Without any overall or grand design, without any intention of a unified effect, the Winchester mansion sprawls and flops in a dozen different directions, moving like a coral reef. Its aesthetic, its beauty, is precisely in its lawlessness. The house is, in a way, a form of automatic writing, a stream of consciousness made spatial. For many visitors this is also what makes the house so unsettling. The Winchester house can feel endless, much larger on the inside than it is on the outside. This is something you find in Shirley Jackson's Hill House, and you find it in the disorienting space of Disney's Haunted Mansion (only from an aerial view do you understand that nearly all of the ride happens not in the house itself but in an adjacent warehouse space, giving you the sense that the tiny mansion you enter goes on forever inside). The disturbingly endless house appears repeatedly in horror novels, from Poe's House of Usher to the eponymous structure in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, built elegantly around the unsettling fact that the house in question is slightly larger inside than it is outside. And this is to say nothing of the numerous gothic novels that feature secret passageways, where the endlessness isn't supernatural, including the estate in H. P. Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls." If houses are supposed to be places of security, then most terrifying is the idea that they might go on forever, that they might be labyrinths.
