this house

I am either thinking about houses or dogs

[byjove]

they don’t tell you this but you can actually call the real estate agent and tour a house on the market just because you’re nosy, even if you have zero interest in buying the house and could not afford it in a million years. just be nice and polite and don’t mention you’re broke

[hellopuns]

The Monday Period: Part 1 of 6

Part 1: you are here

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

[mrsterlingeverything]

[vinceaddams]

It's nice that loud noises don't stick to clothes like smells do. That would be really bad if they did.

[collectivenothingness]

the only grind I respect is girls grinding against each other or something. like whatever the mortar and pestle get up to

[indigosfindings]

"i look forward to hearing back" implies a beautiful world that runs on sense-direction combinations. i smell sideways to tasting up. i palpate inwards to listening diagonal, so that i can hunger clockwise

[dateamonster]

youve just moved into a new place and the bathroom sink has one of those built-in hand soaps you mostly see in public restrooms where the dispenser is attached directly to the tile wall. it still has some soap left in it, so you use it, figuring youll replace it whenever this current batch runs out.

but it doesnt run out.

the outside of the dispenser is completely opaque, just a shell of bland, off-white plastic. you cant see inside to determine how much is left. every day, several times a day, you press down on the pump and it spits out a perfect dollop of pale pink soap, slightly runny, smelling of baby powder and something indistinctly floral.

for a long time you dont really think about it at all except to feel distantly grateful towards the former tenants or the landlord or whoever for filling it up for you before you moved in. after a while though it starts to nag at you. the dispenser isnt that big, and still theres been no indication its anywhere near running out. once, feeling experimental, you keep pumping until soap is running down the side of the sink. you listen expectantly for the faint wheeze of a bottle about to run dry. eventually you are forced to give up and resign yourself to cleaning up the pointless mess youve made.

after that day, the sight and smell of your usual hand soap becomes inexplicably nauseating to you. you buy a new bottle scented "ocean breeze" and open up your dispenser to replace it. that is, you try to, only you cant seem to figure out how it opens. after a few minutes of feeling around for some seam or groove in the uniform plastic, you get impatient and start just pulling on the thing, trying to wrench it out of the wall. on the fourth or so good yank, you hear a crack as the shell separates from its mount. when you finally pry it away from the wall, rather than a floppy plastic bag of soap you find the nozzle is connected to a long gray tube, crimped up in a sort of accordion-like design, disappearing into a concealed hole in the wall.

the area around the hole has been stripped of the usual tile and the bare wall beneath is cracked in places, giving the impression that this... device was installed in a hurry by a shoddy contractor, or else jammed straight through the concrete with a degree of brute force you can scarcely imagine. against your better judgment you press down on the dispenser pump and watch the tube shudder and spasm out another perfect dollop of pink into the sinks basin. the pale color suddenly reminds you less of the placid pink of baby showers and powder blush and easter dresses than it does the color of toothpaste spittle after youve flossed a little too hard.

you stand back and, with one hand tightly gripping the hose, give one final, hard pull. hard because you are feeling too unnerved to worry about your security deposit at the moment. final because when you do pull it, you hear a loud thunk on the other side of the wall, an unseen impact that rattles the contents of your medicine cabinet, followed by a low, pained moan.

you never do find out whats on the other side of that wall. you just fix the soap dispenser, and break your lease. its not that you dont wonder-- of course you do. call it a case of sunk cost. youd been living there for at least a couple months, washing your hands, what, three or four times a day? you dont know. youd never had to think about it before. now, whenever it gets a little too quiet and youve run out of distractions to drown it out, its all you can do to keep yourself from running the calculations in your head to completion. how many cups, quarts, gallons overall?

at a certain point, it had to be better not to know. it just had to be.

[wizardarchetypes]

the place where so many haunted house genre stories fall apart is where the writers try to explain why the house is haunted and it completely defangs the story because the explanation is never as scary as the haunting itself. "this house is haunted and bad things happen here" can be so artful and outrageously scary. "this house is haunted because Specified Bad Thing Happened Here" falls flat again and again. i'm not saying it can't be done but i'm almost never satisfied by it and often it ruins the whole story for me.

[wizardarchetypes]

the thing is, a Haunted House story is not the same as a Ghost story. In a Haunted House story, the Haunted House is a character. Usually a main character. In a Ghost story, the ghost is a character. A Ghost's story may be explained by showing us the Ghost's origin. But a Haunted House story cannot be explained by showing us the origin of one of the House's ghosts. That's just one ghost. We're talking about the House.

