Whatever walks in Hill House walks alone, we are told, right at the start. Eleanor comes alone to Hill House, a repressed woman-child having spent her years caring for her now-dead mother, having to steal the car she half-owns from her sister to answer the invitation of Dr Montague to join him in a scientific investigation of the paranormal, because when she was a child her home was inexplicably bombarded by stones for three days. Also coming are Theodora, unusually sensitive, and Luke, heir to Hill House. Eleanor enters into a sudden little community and becomes part, in her mind, of a new family. She also enters Hill House, an undeniably terrible place with an unpleasant history. Eleanor is very much ambivalent about this, greedily battening on the adventure and the companionship, responding strongly to the inherent terror of Hill House, creating a kind of sympathetic resonance as her repression gives way to a heedless hunger that threatens to unhinge her completely.

I wasn't quite prepared for how funny this was. Jackson uses humour deftly. The characters' dialogue is witty and even extravagant as they cope with the anxieties of their unpleasant and unnerving surroundings with slightly hysterical and over-done jokiness, because these are intelligent modern people deliberately visiting a haunted house to see some ghosts, and this is how they handle the contradictions. Then Mrs Montague arrives, a devoted spiritualist and magnificent comic creation, just as the phenomena reach their peak.

There are supernatural phenomena - though there are also some subtle hints about their source - but the real haunting is Eleanor's mental breakdown into paranoid psychosis, and whether it is she that triggers Hill House or Hill House that triggers her, it is the failure to recognise her condition that brings about the ending.

Funny: but all the more chilling and creepy and scary for it.