Domestic Horror and the Female Body: A Floor Plan

Haunted houses are rarely haunted by accident. They are built with too many rooms. They have wings that were added later, sealed off again, half-finished and poorly explained. They are passed from hand to hand with increasing discomfort. At some point, the story shifts. What was once a place of stability becomes a place of suspicion. There are things no one wants to name. There are sounds no one admits to hearing.

For many women, the body—our literal, daily architecture—is not so different.

Not because we are haunted, but because we are often treated as if our experiences are both central and unbelievable. Like haunted houses, women are studied, feared, owned, inspected, and doubted. We are expected to make others comfortable within us, and punished if our walls creak in protest. We are asked to perform warmth and shelter, even when something beneath the surface feels deeply unsettled.

Domesticity as Design

The haunted house is, above all else, domestic. Its gothic qualities rely not on castles or catacombs, but on familiar architecture: bedrooms, kitchens, staircases. These are spaces built for private life—nurturing, repetition, routine. And yet, it is in these domestic spaces that horror is most often imagined. Not on battlefields. Not in skyscrapers. But in basements, nurseries, attics. These are the places women have historically been confined to, associated with, and asked to make beautiful.

In literary tradition, the “female gothic” often hinges on this contradiction: that the home is both sanctuary and trap. The same walls meant to protect also isolate. The same bed meant to soothe is the one in which the protagonist wakes screaming. In this sense, haunted houses don’t just reflect ghost stories—they reflect a deeper anxiety about the invisible labor women perform inside those walls. Cooking, cleaning, caregiving, smiling, softening, staying.

What makes a house haunted is not necessarily the presence of death, but the failure of that death to be witnessed properly. A child buried too quietly. A woman gone missing and folded into the wallpaper. A history smoothed over in conversation but still echoing under the floorboards. These are not unfamiliar themes to anyone socialized into womanhood.

The Unfinished Room

In almost every haunted house narrative, there is a room that remains shut. Sometimes it’s the attic, sometimes the cellar, sometimes a nursery that no longer serves its purpose. The house is not whole, and its inhabitants know this. Something has been closed off—temporarily, they say—but decades pass. No one enters. The house adjusts around it.

There is something deeply familiar in this structure. So many women carry within them stories that have been shut away for years. Not always traumas, but ruptures. Experiences that changed the shape of who we were but could not be acknowledged openly. There are words that cannot be said without inviting disbelief. There are relationships that never made sense to anyone but us. There are moments that don’t fit into the bright, streamlined floor plan of a life well-designed.

And so we seal them off. Sometimes we speak of them in code. Sometimes we don’t speak of them at all. We learn to live in houses with unfinished rooms.

We learn to live in houses with unfinished rooms—and bodies with unanswered stories.

Ghosts and Belief

The ghost is often the most honest figure in a haunted house. It insists on being heard. It refuses to forget. It appears at the most inconvenient time and asks the most dangerous question: Do you remember?

In many horror narratives, women who believe the ghost are dismissed as hysterical.

In most haunted house stories, the woman knows first. She’s just the last to be believed.

They’re told it’s just old pipes, just the wind, just imagination. Their fear is treated as a symptom. Their memories are pathologized. It is only when the ghost becomes undeniable—when others begin to see it too—that the woman is granted credibility. By then, it is often too late.

This mirrors the broader cultural pattern in which women’s experiences must be validated by someone with more authority before they are considered real. The haunted house story is rarely about ghosts alone. It’s about what is required for a woman’s knowledge—her intuition, her memory, her pain—to be taken seriously. And too often, it’s a matter of proximity to danger. She is not believed until something terrible happens. Until the haunting becomes harm.

Architecture as Memory

A house remembers. Not just in the poetic sense, but in the literal one. Plaster retains smoke. Floors creak where bodies have moved most.

Architecture isn’t neutral. It remembers who was believed, who was silenced, and who was never allowed to speak.

Light changes depending on who has opened the blinds. It is possible to walk into a home and feel a history that was never spoken aloud. There is a difference between staged silence and lived quiet.

Women have learned to sense it. We walk into a room and feel what is missing. We notice what has been rearranged.

If a woman’s body is a house, it is one with many tenants. Childhood, caretaking, violence, pleasure, birth, blood, performance, erasure. Each leaves behind a residue. And like the haunted house, we are not always the first to recognize what’s lingering. Sometimes we inherit fears that aren’t ours. Sometimes we pass down warnings we can’t explain. Sometimes we become vessels for memory that doesn’t belong to us but arrives anyway, needing shelter.

Closing the Door (Or Not)

The haunted house is not evil. It is simply a place where something has happened—and no one made space for that event to live in the open. So it presses against the walls. It flickers the lights. It drips from the ceiling. It whispers in the middle of the night not to scare us, but to be remembered.

The female experience, too, is not inherently haunted. But it is too often defined by things unspoken. And until those stories are given shape—until the rooms are entered, until the history is aired out—we continue to carry them as ghosts.

Some of us build rooms for them.

Some of us name them.

Some of us keep the door open.