Imagine a haunted house.
Does it look like … this?
A decaying structure with severe angles and intricate woodwork?
Maybe some bats flying out of a tower.
This is the Victorian mansion.
It’s ghostly presence traces back to paintings like this one from the 1920s:
artist Edward Hopper’s “House by the Railroad,” which shows an old Victorian house, abandoned
and isolated.
Remember this one because it comes back in later.
Throughout 20th-century pop culture, similar-looking mansions appeared again and again as signifiers
of dread in horror movies, television, and Gothic pulp novels.
It was featured famously as the menacing Bates mansion in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho
and the kooky home of the Addams Family.
But it wasn’t always like that – so why do we associate this house with death?
The later part of the Victorian era, named after England’s Queen Victoria, was known
as the Gilded Age in America.
It followed the bloody American Civil War and was simultaneously an era of rampant income
inequality, political corruption, and industrialization that helped create a new wealthy class.
And the choice home for the “nouveau riche,” or “new rich,” was the Victorian.
It was the McMansion of its time: a gaudy and unbalanced monstrosity that showed off
the wealth of certain American families.
Borrowed from medieval Europe’s Gothic architecture, these houses were designed to be imposing
and make a statement.
They were a mismatched combination of towers and turrets, ornate gingerbread trim, and
sloped, bloated roofs, called the Mansard roof, which drew from the French imperial
style.
Inside was a maze of rooms like parlors, drawing rooms, libraries, and observatories,
places that were often unoccupied, with the curtains drawn to keep out sunlight, which
could damage the clutter of heavy, expensive furnishings.
Spooky, right?
Late 19th-century wealthy Americans wanted to emulate Europe
but after World War I, that changed, as the American vision turned toward progress and
innovation.
Modern architects ushered in an era of clean lines and simplicity as the new hallmark of
taste.
The Victorian, in comparison, became an antiquated symbol of excess, whose architectural style
was described as “grotesque,” and the mansions were called “mongrel types desecrating
the landscape.”
Critics of the time began to associate the houses with death, offensive reminders of
the troubling Gilded Age.
These houses slowly became an unwelcome presence, and eventually the wealthy owners moved on.
And when the Great Depression swept across the country in the 1930s, a lot of the houses
were abandoned or became boarding houses for the working poor.
Without their affluent tenants to maintain them, the ornate structures quickly eroded,
deepening their association with decay.
Enter Charles Addams.
A cartoonist working for the New Yorker who introduced the world to the Addams Family.
A reclusive collection of ghouls who are morbidly anti-social and mysteriously wealthy.
“A toast!
To the glorious mysteries of life, to all that binds a family as one.
To mirth, to merriment, to manslaughter!”
These popular cartoons began appearing in the late ’30s, but it wasn’t until November
1945 that Addams finally showed us the exterior of the strange home the family occupies.
It was the Victorian.
The Addams Family was a dark perversion of the ideal American family, and their mansion
represented that.
Charles Addams later said in an interview that he chose it because Victorians are just
“better for haunts.”
It was here that the Victorian became permanently associated with horror, and by the time Alfred
Hitchcock made his iconic film, Psycho, in 1960, audiences immediately recognized the
Bates mansion as a place of unspoken dread, of something not quite right.
In the promotional trailer for the film, Hitchcock describes the house’s appearance as:
“A little more sinister-looking, less innocent than the motel itself.”
And when he takes you inside ...
“You see even in daylight this place still looks a bit sinister.”
And his inspiration?
It was Hopper, from 1925.
It’s not hard to see the similarity.
Both are towering, empty, and isolated – decaying relics that loomed over a world that had long
moved on.
The Victorian mansion died over 100 years ago, but its persistent presence in Gothic-inspired
art and pop culture has made it an iconic symbol of dread, and now serves as an immediate
signal to audiences:
There’s something not quite right about this house.
So you probably caught that ghost in the window around the two-minute mark, but there’s
actually four others hidden throughout this video – did you see those?