A Haunted House

British author Virginia Woolf’s “A Haunted House” was first published in Monday or Tuesday (1921), a short story collection. The story also gives its title to a collection of her short stories curated by her husband, Leonard Woolf, after her death in 1941. It is both a ghost story and an impressionistic exploration of subjectivity and perspective and blurs the boundaries of classical ghost story telling. This is a procedure common in modernist writing: subverting classical, canonical modes of storytelling by creating uncertainty about what the story is really about or the identity of the narrator or characters.

This guide refers to the version of the text in A Haunted House and Other Stories, published by Mariner Books in 2002, which follows the text of the first edition, published in 1921 in the volume Monday or Tuesday.

The narrator describes a “ghostly couple” enacting events inside a house that are typical of ghost stories: a “door shutting” and another “opening” (3). The couple is identified as a man and a woman looking for something they have left behind some time ago, probably when they were alive. They identify the item only as “it.” They search the house and are careful to be quiet so as not to wake the people who live there.

However, the narrator, who lives in the house, is already awake and alert to the sounds of the ghosts. The narrator is awake reading, making annotations in the margin of their book. They get up to go and seek out the sounds themselves, but they find an empty house and can only hear pigeons and the sounds of a farm outside. The narrator is unsure what they are looking for and also begins to meander through the house, from the garden to the loft, like the ghosts.

The couple takes turns in trying to guess where “it” is. After some conjecturing, the couple enters the drawing-room of the house. It is a gloomy place with “window panes [that] reflected the roses; all leaves were green on the glass” (3). Finally, they find “it” in the drawing-room. However, the narrator enters the drawing room and once again sees nothing and hears the sounds of the garden outside. The house seems to whisper to the couple, “Safe, safe, safe” (4), with a sound that imitates a heartbeat. The house then whispers again to the couple about some type of treasure, and the couple supposes that this treasure might be buried in the garden.

At this point, the story changes the space from inside the house to the gardens outside. Just like the ambience inside the house, the gardens are also gloomy, although there is sunlight shining over them. The trees cast a shadow over the gardens, stooping “darkness for a wandering beam of the sun” (4). Feeling the presence of the ghostly couple in the gardens, the narrator feels the presence of death among them. The narrator says that the woman—the female ghost—had died “hundreds of years ago” before her husband (4). The narrator reveals that after his wife died, the man (now the male ghost) left his house and set about travelling the world. After this period, the husband returned to the house in the southern part of England. The house whispers and pulses again, repeating the phrase from before, “safe, safe, safe” (4); however, this time, the house is glad.

The story switches to nighttime. The sunlit gardens, although filtered by the trees, change to a nightly environment, windy and rainy. The setting then changes to inside the house again: “Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain. But the beam of the lamp falls straight from the windows. The candle burns still and still” (4). The ghostly couple continues to wander through the house. The narrator listens to the movement of the ghosts and understands what they intend to do: “whispering not to wake us, the ghostly couple seek their joy” (4). The treasure the ghostly couple seeks is something that may give them peace and joy. However, the narrator still does not know what the treasure might be.

The ghostly couple reminisces about the happy time that they spent in the house, kissing and enjoying the garden in all seasons. They come near the door of the bedroom where the narrator lies half asleep and half awake. The couple enters the room; the male ghost looks at a couple sleeping on the bed—the narrator and another unknown person designated only by the word “us.” The male ghost identifies that the couple sleeping are in love: “‘Look,’ he breathes. ‘Sound asleep. Love upon their lips’” (4).

The ghostly couple stands above the sleeping couple and watches them sleep for a long time. The environment changes again; the wind outside faces their direction and the moonbeams shine on the floor and seem to traverse the walls. The narrator focuses on the face of the ghosts as they search for the treasure they left behind.

The final paragraph of the story begins with the phrase repeated by the house, “safe, safe, safe” (5). This time, the pulse that the house emits is proud, as if it guarded the couple sleeping peacefully. The ghosts talk to each other and indicate that they have found the sought-after treasure they have been seeking for a long time. “Again you found me” (5), the male ghost says. The female ghost agrees and recalls the places where the male ghost has been: the drawing-room and the gardens. The ghosts then bend over the sleeping narrator and the light they now carry wakes up the narrator. Again they hear the pulse of the house beating loud, “Safe! Safe! Safe!” (5), now with exclamation points indicating a sudden change of mood of the house. After crying out, the narrator finally understands what the treasure that the ghostly couple has been seeking is: “The light in the heart” (5).