It's almost Halloween, I've been swamped by work (I had two sick leaves last month, that's terrifying on it's own), but I found the time to see scary movies and read scary books, I was watching one of them with my mum, she loves old movies, since she used to watch them with her grandma, while watching two ideas sparked in y mind (literary felt the bulb light up), one of them was this essay; The movie "El fantasma del convento" (or the phantom of the monastery) follows a very typical 1930s plot, a haunted place a love triangle and death. Being completely honest, my next thought went to Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated (A show I hold dear to my heart), and then it hit me, just make another essay about scary stuff and being queer! So here we are and let me get into it.
Describing a (gothic) haunted house as a sanctuary may sound silly, it's usually presented to us like a warning: creaking floorboard, a slightly open door that won't shut, a room that rearranges itself when you are not looking (my biggest nightmare as an autistic girl) or the curse placed on the family heirloom that you are tasked to guard. All of this elements make a gothic house a place for the repressed, you are not allowed to be scared outside, but inside a house that is haunted, of course you are allowed. This place where the violence, fear, disgust and terror has been buried comes back to demand that it be reckoned with. And we have found ourselves wanting to reclaim it, contemporary speculative and horror narratives are making the haunted house as a place to scape to. Queer characters, displaced from the families that rejected them and the communities that never quite made room for them, are moving into the gothic house. They are not exorcising the ghosts. They are learning to live with them. They are building chosen families in the ruins of the heteronormative home, and they are discovering that the haunted house, precisely because it has already been declared uninhabitable by the normative world, might be the only place left where they can actually live.
In this paper I try to argue that speculative and horror narratives have begun to reframe the traditionally hostile haunted house into a place of refuge for displaced queer individuals, a space where chosen families are constructed and shared trauma is processed away from a hostile world. The argument is not that the haunted house has become safe, it has not, and the tension between safety and terror is precisely what makes these narratives so rich. The argument is that the haunted house has become inhabitable in a way that the normative home never was. Following Sara Ahmed's account of the queer experience of discomfort within heteronormative space, and drawing on scholarship on queer domesticity, gothic kinship, and chosen families, this essay examines how narratives like The Haunting of Bly Manor, Starling House, Killjoy's Kastle, and The Haunting of Hill House reframe the gothic house as what I want to call a gothic sanctuary: a space that is haunted, yes, but haunted in a way that makes room for queer life rather than foreclosing it.
The Gothic House as Heteronormative Violence
First we have to look at the architecture of a gothic house, it is a machine for reproducing a specific kind of family, and that family is, by and large, heterosexual, patriarchal, and reproductive. The classic gothic novel, Walpole's Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, Lewis's The Monk, is organised around the transmission of property and name through bloodlines, and the horrors that attend any interruption of that transmission. The house is the site where the family's secrets are stored, where the mad wife is hidden in the attic (I'm looking at you Charlotte Brontë), where the illegitimate child is concealed, where the patriarch's authority is exercised and enforced. To be queer in the gothic house is, by definition, to be a threat to the order the house exists to maintain. As Audrey Heffers argues in her study of safety and terror in queer fiction, "the home is one of the core spaces of 'family values' that theoretically rejects queerness and nonconformity". The gothic house is the architectural expression of that rejection.
This is why the haunted house is so often a site of queer haunting in both senses of the word. Queer subjects haunt the gothic house because they have been excluded from it; they return as ghosts because the normative family cannot acknowledge them as living members. The ghost in the gothic house is frequently the figure of the queer relation that the family has tried to forget: the spinster aunt, the bachelor uncle, the intimate friend whose relationship with the deceased is never named. Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is the canonical example. The novel's queer subtext (Eleanor's intense attachment to Theodora, the ambiguity of Theodora's sexuality, the sense that the two women are circling a desire they cannot articulate) has been extensively documented. Hill House is a house that will not permit queer life to flourish. It draws Eleanor in, isolates her, and ultimately destroys her, because the house is the mechanism through which the heteronormative order maintains itself. Eleanor's queer becoming, as one scholar argues, is possible within the house, but it is not sustainable there. The house allows her to recognise her desire but not to live it.
What makes the contemporary reframing so significant is that it takes this gothic architecture of exclusion and reverses its polarity. The house is still haunted. The ghosts are still there. But the queers are no longer the ghosts. They are the residents. And the ghosts, rather than being the enemies, become something else: witnesses, companions, figures of a history that the chosen family can inherit and care for. This is the shift that Heffers describes when she writes that "by reclaiming Gothic and speculative elements for queer narratives, writers are able to reimagine the home, including the home-as-symbol". The gothic house stops being the place where queerness is punished and becomes the place where queerness is housed.
Queer Reclamation: The Haunted House as Refuge
The reclamation of the haunted house is not a matter of making it un-haunted. The ghosts stay (yay). What changes is the relationship between the living and the dead, and between the residents and the normative world outside. The gothic sanctuary is not a house without ghosts; it is a house where the ghosts are on your side. This is the crucial move. In the traditional gothic, the ghost is the agent of the house's violence, the manifestation of the family's sin, the return of the repressed that demands expulsion or exorcism. In the queer gothic sanctuary, the ghost becomes a figure of kinship. The ghost is the one who has also been excluded, also been killed, also been denied a place in the normative family. The ghost and the queer resident recognise each other. They are both, in a sense, unhoused.
