The Creepy College Building That May Have Inspired Netflix’s ‘Haunting of Hill House’
Windows inexplicably opening, footsteps echoing in empty hallways, and instruments playing themselves: Welcome to Jennings Music Building on the Bennington College campus in Bennington, Vermont.
The imposing ivy-covered gray stone mansion, perched atop a looming hill, is speculated to be the inspiration for Hill House in Netflix's new horror series The Haunting of Hill House, which is available to stream starting October 12. The show follows a group of siblings who grew up in the most haunted home in the country, and the effects that ~haunting~ has on their lives. It stars Michiel Huisman, Carla Gugino, Timothy Hutton, Elizabeth Reaser, Kate Siegel, McKenna Grace, and more. And by "more" I mean ghosts, probably.
Netflix's adaptation is based on Shirley Jackson's famous 1959 novel of the same name. Jackson's husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, was a professor at Bennington College by the way. The couple lived nearby and students don't believe it's simply a coincidence that Hill House bears a striking resemblance to their spooky music building.
It's long been believed at the school that Hill House was inspired by the Jennings Music Building, music student Maeve Bustell, 19, tells Cosmopolitan.com. "And it's widely accepted on campus that [the Jennings building] is haunted," she adds.
Jennings isn't necessarily tortured "by a specific [ghost]," Bustell, who takes classes in the building almost every day, explains. "It's really more things people can't explain." Like, creaking floors when nobody is there, random closing doors, and locked windows that fling open when there's no wind.
"Lights go out when there's no power outage and there's always random cold patches," Bustell adds. "I go to Jennings to practice music late at night when the building is empty and I hear footsteps that, I guess, could be a person - except I'm pretty sure there's nobody else in the building."
It's "really beautiful," she says. "But it definitely has this weird undercurrent when you walk in. The interior is dark wood, with all these super ornate engravings and you can feel the history - but there's something off, it feels dark. And that's contradicted by the beautiful music being played in the building... It's a weird dichotomy that leaves you not knowing how to process where you are."
Head music librarian Susan Reiss calls the building "austere" and the "perfect place to play hide and go seek." But it's best not to get too lost, because "the basement is very creepy," Reiss, who has held her position for 26 years, tells Cosmopolitan.com. "That's the one place I'm scared to go to, even during the day. It's a long, dark corridor. It has safety lights, but there's a feeling of darkness... There's all these little caged spaces and locked doors, where faculty used to store items."
Reiss says students often complain about windows shutting up, not down, and once, when a professor fell asleep in the lobby overnight, he awoke to loud banging sounds that started at one end of the building and moved to the other end.
"He was scared out of his wits and fled!" she says. "I think there's a lot we don't know, as humans, and I'm open to believing [in ghosts], but I'm still skeptical - and, yet, with these kinds of tales you have to wonder..."
According to a Bennington student Tumblr, before it was a music building, Jennings was home to Frederic and Laura ‘Lila’ Hall Jennings. Lila was the daughter of a well-known philanthropist and Frederic was a wealthy New York lawyer who summered in North Bennington. When Lila died, the house was donated to the college and eventually became Jennings Music Building.
The building's aesthetic "fits perfectly with the book's description," says Bustell, who read Jackson's famous horror novel in high school. "It's totally isolated on this big hill, sort of looking down on the rest of campus. It's very much up there by itself."
In the first paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House, Jackson writes that Hill House is made of "stone" and "not sane."
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
There's even a pair of stone lion heads in the fireplace at Jennings that match a description in Jackson's book, below.
...she passed a vast house, pillared and walled, with shutters over the windows and a pair of stone lions guarding the steps, and she thought that perhaps she might live there, dusting the lions each morning and patting their heads good night.
But while many Bennington students are convinced of the building's connection to Hill House, Shirley Jackson's biographer isn't so sure. Ruth Franklin, author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, tells Cosmopolitan.com there's "no evidence that Jennings Hall was the inspiration for Hill House."
A post shared by Tori Matteson (@torimatteson) on Oct 22, 2017 at 12:11pm PDT
In A Rather Haunted Life, Franklin writes that Jennings is much too plain to be Hill House-and argues that the supposedly haunted Everett Mansion, on the grounds of Southern Vermont College, is a much better candidate:
A better local candidate is the Edward H. Everett man-sion near Old Bennington, which at the time was being used as the novitiate of the Holy Cross Congregation and is now part of the campus of Southern Vermont College. The former home of a wealthy glass bottle manufacturer, the mansion was the site of a contentious legal dispute between Everett’s daughters and his second wife. It is said-still-to be haunted by the ghost of Everett’s first wife, a woman dressed in white who roams the house and grounds.
In conclusion then, there's enough haunted houses to go around! Write all of the scary stories about all of them.
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