[kittykat-pikachu]

list of things about mussed up houses

house of leaves by mark z. danielewski

skinamarink by kyle edward ball

the house in the ocean by mister manticore

myhouse.wad by veddge

this house has people in it by alan resnick (possible? its more like the people are the strange thing)

monster house by gil kenan (maybe not messed up in the right way for this list)

burning down the house by the talking heads (only in passing)

additions:

the haunting of hill house by shirley jackson (book)

the haunting of hill house by mike flanagan (tv adaptation of the book)

rose red by stephen king

vivarium by lorcan finnegan

changing planes by ursula k. le guin (not a house, but thematically close)

charlotte markham and the house of darkling by michael boccacino

slade house by dave mitchell

little, big by john crowley

the inner room by robert aickman

phantom architecture by phillip wilkinson

bite size terrors: erobos heaven by anoverthinker (seems like possibly the house isnt whats strange? but i dont know for sure i havent played it)

anatomy by kitty horrorshow

childhood homes (and why we hate them) by qrowscant

the house next door by annie rivers siddon

white is for witching by helen oyeyemi

haunted by poe (album counterpart to house of leaves??? holny crap)

the house with a clock in its walls by john bellairs (also has a movie adaptation)

p.t. by hideo kojima

coraline by neil gaiman (more like the creature is making the house messed up but yeah ill count it)(EDIT: okay yeah that house IS just messed up. forgot the beldam didn't make the other house)

starling house by alix harrow

the witch's house by fummy

house (hausu) by nobuhiko obayashi

the house is alive and the house is hungry by the paper chase

my house walk-through by nana825763

control by sam lake

house of bones by jeffery scott lando

lungbarrow by marc platt

if anyone knows of other things that fit this niche, any type of media, feel free to add on. i'll edit and add it to the original post. i just really like this specific niche

thank you to @bas-fish, @eggmixercortex, @ohiotpke, @posteriorpeasantpresents, @hadoom, @dougielombax, @lite-weaver, @mimillion, @elvriskastello, @apotheoseity, @hauntedhousez, @sophiewooloo, @jumbledthemes for contributing :3

i should sort this + add links putting that on my to-do list

[valtsv]

"constantly changing and shifting architectural landscape" really is one of my favourite settings for a story because it encompasses two similar but distinct niches of existential horror

[valtsv]

illustrative diagram i made to explain my point

[valtsv]

a story itself is, of course, both of these at once - you are trapped within a living organism more vast and multifaceted than your own understanding of it can ever hope to contain, and subject to the whims of its architect, the author

[stillmissing]

starting a collection #blackmold

[virgin-martyr]

Lisa Robertson’s “Report 1624: The House" 

[ineskew]

on haunted houses

When she stood still in the middle of the room the pressing silence of Hill House came back all around her. I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson

This haunting is architectural. It is not about you. It is about where you are. There are bones in the foundation. This house is a graveyard. This house is a corpse. You are inside the corpse. That makes you the maggot.

“WHY ARE YOU HAUNTED? A survey,” @filmnoirsbian

Some places are born, not built. Such a strange thought to have. And I don’t know what came next, but I was still muttering the words to myself when they stopped my car and broke the glass and dragged me out. Born, not built. Born, not built.

I Am In Eskew, Anonymous

…for of all that “Être humain” the real human beings in these houses and cities become normalized termites, or within a “dwelling machine” they become foreign cells, still too organic.

“Buildings in Empty Spaces,” Ernst Bloch tr. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg

The house, heavy with history, is burying the bodies before they even know they are bodies.

“i’m going through a bunch of old essays and tbh this slapped,” @nedlittle

There’s only so much that hate can build up in a place before it starts hating you back… I don’t know what’s in the attic, or if there’s anything up there at all, and I don’t think I want to.

SCP-2740, djkaktus

Have you not been paying attention? Did it not occur to you that as an organism existing within a greater organism, your intrusion would be felt? And still you harass. And now, like the wayward spider who witlessly settled on a sleeper’s tongue, you will be swallowed. Because the truth is this: When a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth.

ANATOMY, Kitty Horrorshow

Despite all their efforts to the contrary—their impossible architecture, their threats of betrayal, their lesions in the walls—we keep coming back. We keep exploring them and charting them and trying to bend their distinctively un-human design to our will. These houses are haunted—they’re haunted by us.

“Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House,” Jacob Geller

[duckdotcom]

imagine if doorways grew back like scabbed over with fresh drywall and you had to keep carving them back out with a jabsaw to keep the doorway clear etc

[cryptotheism]

Imagine if the membranes recoiled in pain every time you did this. Imagine if over time, some doorways became accustomed sensation. Imagine that very rarely, some even seemed to enjoy it.

[moonbeamdagger]

*sleepover host voice* imagine if you two went to sleep

[m0mspc]

[blackberrybisexual]

hauntings obsession, pt 2 (pt 1)

Keep reading

[valtsv]

the questions i really want to ask are if a house can be compared to a living body, if it can experience physical trauma like living bodies do, then can it not also be susceptible to injuries and illnesses that affect the mind? are ghosts and creaks and groans not as much a manifestation of mental afflictions that the body keeps the score of as they are of physical wounds? if a building can be said to have a personality then surely it stands to reason that it can develop a personality disorder? when we say a place is 'sick' are we not referring to its emotional state as much as its physical one?

[valtsv]