This is a transcription of Manor House: The Fall of the House of… Almost Everyone, Really
David: Hello. Welcome to Strong Sense of Place.
Melissa: In each episode, we focus on one destination and discuss what makes it different than any other place on Earth.
David: Then we recommend five books we love that took us there on the page.
Melissa: I’m Melissa Joulwan.
David: I’m David Humphreys.
David: We’re going around the world one great read at a time. Thanks for joining us.
[cheerful music]
David: Welcome to Strong Sense of Place. Today we get curious about Manor Houses. Today on Two Truths and a lie, we’ll talk about an ancient English manor and the unusual family you’ll find there, a ghostly ape, and an ever-expanding California mansion. Then we’ll talk about five books we love. But first, Mel’s going to bring us up to speed with the Manor House 101.
Melissa: For most people, home represents comfort, safety, maybe family. It’s the place where you can be yourself — and where you can find all your stuff. For the wealthy, it’s even more. It’s status, reputation, and legacy — especially in the UK. For hundreds of years, the traditional English manor was more than simply a big house staffed with servants. It was a grand home situated on farmland owned by the family. In addition to being a show-piece, it was a responsibility.
Melissa: Owners — or, at least, the good ones — considered themselves stewards of the estate. They were responsible for preserving the home and caring for the tenants who tended the surrounding land.
Melissa: The strictest definition of manor house is that kind of British estate. But in conversation and in the books we’ll talk about later, we’re using manor house loosely to describe fancy-pants mansions anywhere in the world.
Melissa: In the US, the closest thing we have to an English manor house is a gilded age mansion. The owners of these luxurious homes didn’t have to worry about the welfare of tenants. They could simply count their money and throw lavish dinner parties. You can find historic mansions all over the US, and there’s an enclave of gilded age mansions in Newport, Rhode Island.
David: Hearst Castle! Hearst Castle is on a hill above the Pacific Ocean, right on Highway One. It’s a Mediterranean-Revival fantasy, all marble terraces, tiled fountains, and ocean air. The coast unwinds below; inside, there are dining rooms and salons and guest houses, and the most amazing Roman Pool. It all kind of whispers, “Start a newspaper empire.” I could have been a benevolent robber baron! There are guided tours full of 1930s gossip about movie stars and politicians. It’s very Citizen Kane: part museum, part movie set, part sort of a dream you can walk through.
Melissa: In Europe, there are palaces, chateaux, castles, palazzos, villas, that kind of thing. I’ll put links in show notes to organizations that will help you find fancy-pants houses all over the world that you can visit.
Melissa: On the page, especially in classic English literature, the manor house is often used to symbolize a character’s status, motivation, and values. A tasteful manor house — situated JUST RIGHT in its landscape — is shorthand for a person of good character. And it can hint at what the plot has in store for them.
Melissa: So — think about ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ Lizzy — Elizabeth Bennett — is convinced she could never, EVER care for that rude and prideful Mr. Darcy. Until she tours his estate, Pemberley. When the carriage approaches his estate and she sees this:
It was a large, handsome stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills; and in front a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste… at that moment she felt that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!
Melissa: Then a little later, the housekeeper says this about Darcy:
He is the best landlord, and the best master that ever lived… There is not one of his tenants or servants but what will give him a good name.
Melissa: For all intents and purposes, the manor IS Darcy. The house is in harmony with the landscape, just as Darcy is in harmony with his tenants.
Melissa: That bit when Lizzy visits Darcy’s estate… That was a real thing people did during the Georgian and Regency periods. Wealthy people have always been happy to show off their houses, and there was a long tradition of offering hospitality to travelers who showed up at the gates. By the middle of the 18th century, it was the Done Thing to open the house and gardens to tourists. They even published guidebooks that included floor plans, and illustrations, and had tips on what to be sure to see and what to ignore.
Melissa: Today, manor house tourism is still huge. In the UK, there are two primary organizations that protect and promote historic homes: The National Trust and Historic Houses. All of the properties supported by these organizations are open for tours. Some have overnight accommodations and most of then also have restaurants, gift shops, and gardens. They’re like theme parks for book nerds and history buffs — or people who just enjoy a posh afternoon tea.
Melissa: The non-profit National Trust cares for parks, gardens, beaches, woodlands, castles, forts — and they own more than 200 historic homes that are open to the public. The online directory lets you browse by topic like ‘places with literary connections’ and ‘most haunted places to visit.’ Pro tip: I typed ‘library’ in the site search and got dozens of returns.
Melissa: The other organization to know is Historic Houses. It’s also a nonprofit, and it represents 1600 privately owned houses and castles in the UK. On their website, you can browse for homes that allow overnight stays.You can also enjoy a holiday in Hever Castle; that was Anne Boleyn’s childhood residence. Or visit Chawton House, which was the home of Jane Austen’s brother. You can see the reading nook where Jane liked to sit with a book.
Melissa: Obviously, I want to go to all of them. But today, I want to tell everyone about Haddon Hall in Bakewell, Derbyshire.
