{"id":128028,"date":"2025-10-17T12:59:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T12:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/128028\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T12:59:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T12:59:11","slug":"from-amityville-to-borley-rectory-a-new-book-on-haunted-houses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/128028\/","title":{"rendered":"From Amityville to Borley Rectory, a new book on haunted houses"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>They are the backbone of millions upon millions of horror stories, they\u2019ve been brought to life countless numbers of times on the silver screen and everybody reading this is probably aware of one \u2013 if not from personal experience, then certainly from local folklore. Haunted houses are so deeply ingrained in the human psyche, that any old stack of bricks has the potential to send a shiver down your spine.<\/p>\n<p>Caitlin Blackwell Baines has taken it upon herself to dive headlong into some of these stories, to try and find out what really makes up the elements of a haunted house. In How To Build A Haunted House, she focuses on some of the better-known buildings associated with this phenomena \u2013 providing the scares, in the course of chronicling some of their more infamous stories, but balancing this with well researched facts about the building and often leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions.<\/p>\n<p>Borley Rectory \u2013 arguably England\u2019s most famous haunted house, claimed by some to have the corpse of a nun bricked up in its walls \u2013 is given the once-over, as is Long Island\u2019s Amityville house. Occupied by the Lutz family in the 1970s in the wake of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ronald_DeFeo_Jr.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">a grisly mass shooting<\/a> there, and now known worldwide thanks to a book and movie series, the house comes under Baines\u2019 microscope; while she recognises something was afoot, she also questions whether the framework of the this could have been made up years prior and has influenced others since.<\/p>\n<p>How To Build A Haunted House is an intriguing read that delves deep into the cultural obsession with the haunted house, and while Baines isn\u2019t afraid to play devils advocate, she\u2019s more than happy to scare the reader to death in the process. Perfect Halloween fodder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They are the backbone of millions upon millions of horror stories, they\u2019ve been brought to life countless numbers&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128029,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[359,77295,77296,58279,18,117,19,17,77297],"class_list":{"0":"post-128028","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-buzz-book-review","10":"tag-caitlin-blackwell-baines","11":"tag-chris-andrews","12":"tag-eire","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-profile-books"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128028\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}