, and ghosts.”
― Byrd Nash, Spirit Guide

“Some hearts are like haunted houses; someone dwells within, yet remains unseen. Someone weeps, but all you hear are your own echoes. A cold, as chilling as sorrow, lingers in every corner, seeping from every pore, making you numb. An eerie silence pervades, broken only by the sound of your own heartbeat.”
― Shahid Hussain Raja

“I felt it again, the house’s pull, the urge to sink to the ground and merge against it”
― Claire L. Smith, When We Entered That House

“Some hearts are like a haunted house; someone resides there, but you cannot see her. Someone weeps, but all you hear are your own echoes. A cold dampness lingers, as chilling as sorrow.”
― Shahid Hussain Raja