Melissa: Derbyshire is which almost smack in the center of England, in a region called the Peak District. Imagine velvety green rolling hills, scrabbly moors, dramatic stone cliffs, and bubbling streams — it’s pretty much the bucolic ideal. The town of Bakewell has been holding a market since the 14th century — and just 3 miles away is Haddon Hall, which stood on its perch above the River Wye for a good 200 years before that market ever sold its first bunch of carrots.
Melissa: The former chairman of the National Trust said Haddon Hall is ‘the most perfect house to survive from the middle ages.’
Melissa: If you’ve watched the 2005 version of ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ or ‘The Princess Bride,’ or ‘The Other Boleyn Girl,’ or any of the three modern adaptations of ‘Jane Eyre,’ you’ve seen Haddon Hall.
Melissa: Imagine a gray stone building sitting atop a slight slope. Its silhouette against the green grass and blue sky is very imposing. The shape is a bit higgledy-piggledy with turrets and chimneys asymmetrically place — and battlements that look like square teeth jutting out of the top. There are arched windows and mullioned windows and ivy climbing up the walls. The perimeter encloses two internal courtyards, almost like a fortress — with wide stone terraces overlook the gardens. The rooms inside include an aviary, a great hall, a Tudor kitchen, a long gallery — probably for dancing — and, in the northeast corner — the oldest part of the Hall — the Eagle Tower with a spiral stone staircase leading to the top.
Melissa: The first owner of the Hall was a Norman knight named William Peverel in 1086. Apparently, he was a good pal with William the Conqueror. But his son was caught up in a plot against King John. You might know HIM as the villain in the legend of Robin Hood — the one who was always trying to extract more taxes from the poor.
Melissa: Anyway. The Peverels were stripped of Haddon, and it was given to the Vernon family in 1170. Their descendents still own Haddon Hall today. Delightfully, the current owners are Lord and Lady Manners. And THAT name is associated with a real-life love story to rival Jane Eyre.
Melissa: In the mid-1500s, the family seat at Haddon Hall was held by Sir George Vernon. He and his wife had two children: Margaret and Dorothy. According to legend, the beautiful and amiable Dorothy — at 19 years old — fell in love with a nobleman named John Manners. But theirs was to be a doomed romance: John Manners was a SECOND son — and to make things worse, the Vernons of Haddon Hall were Catholic, and the Manner family was Protestant.
Melissa: One night at a ball thrown by her father — some versions of the legend say it was her elder sister’s wedding! — Dorothy slipped out of the crowd, fled through the gardens and down a stone stairway to a footbridge where her beloved John waited for her in the moonlight. They rode away together on his horse and were soon married — against her father’s will. But it seems her father was a forgiving man: When he died two years later, he bequeathed Haddon Hall to his willful daughter Dorothy. The small stone bridge where they eloped still crosses the River Wye and now bears her name.
Melissa: Even though it’s still a family home, Haddon Hall is open to the public for special events and daily tours. The most popular tour includes family history, the 600-year-old kitchens, the frescoes in the chapel, and a tapestry in the banqueting hall that was gifted to the Vernon family by Henry VIII. There’s also a garden tour lead by the estate’s head gardener and one called Lights, Camera, Action, that delves into all of the film productions that used the Hall as a setting.
Melissa: A very pretty restaurant on the grounds has a daily afternoon tea and a full roast dinner on Sundays, plus a savory pie of the day. During spooky season, you can meet the owls that live at Haddon. In the summer, there’s an open air production of ‘Jane Eyre’ with costumed actors wandering among the Hall’s visitors. And at Christmas time, the Hall is decked. There are multiple Christmas trees, carols in the corridors, and fires lit in all the fireplaces. There are candlelit tours in the evening, a special menu at the restaurant, and a market in the courtyard with handmade crafts and hot chocolate, all lit up with fairy lights.
Melissa: I found a video in which the current Lady Manners takes you on a walk through the house and talks about what it’s like to live there. It looks pretty spectacular. I’ll put that link in show notes.
Melissa: To wrap up, I want to share a short manor house poem. It’s ‘Castle Howard’ by John Betjeman. Castle Howard is a country home in Yorkshire, built in 1699, and John Betjeman was the poet laureate of the UK from 1972 until his death in 1984. He was known for the sense of nostalgia in his poems. Here’s Castle Howard.
Approach the mansion of a man of taste.
But shares his mistress at the castle gates.
And a whole parish in one mansion dwells.
In due gradation of the servants’ hall
Melissa: That’s the Manor House 101.
David: I’m about to say three statements, two of them are true. Mel doesn’t know which is the lie. First statement: One of the oldest families in Britain to still reside at their original seat, the Fulfords, built their fortune not on land or titles, but by guarding a secret recipe for a sauce made of anchovies and spices, an ancestor of Worcestershire sauce. Statement Two: There is a manor hall in Dorset, England that is said to be haunted by an ape.
David: Statement three needs a little setup. The Winchester Mystery House has been called America’s strangest mansion. According to legend, Sarah Winchester, heiress to the rifle fortune, kept building nonstop – around the clock – to appease ghosts. But there’s another possible explanation. Here’s the statement: Sarah Winchester kept the renovations going, at least in part, so she wouldn’t have to entertain houseguests.
