Jaunted

Literary Travel / Halloween / Daphne Du Maurier / Emily Dickinson / → All Tags

Spooky! Haunted Mansions In Real Life

What if the ghost isn't inside the house, but is the house? NPR rounds up three pieces of fiction where houses want their inhabitants to get out, and quickly, like Manderley, the domain of secrets in Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca where a skittish second wife tries to root out how her predecessor died.

British writer Du Maurier based her depiction of the mansion on two real-life, but sadly private houses, Milton Hall in Cambridgeshire and Menabilly in Cornwall, having visited one as a child and rented the latter as an adult. While you can't tour either one, you can catch a glimpse of Milton Hall from the nearby Peterborough Milton Golf Club (includes free lessons for beginners!) or stay on the grounds of Menabilly in one of two gamekeepers' cottages offered for rent. And really, do you want to get closer? Probably not.

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