What are your ideas on how to build a genuinely creepy place that doesn’t cross over into haunted house or stagecraft?
Like airbrushing a layer of faux grime over the woodwork or putting in holographic mirrors crosses the line. I mean this needs to be an actual creepy locale. One positive example I’ve found is the infamous Winchester House’s stairs to nowhere. Stuff like that. Sort of a brooding, brutal, and unsettling feeling should pervade the design, but never be so over the top as to tip one’s hand that, “yeah, who was your architect, Vincent Price? Tim Burton?”
I would just invite you over to my place. I have someone cut the lawn but all of the border areas and “gardens” are completely overgrown. The overgrowth along the gravel driveway creates an eerie sort of green archway and since the house is built into a shallow hillside with the driveway at the base, you have to look up through this tangle to see windows covered with room darkening shades behind ivy dangling from the eaves. In addition to that, I have ferocious attack ground hogs and killer bunnies. ( I’m joking about the killer bunnies, but not the ground hogs )
Odd angles and doors that will not stay open but gently and slowly wing shut.
In the original of great haunted house as opposed to ghost stories The Haunting of Hill House the author describes how none of the angles in the house is quite right, and the doors will not stay open. It does also have a confusing floorplan, with odd rooms and corridors but I think that the best idea would be a subtle lack of 90 degree angles. It would end up taking a lot of custom carpentry for the doors and arches though. H P Lovecraft also dealt heavily with bad angles.
Add in slightly springy floorboards that don’t creak - so you are unsettled by walking because it is just springy enough to feel unsolid and wrong. You can also get a tone generator and run some super low frequency into the walls and windows, turning the whole house into a neutral super bass woofer. Add in borderline unhearable whistling wind sort of noise at the top end of the hearing spectrum faintly so you can not tell where it is coming from [and having still air inside] will also be unsettling. Add in little scritchy sounds like mice in the woodwork, and really make people uncomfortable.
Just how far do you want to take it? You could run high frequency electric in the walls to generate actual effects in the brain:D
Doors that don’t fit square in the frame. Windows that are grimy and don’t close, with one broken pane covered by a piece of board. A sprung bed with a stained vinyl mattress.
The creepiest house I was ever in achieved its effect by having really inappropriate furniture. Like an enormous antique four-poster bed in the middle of the living room. The living room also had a tiny, child-sized wooden chair turned to face the corner. (The owners didn’t have children.) I was house-sitting for them and walking in there at night when the lights were dim always freaked me out.
My grandparents had a door to nowhere on the stairs landing: if you could manage to open it it would open up to midair on the outside. Unfortunately, it let in too much light to be considered creepy during the daytime, although the house did have some dark wood passageways elsewhere that were creaky and bleak.
I used to live in an honest to god creepy house by myself in grad school. It was a farmhouse in Vermont on 80 acres of land up a long dirt road on the side of a mountain. 3000+ square feet. Rent - $300 a month in 1996 all utilities included and there was a reason for that.
This house had the market covered on creepy features but I can hit some highlights:
The main room was huge like a ski lodge and it had a gigantic fireplace in the center.
My bedroom overlooked the main room like a large loft execpt it had walls mounted on old wagon wheels that I could slide to open the whole thing up into a ledge that overlooked the main room.
The house had 5 bedrooms and all of them were decorated completely differently ranging from New England classic to 1960’s modern but nothing newer. Random books and magazines from the 1940’s to the early 1970’s were strewn around like someone was just reading them and would be back at any time. I certainly never moved them the whole time I was there.
There were two main staircases and each of them had the worst examples of Scooby Doo type painting right at the top of them. They were both paintings of women who looked like they had just killed their family and were pleased with the results. They would glare at you if you got up the never to go up either staircase and I had several grown guests that couldn’t bring themselves to do it without escort.
There were no neighbors. The closest ones were the prison about two miles away (no joke). There was a phone. It was a large black one from the 1950’s but it wasn’t hooked up. There was no mailing address either. TV was isolated to one station that went off the air at midnight. Forget an internet connection. If you get hurt and can’t drive or walk yourself to get help, you die.
It had a loft bedroom off of the main room that could only be reached by a ladder that started along the wall about 6 feet up. In other words, you had to be very athletic to even get to it but once you did, it was a room larger than many NYC apartments.
The capper was the original part of the house that was built in the early 1800’s. I rarely went in that side of the house because the place was so huge for one person but there was a large basement with a dirt floor complete with a morgue area to hold the bodies of anyone who died during the long winter until they could be buried after spring thaw.
I loved that place more than anything but it taught me that all work and no play makes me a dull boy.
Oh man, I would so live there in a heartbeat if it got cell signal [and I could convince the cable people to run cable and cable internet up the mountain] I absolutely adore funky places like that. Well, and mrAru didn’t need to work for a living, he has a job now that he really likes.
I was helping my mother fix up one of her rentals after a tenant left, and one of the bedrooms had a hasp, like the kind you’d use to padlock a shed, on the outside of the bedroom door. It was an old door that probably didn’t shut securely and the tenant had several dogs, so I assume she used it to keep them in there. But I found it creepy.
There was also a building on my college campus that I always found really creepy due to its layout and floor plan. It was confusingly laid out and any given floor wasn’t entirely accessible from that floor. So if you entered through one entrance and wanted to reach a room on the ground floor, odds were you had to go up or down stairs, wander through the building, and then go back down or up different stairs to the ground floor. It was extremely disconcerting, especially at first when you didn’t know the building.
Of course, it was a large college building with winding hallways and lots of rooms. If you tried to do that in a normal residence you’d probably just divide the house annoyingly in half and it would be weird, not creepy.
The house I grew up in had a couple very vaguely creepy aspects to it. The second story railing to the stairs had broken and so we could have theoretically just fallen right down. Not only dangerous but also “just wrong” in my mind when I think about it.
The house had two bedrooms but was set up for three. The wall to the third just never got built, so the hallway on the second floor was just extra big. The reason I think it was meant to be a room was it had a closet and a window in the appropriate place.
It originally had two barns. The one the previous owners used, was a modern plastic sheeting one that they moved to their new property, but they hadn’t torn down the old wooden one which was strewn with old farm equipment that my family also never used or moved so just stayed there the whole time I lived there making the first floor of the barn useless. I was so young that I don’t remember what type of tools they were and so I replace them in my mind with stuff looking like Gary Larson’s “Cow Tools”.
Window glass that was slightly polarized & darker.
Peeling paint.
A bed or a mattress in a room totally inappropriate for a bedroom. Bonus points if its been slept in and is unmade.
A bigger heavy-duty door leading to the basement complete with dead bolts, internal lock, a padlock hasp, and a top and bottom 2x4 door barricades that say “There’s something down there that we don’t want up here. Ever.”
Radiator heat steam-heat, so the walls clank and creak every night all winter long.
A steamer trunk in the attic with chains wrapped around it, padlocked shut with an antique padlock and bolted to an attic beam.
A fully stocked tool bench in the basement with a built in table saw on one side of the room and a claw-footed bathtub on the other side of the room. Bonus points if a large wood screw mounting hook is sunk into an overhead beam right over the tub.
Later, you can always add:
Large portrait of an ugly person in period dress. Bonus points if they are painted as just slightly insane looking, so the viewer can’t tell if the insane person was the subject, the artist, or the art collector.
Ventriloquist dolls / dummies with eyes that move on a timer.
Scattered leaves that have never been cleared or picked up.
Two red X-mas light bulbs set 2 inches apart outside a second floor bedroom window that turn on from a pressure switch when you sit on the bed.
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