David: One of the oldest families in Britain to still reside at their original seat — the Fulfords — built their fortune not on land or titles, but by guarding a secret recipe for a sauce made of anchovies and spices – an ancestor of Worcestershire sauce. Yeah, that’s a lie.
David: But the Fulfords are one of the oldest families still at their ancestral seat. Francis Fulford, Esquire, is the 24th Fulford to own Great Fulford, their crumbling manor in Devon. That’s out on England’s southwestern coast, where farmland meets the English Channel. The land was first granted to the family by King Richard the Lionheart, just before the year 1200.
David: To put that in perspective: that was before England had paper money. Or forks.
David: The Fulfords are famous in Britain for two things. First, their house: Great Fulford, an 800-year-old manor on a 3,000-acre estate. Second, their spectacular fondness for swearing. Channel 4 made a documentary about them in 2004 called The F’ing Fulfords. Except the British say the full word, of course. Francis himself — called “F**er Fulford” by friends — has spent most of his life trying to stop the place from collapsing around him.
David: Clips of that series are still floating around online, if you’re curious. And if you’d rather skip the shouting and cursing, the house’s own website has history and restoration notes that are almost as colorful. We’ll put links to all of that in shownotes.
David: Next: There is a manor hall in Dorset, England that is said to be haunted by an ape. Many manor houses in England will tell you they’ve got a ghost or two. In fact, if your manor doesn’t have at least one Lady in White or a set of phantom footsteps, is it even a manor house? I mean … come on.
David: The most famous ghost photo of all time comes from Raynham Hall, about three hours north of London toward Norwich. It shows the ‘Brown Lady’ gliding down a staircase. If you grew up in the 1970s or 80s, you might remember that photo — it was everywhere, in those Time–Life books about the supernatural. It certainly stayed with me.
David: Other houses boast the usual suspects: cold spots, light orbs, things that go bump in the night. Poltergeists. A lady in white, or blue, or grey. Floating hands turn up surprisingly often.
David: At Blickling Hall, they say Anne Boleyn still wanders the corridors, her head in her hands. Each year on 19 May, the anniversary of her execution, she is said to come back to the house in a carriage which is driven by a headless horseman.
David: In what I think is a complete lack of restraint, Bramshill House, not far from London, claims fourteen different ghosts: a Grey Lady, a Green Man, a tennis player from the 1920s, and a child who likes to hold visitors’ hands. Bramshill is also linked to the ‘Mistletoe Bough’ legend — a bride who hid in a chest during a wedding-night game of hide-and-seek and wasn’t found until fifty year later, still clutching a sprig of mistletoe.
David: Honestly, that’s not tragic, that’s negligent. Losing your new bride for 50 years? Did they even really want to find her? Did she not fit in somehow? Did the family think, ‘You know, really, we can manage without her.’ Darkly enough, Bramshill still keeps a chest in the entry hall, just to make the story tangible.
David: But none of that quite compares to the haunting at Athelhampton House, near Dorchester. In addition to their own Grey Lady, and a hooded priest, they have a ghostly ape. The story goes that a wealthy merchant who lived there in the 1500s kept a pet ape. One day his daughter slipped into a secret passageway to hide. The ape followed her in. She left, but he didn’t. He got trapped in the walls and starved to death. Nothing says old-money England like misplacing your ape in the walls. Now, they say, his spirit still roams the Great Chamber. At night you can hear scratching on the wood paneling — the restless ghost of a very unlucky pet. I think it might be irresponsible to leave this particular topic without mentioning ‘infrasound.’
David: Infrasound is very low-frequency sound that humans can’t consciously hear but can still physically sense — it makes objects and even our own bodies vibrate. Exposure to infrasound has been linked to feelings of unease, dread, or sudden chills, or even hallucinations – because it can trigger the body’s fear responses without us realizing why. That’s why researchers sometimes call it the “fear frequency.” It’s often invoked in explanations of haunted houses or ghostly encounters.
David: It’s easy to imagine an old manor groaning out a low note that unsettles the nerves. But it’s far more entertaining to blame it on ghosts.
David: Finally, the Winchester Mystery House. Let’s start with a house. A very strange house.
David: The Winchester Mystery House in San José, California, is one of the most remarkable mansions in America — sprawling, twisting, more than 160 rooms scattered across six acres. It has doors that open onto thin air, staircases that lead into ceilings, windows built into the floor, and corridors that wander like a labyrinth.
David: For decades, the story went like this: Sarah Winchester, the widow of the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, believed herself cursed by the spirits of all those killed by her family’s repeating rifles. To keep the ghosts at bay, she built — and kept building — this bizarre, unfinished mansion. Work went on for 38 years. 24/7. Hammering, sawing, dust flying — until her death in 1922.
David: It’s such a good story: a fortune built on death, a widow plagued by ghosts from the Wild West, and a house that never ends. Except that much of what we ‘know’ about Sarah Winchester turns out to be more myth than fact.