This is why the haunted house is such a powerful figure for queer refuge. The normative home is a space that has already declared the queer subject unwelcome. The queer subject who has been rejected by their family of origin cannot go home again; or, if they can, the home is a site of ongoing violence. The haunted house offers something different: a space that has also been rejected by the normative world, a space that is already marked as uninhabitable, and therefore a space where the queer subject can claim residency without having to pretend to be something they are not. The haunted house is a refuge precisely because it is not the normative home. It is a space where the rules of the outside do not apply, where the family values that excluded you are no longer the organising principle, and where new forms of kinship can be invented.
The Haunting of Bly Manor is perhaps the clearest example. The series takes the classic gothic setup, a governess, two children, a haunted estate, and transforms it into a queer love story. Dani Clayton, the American au pair, falls in love with Jamie, the gardener. The house is haunted, yes, by the ghost of the previous governess, Rebecca Jessel, and by the entity that possesses the children. But the haunting is not the enemy of the queer relationship; it is the condition under which the queer relationship becomes possible. The ghosts are the residue of the house's heterosexual violence, the violence of the nuclear family, the violence of the master of the house, the violence of the reproductive imperative. The queer family that Dani and Jamie build is explicitly positioned as an alternative to that violence. As one analysis of the series argues, "Bly Manor foregrounds a fluid, queer chosen family, which moves beyond traditional concepts, is not limited to blood ties". The house is haunted, but the haunting is the reason the chosen family forms. The ghosts are the past that the queer family must reckon with, and in reckoning with it, they become a family.
Starling House by Alix E. Harrow performs a similar operation in a Southern Gothic register. The house is a sentient, haunted entity that has been a refuge for the persecuted, first for the enslaved, then for the poor, then for the queer and the marginalised. The protagonist, Opal, is not queer in the central romance, but the novel is structured around a queer logic of chosen kinship: the house itself is a member of the family, the ghosts are ancestors in a non-biological sense, and the refuge the house offers is explicitly framed as an alternative to the violence of the town's normative order. The house is a sanctuary because it has been made a sanctuary by everyone who has ever needed it. It is a palimpsest of refuge, and the queer characters who pass through it inherit that history of sanctuary.
Chosen Families: Kinship Beyond Blood
The mechanism through which the gothic sanctuary operates is the chosen family. The chosen family is not a new concept, queer communities have been building kinship networks outside biological and legal ties for as long as queerness has existed, but it has become a central theoretical category for understanding queer life. Kath Weston's Families We Choose (1997) framed chosen families as especially significant in a context where many queer people were excluded from their families of origin due to rejection. Chosen families are "formed based on mutual trust, intimacy, familiarity, and responsibility for each other," and they "stand in a crucial conceptual space for queer people: choosing people who are as close as family members of origin supports queer people's relational autonomy".
The gothic sanctuary is where the chosen family lives. This is not incidental. The chosen family needs a space, and the normative home is not available. The haunted house offers a space that is already outside the normative order, already marked as deviant, already associated with the deaths and exclusions that the normative family has produced. The chosen family moves in and makes it a home. The ghosts become members of the household, in the sense that the chosen family's history includes the dead, includes the excluded, includes the queer subjects who came before and did not survive. The gothic sanctuary is a space where the chosen family can mourn its dead, care for its ghosts, and build a life in the ruins of the family that failed.
This is what distinguishes the gothic sanctuary from the merely haunted house. In the traditional gothic, the haunted house is a place you leave, or a place that destroys you. In the queer gothic sanctuary, the haunted house is a place you stay. You do not exorcise the ghosts. You learn to live with them. You build a family that includes them. The ghost becomes an ancestor, a witness, a figure of continuity between the queer past and the queer present. The haunted house becomes a home in the fullest sense: a place where you are known, where you belong, and where the dead are not forgotten.
Case Studies: Bly Manor, Starling House, Killjoy's Kastle
The Haunting of Bly Manor is the most accessible example of the gothic sanctuary in contemporary popular culture. The series is structured around the construction of a queer family in a house that is saturated with the violence of the heterosexual family. Dani and Jamie's relationship is the emotional centre of the series, and it is explicitly framed as a chosen family: they raise the children together, they build a life together, they care for each other in the face of the haunting that threatens to destroy them. The series does not pretend that the haunted house is safe. Dani is ultimately possessed by the ghost of the previous governess, and she drowns herself to protect Jamie and the children. But the series insists that the queer family mattered, that the love between Dani and Jamie was real, and that the haunting was not the negation of that love but its condition. The gothic sanctuary is a place where love is possible because it is haunted, not in spite of it.
Starling House extends this logic in a different register. The house is a literal refuge, a place that has sheltered the persecuted for generations. The protagonist, Opal, is drawn to the house because it offers something the normative world does not: a place where she can belong without having to conform. The house is haunted, but the haunting is not hostile. The ghosts are figures of the house's history of sanctuary, and they welcome Opal into that history. The novel is not centrally a queer romance, but its logic is queer: it insists that family is something you make, that home is something you build out of the materials the normative world has discarded, and that the haunted house is a valid, perhaps the only valid, form of refuge for those who have been excluded from the normative home.
