A haunted house by virginia woolf summary

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“Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting.”

Such was the first sentence of Virginia Woolf’s short story A Haunted House. Sitting comfortably on the edge of reality and subconsciousness, Woolf’s 600 word piece offers a unique passage into a new world. Centring on the perspective of an unnamed narrator, we watch the events unfold through her gaze as she recites to us the eerie events in her house.

A Haunted House both is and is not a ghost story. In the most literal sense, the story features a ghostly couple, wandering the silent halls of a house searching for something. The narrator then goes on to describe her encounters with the couple, confiding to us that she could never seem to clearly see them. Soon night falls and the narrator senses the ghosts standing over her as she sleeps. The ghosts recall their past joys spent in the house just as the narrator wakes, believing to have found that ‘something’ the ghosts seek.

But from a different perspective(and indeed, the story is all about perspective), A Haunted House takes on the form of a visual illusion — boring into our subconsciousness. It’s all about reading between the lines and looking beyond the words themselves.

Wow. That was complicated. Let me explain.

Feeling and Sensing — the Borders of Our World

“And tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the farm.” — A Haunted House

Here the narrator tells us of an event where she seemingly heard the murmur of the ghosts, and stands to check if there had been any change to the house’s interior. She notices nothing out of the ordinary and proceeds to check further. Still nothing.

This story touches heavily on what it really means to ‘perceive’ something. Woolf attempts to capture the fleeting emotion of just sensing something beyond our immediate comprehension. Just like the hum of a bee as it whizzes past our heads — by the time we turn, it’s gone.

But the bee still existed, didn’t it?

I’ve spent nights alone in my house many a time before. It’s almost as if I was granted super-hearing — I could pick up every creak, hum, scratch and click. All those sounds augmented my very perception of the place: they allowed my mind to go rampant and fabricate horrible stories of monsters slinking beneath the floorboards, or spirits leering through my window. In other words, I was horrified.

I’m sure we can all relate to what I’m referring to, but that feeling of horror was not that of terror, but rather more subtle and unnerving. It drifts on the periphery of our vision, making us turn and eye the door suspiciously, try the lock a few more times or double latch the windows in defence against whatever decides to break inside.

But then again, the sounds of creaking floorboards or rattling windows are not rare. In fact, if I pay attention now I could hear the same noises the roused so much disturbance in my nighttime rest. Why do they seem so mundane now?

That brings us to the author’s crux — perspective. Woolf emphasises on how human activity comforts us in the day, but terrifies us in the night. Her narrator must’ve felt the same as she struggles between believing and not believing in those ghostly apparitions. She constantly dips between different outlooks, and gradually her ability to identify what she hears grows weaker. She starts confusing and misinterpreting what she hears and sees. Especially in the isolated night, when the same sounds could have been made by anything from fellow humans to otherworldly ghosts.

At the end of the day, all the noises and disturbances are still made by comprehendible beings. A stray possum in the trees maybe, or a startled bird. But Woolf questions this belief and asks whether we can truly know and understand what we sense, to comprehend everything we see.

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Dreams and Reality — What it Means to be Conscious

“A moment later the light had faded. Out in the garden then? But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun.” — A Haunted House

When I first read this story I felt the narrator to be in limbo between absolute consciousness and subconscious dreaming. She recites congruent events, but describes some things in odd detail and others with complete neglect. Time is almost non-existent, with day just as likely as being night, and shifting just as fast. The narrator seemed to only sense the ghosts when she was absorbed in something else, not really aware of her surroundings — either when she was reading or when she was just waking up.

I’ve had dreams that felt just as plausible as reality and reality as confusing as dreams. I’m sure we’ve all had times when the situation was so wonderful or so terrible we question the very things we see. What does it really mean to be in reality? If we smudge the boundary of dreaming and living, will there be an actual difference?

To the core, consciousness all depends on observation and comparison. The basic idea of ‘consciousness’ is that some things can feel and others cannot. When I see my table or my chair I know instantly that I differ from it, that I can feel something it cannot. I sit in the chair, and the chair has no response. Now I definitely know I differ, because I observed its behaviour and compared it to my own. So to a degree, if the ‘dream’ and the ‘reality’ have no difference and act the same, they are the same.

Virginia Woolf is especially skilled at capturing these slippery concepts. The narrator of The Haunted House believes the ghosts to be real, and so she begins to relate her odd experiences to the presence of the ghosts, enforcing this new reality she created: My house is haunted by ghosts.

Woolf’s net of brilliance captures these imaginary butterflies. She hides them among her words, waiting for us to come by and explode into a burst of colours and reflections.

And that brings us to the last facet.

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Reflection and Mortality — the Passage of Time

“Death was the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; The rooms were darkened. He left it, left her, went North, went East. ‘Safe safe safe,’ the pulse of the house beat gladly, ‘The treasure yours.’ ” — The Haunted House

A Haunted House may be categorised as a short story, but its true position lies between story and free verse poetry. A hybrid of sorts, with its poetry heritage adding to the fluidity of the piece. The repetitions link together to create echoes and the echoes then form a sort of plot, stringing everything else together.

I turn away in horror and pain as I find the rejected pages of old books strewn around the trash, I feel a tinge of sadness as I pass a dead bird on the sidewalk. But then I ask myself: does the book or the carcass really care? I believe not.

Then why do I feel emotion toward it? The answer lies in that we inject our own emotions into the things we care about. That’s why the narrator of A Haunted House feels as if the house has a pulse — it’s actually just the sound of her own heartbeat reflected back at her.

Woolf’s story, in this sense, is not a ghost story at all. The ghosts were never there in the first place — merely exaggerated reflections of our narrator herself. The narrator’s restlessness is reflected in the ghosts’ endless search of the treasure, her love life reflected in the sense that there is not one but two ghosts, a couple.

But the ghosts could also exist. They hung onto the house they’ve lived in for so long. The ghosts may not be the reflection of the narrator, but the reflection of the house itself, hence the title.

Why did Woolf choose ghosts? Why not monsters or pixies or a world-bending, universe-devouring god? Because what a ghost has that all of them do not is humanity — that they were once humans, now only reflected shadows of their former life.

In the end, it does not matter whether the ghosts themselves still exist. Woolf wanted to stress how the memories and experiences and emotions injected into a place transcends even the flow of time itself, leaving a lasting impression and passing down onto the next inhabitant.

There are infinite doors to open when it comes to the insightful prose of Virginia Woolf, and perhaps that is why I love her fiction so dearly. She is not afraid to go out of convention, to explore and experiment with the smallest emotions. She tested the boundaries of fiction in these stories, and by doing so she recreates in words ‘the confusion and swarm of life’.

As to what A Haunted House really wishes to convey, I will leave that up to you. But just as Mrs Woolf herself says:

“I am rooted, but I flow.” — Virginia Woolf