David: Sarah was born in 1839 in New Haven, Connecticut. She grew up alongside William Wirt Winchester, heir to the famous firearms company. The two fell in love and got married. Their only daughter died in infancy. William himself succumbed to tuberculosis in 1881, leaving Sarah an immense fortune and an almost equally immense grief. Partially on doctor’s advice, she left the East Coast and moved to California. There she bought some farmland that would become the Winchester Mystery House.
David: And yes — she built. She expanded the farmhouse into a mansion, and then expanded the mansion again. But why? The legend says ghosts. The legend says superstition. The legend says a psychic told her to move west, to build nonstop, to confuse spirits and escape death. But historians have looked closely at her life — including Mary Jo Ignoffo, author of a book called ‘Captive of the Labyrinth’ — and they tell a different story.
David: Ignoffo went into the archives: letters, receipts, contracts, even Sarah’s household notes. And what she found was not a woman captive to spirits, but a woman who knew exactly what she was doing.
David: Sarah Winchester, it turns out, was a lover of architecture. She read Architectural Record. She subscribed to design journals. She toured world’s fairs and brought back ideas — stained glass from Tiffany, statuary for the gardens, exotic plants from more than a hundred countries. She built in the eclectic Victorian style of her day, full of experimentation and whimsy.
David: What about those ‘doors to nowhere’ and staircases that lead into the ceiling? Many of them are the result of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which collapsed seven stories of the mansion. Sarah chose not to rebuild, which left a semi-ruined, odd-angled house behind.
David: And those endless renovations? Ignoffo suggests they may have been less about superstition and more about solitude. In letters to her friend Jennie Bennett, Sarah admitted she wasn’t ‘so situated’ to receive guests. In other words, the house was always under construction because she didn’t want company. Building gave her an excuse to keep people away.
David: Ignoffo also points out how the legend of Sarah Winchester was shaped by culture. The Winchester rifle had become infamous as ‘the gun that won the West.’ As America began to reckon with that violence, Sarah became an easy symbol — the haunted widow, wracked with guilt. But there’s no evidence Sarah ever felt that way. Her philanthropy was directed not toward appeasing spirits but toward fighting tuberculosis, the disease that killed her husband. She quietly gave more than a million dollars to fund a tuberculosis hospital in New Haven — money she donated anonymously.
David: So while the legend tells us Sarah was terrified of death, the reality is that she was fighting it in the most concrete way possible: by funding medical care for a disease that had touched her life.
David: Of course, the myth is hard to resist. It’s cinematic. The story of the haunted mansion, built to confuse spirits, sells tickets. That’s why the Winchester Mystery House still exists today — because an amusement-park promoter turned it into a tourist attraction in the 1920s. Without the myth that he created, the house probably would have been bulldozed.
David: But in Captive of the Labyrinth, Ignoffo asks us to see Sarah Winchester differently: not as a mad widow trapped in her own maze, but as a capable, intelligent woman who lived privately, did what she pleased, and used her wealth on her own terms. She built a house the way she wanted to, whether anyone else understood it or not.
David: Sarah Winchester wasn’t captive to spirits. She was captive to rumor, and to the American public’s fondness for a spooky story. We wanted her life to be Gothic horror. What she actually gave us was a house full of Tiffany glass, rare orchids, and the best excuse in the world not to have houseguests. Whatever strangeness the house has says a lot more about us than it does about her.
Melissa: The books I’m recommending today are Gothic-tinged because that’s the mood I’m in right now. However! There’s a whole genre of novels that delve into life in an English manor house, particularly between the two world wars — some satirical, some romantic. If that’s more your speed, here are a few recommendations.
Melissa: ‘The Shooting Party’ by Isabel Colegate. It’s set during a country house weekend in 1913 and was the inspiration for the film ‘Gosford Park.’
Melissa: If you love Downton Abbey, you’ll want to read books by Nancy Mitford. She and her sisters were infamous in the mid-20th century. Among the six girls, there was a Nazi who adored Hitler, a fascist who spent time in prison, and a Communist who ran way to FIGHT the fascists in Spain. Nancy, the author, was a socialist who also liked to wear Dior dresses. She wrote eight novels, including two semi-autobiographical manor house tales: ‘The Pursuit of Love’ and ‘Love In A Cold Climate.’
Melissa: Finally, if you prefer something entirely more gentle, there’s ‘I Capture the Castle’ by Dodie Smith. That’s a coming-of-age story set in a crumbling castle in Suffolk.
Melissa: More on those books and a bunch of others will be in show notes. Now let’s get into the Gothic!
Melissa: My first recommendation is The Original by Nell Stevens.
Melissa: Before I talk about my book recommendation, I need to tell you about one of the most infamous British legal cases of the 19th century. The real-life drama has everything: a shipwreck, a bereaved mother, a substantial reward, a titled inheritance, a 12th-century manor house, and an audacious butcher from Wagga Wagga, Australia.
Melissa: In 1865, a butcher from Australia contacted a wealthy British family, claiming to be their long-lost heir Roger. He, Roger, had been presumed dead at sea in a shipwreck 10 years before. His poor mother had already grieved the loss of her husband and three other sons. She refused to believe Roger was gone, too, so she offered a reward and spent years searching for him.