Killjoy's Kastle is the most radical example. Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue's immersive installation takes the form of a haunted house, specifically, the Christian hell house tradition, and transforms it into a queer feminist space. The hell house is a site of normative violence: it stages the horrors of sin and the rewards of righteousness in order to terrify its audience into conformity. Killjoy's Kastle takes that form and reverses it. The horrors it stages are the horrors of lesbian feminist history: the exclusions, the stereotypes, the myths, the violence that queer women have faced. But the kastle is not a place of terror. It is a place of processing, of community, of what the creators call "a queer exorcism and celebration of the past". The final room is a processing room where visitors can talk about their experience with "real-life feminist killjoys". The haunted house becomes a space of collective healing, a chosen family gathered in the ruins of the hell house that was designed to condemn them.
Risks and Limits: Who Gets to Be Safe?
An essay arguing for the gothic sanctuary should not overstate its case. The reframing of the haunted house as a queer refuge carries genuine risks, and the strongest scholarship on this material takes them seriously rather than treating the gothic sanctuary as an uncomplicated good.
The first risk is the romanticisation of trauma. The haunted house is a site of violence, and there is a danger that the queer reclamation of the haunted house aestheticises that violence, treating the ghosts as decorative rather than as figures of real suffering. The gothic sanctuary works when the haunting is reckoned with, not when it is ignored. The queer family that moves into the haunted house must not pretend that the ghosts are not there. It must care for them, mourn them, and build a life that is accountable to them. If it does not, the sanctuary becomes a form of denial, a way of enjoying the aesthetic of the gothic without confronting the violence that produced it.
The second risk is the homonormative impulse. Lisa Duggan's concept of homonormativity describes a politics that "does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them". There is a danger that the queer gothic sanctuary becomes a homonormative space: a queer family that mimics the nuclear family, a haunted house that is gentrified into a bourgeois domesticity, a chosen family that reproduces the exclusions of the family it replaced. The gothic sanctuary should be a space of radical kinship, not a space of assimilation. It should be a place where the norms of the outside are suspended, not a place where they are quietly reinstated.
The third risk is the question of who gets to be safe. The gothic sanctuary is not equally available to all queer subjects. The haunted house is a resource, and resources are distributed unequally. The queer subject who can afford to buy a haunted house, or who has the cultural capital to appreciate the gothic aesthetic, is not the same as the queer subject who is homeless, or who is incarcerated, or who is undocumented. The gothic sanctuary is a strategy for those who have access to it, and an honest account of the gothic sanctuary must acknowledge its class and racial dimensions. The haunted house is not a universal refuge. It is a refuge for those who can claim it.
Conclusion: The Ghost as Ancestor
The gothic sanctuary is not a utopia. It is a strategy, a way of making a home out of the ruins that the normative world has left behind. The haunted house is reframed not because the haunting is overcome, but because the haunting is inhabited. The ghosts become ancestors. The chosen family becomes a household. The gothic house, which was built to exclude queerness, becomes the place where queerness is housed.
This is the argument that the contemporary queer gothic is making: that the family values that the haunted house was built to protect were always a kind of violence, and that the queers who were excluded from that house were not the problem. The problem was the house. The gothic sanctuary is a way of building a different kind of house, a house that includes the ghosts, a house that makes room for the excluded, a house that is haunted not by the sins of the fathers but by the presence of the ancestors who were never allowed to be family. The gothic sanctuary is a counter-archive of kinship, a repository of queer relationality that operates through haunting, through chosen family, and through the refusal to let the dead be forgotten. It is not a safe place. It is a habitable one. And for queer subjects who have been told that the normative home is the only home there is, that is enough.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Feelings. 2004. Bonus, James Alex, Hannah Wing, and Judy Watts. "Finding Refuge in Reverie: The Terror Management Function of Nostalgic Entertainment Experiences." Communication Monographs, vol. 89, no. 2, 2022, pp. 165–188. Duggan, Lisa. "The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism." Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, edited by Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson, Duke University Press, 2002, pp. 175–194. Harrow, Alix E. Starling House. Tor Books, 2023. Heffers, Audrey. "Dualities of Safety and Terror in Queer Fiction." REDEN, vol. 6, 2025, pp. 1–22. Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. Viking Press, 1959. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991. Mitchell, Allyson, and Deirdre Logue. Killjoy's Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House. 2015. Routledge, Clay, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Jacob Juhl, and Jamie Arndt. "The Power of the Past: Nostalgia as a Meaning-Making Resource." Memory, vol. 20, no. 5, 2012, pp. 452–460. Trimble, S. "Home Sick: Horror, Gothic Storytelling, and the Queers Who Haunt Houses." Queer Gothic, edited by someone, University of British Columbia Press, 2020. Weston, Kath. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. Columbia University Press, 1997. The Haunting of Bly Manor. Created by Mike Flanagan, Netflix, 2020.
— written between job breaks