Melissa: When that butcher from Wagga Wagga appeared it seemed to be a miracle. Was he really her darling son? It was unlikely. Roger had been very thin. The butcher was fat. Roger was born in France, spoke English with a strong French accent, and had been classically educated, so he knew his Latin from his Greek. He also had a tattoo of a heart, cross, and anchor on his left arm.
Melissa: The butcher? No French. No classical languages. No ink. And from all reports, he was a thoroughly unrefined man. But poor Lady Tichborne welcomed him as her son, much to the chagrin of the people around her. For years, the ‘is he, isn’t he’ questions swirled around them, until a civil court in 1874 determined that the butcher was definitely not the erstwhile Roger.
Melissa: That sensational case was the talk of London for months and inspired multiple movies, plays, and novels.
Melissa: Which brings me to this book. ‘The Original’ by Nell Stevens. This yummy Gothic novel uses the Tichborne case as invisible scaffolding to tell a story about identity, class, the desire to belong, and the power of art.
Melissa: It’s 1899. Our heroine and narrator is 12-year-old Grace. She’s an odd sort of orphan. Both of her parents have been committed to a mental hospital, and she’s been reluctantly taken in by her aunt (cold and judgmental) and her uncle (an uncultured oaf). Grace is fiesty and misunderstood.
Melissa: The Gothic atmosphere is pleasantly thick, but also has a mischievousness I loved. I want to read you a bit I love that’s a good introduction Grace:
At my parents’ house, I had spoken to everyone in the same manner: my parents the same as the vicar the same as the maid the same as the rag-and-bone men… I was taught no rules in this regard except the rule of being a pleasant person who did not trouble others and who was untroubled by them. I had not known, before I moved to Inderwick Hall, that to see the family lawyer emerge from a consultation with my aunt and say, ‘Why are you so sweaty? Have you been running or are you sick?’ would be considered an affront.
Melissa: Grace’s only ally is her cousin Charles, five years her senior. He’s a charmer and a bit of a rascal. He pays the chamber maids to pose nude for paintings and reads pornography in church — but he’s kind to Grace, shows her warmth, teaches her to paint.
Melissa: Before we go on, there are two other important points to know about Grace: One. She has face blindness, so when she runs into someone in the hall, say, a servant or the aforementioned lawyer, she’s not sure if she’s met them before. And two, paradoxically, she’s a supremely gifted forger of paintings, able to recreate the colors, stroke style, and composition of the great masters.
Melissa: So, here’s Grace with her smart mouth and her weird skill and her inability to recognize people and her only bright spot is Charles. One day, after a viscious fight with his father, Charles runs away to the sea. At first, letters arrive with tales of adventure, but then… nothing. It’s presumed he’s drown in the Mediterranean. Until one day, 12 years later, a man claiming to be Charles presents himself at Inderwick Hall and the plot does thicken.
Melissa: As a reader, you know ALL OF THAT by chapter two. The rest of the book leaps backward and forward in time, revealing more about Grace and Charles — and circling the question of whether this New Charles is the real Charles or not.
Melissa: This book is Romantic with a capital R — filled with big, swoony feelings and people acting on intuition instead of reason. Grace’s emotional descriptions of famous paintings by van Eyck and Velázquez are lush and vivid. There’s a family curse and daring escapes and forbidden love, and heartbreaking twists that somehow felt good in that bad way — or bad in that good way?
Melissa: This is the kind of story that you can get swept up in. It’s The Original by Nell Stevens.
Melissa: I want to quickly mention another novel inspired by the Tichborne case. It’s ‘Brat Farrar’ by the 20th-century Scottish author Josephine Tey. From the jump, we know that the stranger claiming to be a long-lost heir is an imposter. The whole book is about if he’s going to get away with it — and the author did a brilliant job making me root for him. I wanted this faker to succeed. It’s great fun, and it was a cool experience to read these two books back to back.
David: My first book is ‘The Little Stranger’ from Sarah Waters. This is a mashup of a country-house novel and a postwar social novel and a maybe-haunting. It’s all told by a rather dry, rational village doctor who absolutely does not believe in ghosts … until his confidence has been rattled a few times.
David: We are in Warwickshire, about halfway between London and Manchester, in the late 1940s. There’s a grand old manor there — Hundreds Hall — and it’s crumbling. Its steps are cracked with weeds. The gates don’t quite open. Some rooms are closed up, heirlooms have been quietly sold. Inside, a widowed mother, and her two adult children are keeping up appearances as best the can. But it’s not going well. The decades are pressing in. Like the house, the class system is tottering but still there.
David: And in the middle of this is a little stranger. Maybe.
David: Waters writes all of this with a delightful combination of historical accuracy and Gothic unease.
David: Our narrator, Dr. Faraday, first crossed the threshold of the manor as a … dazzled child; decades later, he’s called back on a routine house call. Now he finds decay where there had been sparkle. He parks, takes in the shabbiness, pulls the bell and hears its thin, far-off ring—and that sets the tone for the rest of the book: everything familiar, just slightly off. And from that quiet wrongness Waters builds a symphony of anxiety. Are the small disturbances the work of grief, money trouble, or nerves? Or is Hundreds Hall itself… hungry? I kept wanting to be taken into the full crash-bang-run ghost story, and the novel kept tugging me back towards the rational. And that tension is like an engine — it pulled me forward.
David: One of the things that I love about this book is that, even though it’s a ghost story — it all feels so psychologically true. Every reaction lands as the only thing that person would have done in that moment. The maid’s nerves, the widow’s composure, the daughter’s skepticism, the doctor’s need to rationalize – all map really cleanly on how these people protect themselves daily, but especially when things get weird. There are no ‘horror movie choices’ in this book. The author gives you a lot of explanations that seem perfectly ordinary: the wiring is old, the vermin are moving about, everybody is under a load of stress. Weird noises lead to household bickering. A little maybe-supernatural event leads to one of the characters expressing a little delight. Kind of like that moment in Poltergeist where the mom is amazed by the chairs moving across the room. As a result of the psychological truth, the house becomes a mirror for each of them. It’s a really good trick the writer pulls off.
David: The period detail in this book is amazing. You can smell the soap and coal, see the bells-and-wires callboard in the servants’ corridor, hear the creek of the wooden stairs, feel how dark a house like that would be in winter. Waters has talked about how deeply she went into diaries, films, and ephemera to capture the time—down to how people swore in private. It’s all sewn so well into the world of the novel that you forget you’re reading historical fiction. Because it isn’t a dreamt past; it’s immersion.
David: I am not the first person to recommend this book. Ron Charles of the Washington Post called it ‘a deliciously creepy tale.’ The reviewer for The UK Times said she ‘had to stop reading for fright.’ And in 2009, it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It’s one of the few horror titles that have ever done that. It wasn’t just recognized for atmosphere; it was celebrated for the way it uses a haunting as an X-ray of postwar Britain and of the human need to believe—or not.
David: By the way, 2009 was a really good year for the Man Booker. Also up that year was Simon Mawer’s ‘The Glass Room,’ which we talked about in our Prague episode. The winner that year though? Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall,’ one of Mel’s favorites.
David: There’s also a film adaptation. It was directed by Lenny Abrahamson, who also directed ‘Room.’ It stars Domhnall Gleeson, who you might recognize from ‘About Time’ with Rachel McAddams. The movie also stars Ruth Wilson. I think this is the third movie I’ve seen where Ruth Wilson is cast as a woman who is, at least in the book, described as plain and unattractive. Here they also give her the full dowdy kit—sensible shoes, wind-rumpled hair with a bit of frizz — but her face keeps breaking character.
David: But. The book. This is a curl-up-and-lean-forward book. It invites you to be a skeptic and a believer at the same time. Read it for the atmosphere; stick around for how Waters uses a creaky floorboard to talk about class, desire, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive a changing world. And if you’re reading at night… maybe leave a light on.
David: One last thing. As you may know, we’re quietly moonlighting as a bookish travel agency, and our first stop is Wales this October—two weekends at Trevor Hall. There’s a book club each weekend, and when we asked our guests to choose, they picked The Little Stranger. Which means we’ll be talking about a haunted country house inside a country house, by lamplight, with a magician from London doing a séance-adjacent set after dessert. I keep saying, ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ and laughing just a little too loudly. If this sounds like your idea of a good time, get on our Substack, or even better, join our Patreon—so you’re first in line for future trips. Details in the show notes.
David: That was ‘The Little Stranger’ by Sarah Waters.
Melissa: My next recommendation is ‘Wakenhyrs’ by Michelle Paver. A deliciously Gothic corker of a story.
Melissa: It’s 1906. Our heroine Maud is nine years old. She’s opinionated, put-upon, and far too curious for her own good. Her mother is dead, the victim of too many pregnancies. Her domineering father, named Edmund Stearne — just a little nod to Dickensian names there — sees demons everywhere he looks. Poor little Maud lives her two brothers — whom she barely tolerates — a slew of servants, and her domineering father at Wake’s End, an Edwardian mansion that sits on the edge of a wild fen.
Melissa: Fens are marshlands in eastern England rich with peat and bordred by ancient woodlands. Many folktales are set in the fens, including the Lantern Man, who lures victims to their deaths in a bed of reeds, a phantom black dog called the Black Shuck, and the ghosts of Roman soldiers.
Melissa: Maud loves the fens: its wildness, the chance of adventure, the animals who live there. To her, it’s a magical realm. But her father? He hates the fen. He forbids his children to enter it, and every window of the house that overlooks the fen must be kept shut. Always.
Melissa: The house — Wake’s End — and the fen are major characters in the story. Here’s how Maud describes the house:
She always liked how Wake’s End looked from outside. Its bumpy roofs were splashed with orange lichen, and its dormer windows poking from the attics looked like eyebrows over its shaggy green ivy-clad fence. The ivy kept Maud safe, and now she befriended the creatures that lived in it: wasps, spiders, whole families of sparrows. She would lie in bed watching the rustly green light filter through the leaves and listening to magpies stomping about on the roof. The old house was home to thousands of wild creatures.
Melissa: To the outside world, Edmund is a revered historian. But WE and Maud know the truth: He’s a petty, judgmental tyrant with irrational rules. Which include never running in the garden, always being silent downstairs, and no animals in the house. The servants are instructed to drown any cats found on the property.
Melissa: Maud skirts this restriction against animals by developing warm feelings for the taxidermied bats kept under a glass dome in her father’s study. And one day, she rescues an injured magpie, nurses him back to health, dubs him Chatterpie, and feeds him outside her window every day, her father’s rules be damned.
Melissa: This brazen disregard for her father’s wishes and her deep love for animals are just two of the many quirks that makes Maud such a great heroine. She’s a blend of Jane Eyre, Alice in Wonderland, and Wednesday Addams. She’s desperate for attention and love. She’s unabashedly inquisitive. And her dictatorial father has made her necessarily sneaky.
Melissa: One day, while slinking about her father’s study, Maud finds his private diaries and does what any precocious young girl would do: She reads them. The entry from 15th January 1911 says, in part, ‘Last night I had the dream again. WHY?’ With that, Maud is captivated by her father’s disjointed scribblings and the revelation of gruesome murder at Wake’s End. She makes it her mission to understand who did what and why.
Melissa: The mystery unfolds through two narratives: Maud’s account of her fraught upbringing at Wake’s End — and the increasingly unhinged entries from her father’s journals.
Melissa: The author Michelle Paver is a British novelist. She’s best known for her children’s fantasy series set in Stone Age Europe. In this novel for adults, she uses her understanding of how children think to make Maud a delightful imp of chaos.
Melissa: The story weaves together threads of witchcraft and demonology, the folklore of the fens, and a dark painting in the style of Hieronymus Bosch. It’s described as depicting ‘tiny malevolent faces’ that were ‘painted in such obsessive detail they could be alive.’ That painting has a major role to play in the plot.
Melissa: On the surface, this book is a dark tale of suspense, family secrets, and hauntings, both psychological and ghostly. It also has a strong point of view on the down-side of living in an Edwardian era manor house, specifically, the classicim and entitlement of the aristocracy, the hypocrisy of the overly pious, and the lousy lot endured by women and the working class.
Melissa: But it’s all a lot of fun, too — if you find a creeping sense of dread to be fun. Michele Paver is fantastic at unsettling detail. You can hear the unnatural scratching in the walls and smell the damp decay that permeates every room of the manor. The atmosphere is disquieting, the resolution is very satisfying, and Maud is ungovernable in the best way possible.
Melissa: That’s Wakenhyrst by Michele Paver.
Melissa: This is another one that’s fantastic as an audiobook. The narrator Juanita McMahon has a pleasantly low voice that brings to mind whiskey and glowing fire embers. Highly recommended.
David: I want to start with this confession: until this month, I’d never read an Agatha Christie. With ‘manor house’ on deck, it felt like the right time to fix that. So I did.
David: To find a starting point, I took a dive into Christie fandom. There were four books that came up over and over as possible good first reads.
David: They are: Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
David: Now, Orient Express is a classic – and I’ve seen and enjoyed two film versions. The first one – with Albert Finney – I first saw in 1974, when I was nine. My mom, the librarian, dragged me to the theater and introduced me to the adult version of the detective’s closing argument: everyone present, every card on the table, justice served. I knew the shape of it from Scooby-Doo. This was the deluxe, grown-up edition: less Velma, more Lauren Becall. But I didn’t want to start with a story I knew that well. Same problem with ‘Death on the Nile.’
David: And that brought me down to two: ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ and ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.’ ‘Styles’ was her first, the debut of Hercule Poirot. ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ was her third Poirot novel, but it’s the one that made her famous. And for good reasons. First, it subverted the tropes she created. And second it changed crime writing forever.
David: I’ll talk about that in a minute, but first – here’s the setup: It’s a country-house murder in a small English village. It’s got all the cozy details you might expect: drawing rooms, parlourmaids, footprints on the windowsill. Our narrator is the village doctor, who lives with his gloriously nosy sister. And they happen to be neighbors with a retired Belgian detective who is now tending vegetables. A wealthy man is found behind a locked door with an antique dagger in his back. Enter Poirot.
David: One of the things that surprised me about this book was the tone. I was expecting solemn BBC vibes: ‘murder most foul,’ creaking corridors, stern men with pocket watches, that kind of thing. ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,’ at least for me, was a little quirkier than that. It’s brighter, and funnier, and more conspiratorial.
David: The doctor and his sister bicker with affection. When Poirot is introduced, he’s offstage, and they get his name wrong. They think he’s a hairdresser. Because of the moustache. There’s a significant scene that runs through a Mah Jong game. And Christie keeps side-eyeing the genre’s cliches. She has local cops talk about fingerprints and poisons like they’ve probably read too many dime-store novels, and then she’ll have the narrator explain why those are useless ideas and details. Christie even drops in a sly bit in the book where Poirot reads the manuscript of the book that you are reading and comments on it.
David: The tension is real. The story gets quite dark in places. But a lot of the book is airy and playful. It feels more Knives Out than scandi-noir. Like Christie is bringing a little mischief. I wasn’t trudging through the gloom, I was being invited to a game.
David: This book is one of the most significant crime books of all time, and I feel like we need to at least glance in that direction before we move on entirely.
David: It came out in 1926, during the Golden Age of detective fiction. An industry-wide conversation was going on about the idea of fair play. Fair play is the gentleman’s agreement of classic whodunits: the reader gets the same clues as the detective. There is no cheating with secret twins, or mystic visions, or clues that only come out in the last page or two. The idea appeared because — in the late ’20s — critics and writers were trying to separate a solid detective story from a gimmicky thriller.
David: In the 1930s, there was a Detection Club in London—a bunch of mystery writers got together and — I suspect — drank many martinis and talked a lot about how to kill people. Christie was part of it, so was Dorothy L. Sayers. It was was part social club, part quality-control board for fair-play mysteries. Their initiation oath said:
Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them, and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God?
David: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd came in the middle of that conversation and redrew the map a bit. Christie keeps her promise of fair play — the clues are all out there — but the emphasis shifts from poisons and locked doors to the slipperiness of character and storytelling. How the tale is told becomes as important as what’s being told.
David: That’s all old hat to us now. We’ve seen murders narrated by the victim, or solved by a body-hopping detective, or told backwards, but all of that is from the echoes of this book over the last hundred years.
David: Ackroyd was a career-making moment for the woman who went on to be one of the most-published authors of all time. According to Wikipedia, she’s tied with Shakespeare with somewhere between 2 and 4 billion books sold. She wrote this book and then banged out another 80 or so novels over the next fifty years, as well as the script for one of the longest-running plays of all time. Top that, Will. And this book came out during the year that would end with her famous temporary disappearance.
David: This is a classic and it hasn’t lost its bite. It’s witty without being arch, intricate without being fussy, and unexpectedly humane about motives: greed, shame, pride, and love. It respects your intelligence, and it trusts your attention. Although, if you’re like me, get out a pencil. Notes aren’t a bad idea. If you like being outfoxed in the fairest possible way, and you haven’t read it, this is a great book. It’s ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ by Agatha Christie.
Melissa: My final recommendation is The Cherry Robbers by Sarai Walker. This is a lush atmospheric family saga set in a 1950s Connecticut mansion nicknamed ‘The Wedding Cake.’ I want to describe this book as Americana Gothic — can I just make up that term? — because it’s got all the yummy tropes of a traditional Gothic novel but it also tells an entirely American story.
Melissa: It’s the saga of the Chapels, an old money family who made their fortune selling firearms in the 20th century. Iris is our narrator. When the story opens, it’s 2017. Iris is an elderly woman, and a very successful artist — she’s a sort of Georgia O’Keeffe character, living in New Mexico under an assumed name. When a journalist starts digging around her past, threatening to reveal her true identity, Iris decides she needs to tell her own story.
Melissa: So we learn that Iris is one of one of six daughters who lived an almost cloistered, unhappy existence in ‘The Wedding Cake’ house with their ambivalent parents. Their father is the very definition of stodgy patriarchy. Their mother drifts in and out of reality, convinced that the house is haunted by the ghosts of victims of Chapel weapons.
Melissa: We know right from the beginning that Iris has survived some kind of trauma — people don’t reinvent themselves for no reason. And on page 17, we get the setup for the whole story. Here’s Iris to explain:
Later, once the tragedies began to happen, one after another, the children in the village made up a rhyme about us.
It didn’t help matters that we lived in an enormous Victorian house that looked like a wedding cake. If this were a novel, that detail would push the boundaries of believability, but that’s what our house looked like and I can’t change reality…
The house, with its cascading tiers and ornamental details, looked as if it were piped with white icing. The eyes are drawn first to the central tower… perched above the rest of the house and circled with tiny dormered windows… A prominent widow’s walk and balustrade marked the second floor, then there was the ground floor, with its bay windows and portico, curlicues everywhere, and tall stalks of flowers ringing the base.
It looked like something out of a fairy tale, that’s what everyone said. If you could have sliced the exterior of this wedding-cake house with a knife, you would have found inside six maidens — Aster, Rosalind, Calla, Daphne, Iris, Hazel — each of whom were expected to become a bride one day. It was the only certainty in their lives.
Melissa: The six sisters live in a dark fairytale. Because their parents are pretty much useless on the parental front, the sisters rely on each other. They bicker and snipe, but they’re also devoted to each other. They spend lazy summer days together, reading Tennyson, walking in the nearby woods, painting their fingernails, daydreaming about the men they might marry who will take them away from the oppressiveness of The Wedding Cake.
Melissa: Aster, the eldest, is the first to fall in love and is soon engaged to the heir of a steel magnate. As the wedding approaches, gifts pile up in the library, along with wedding favors, place cards, stacks of the newlyweds’ china, and the dress — the pristine white silk dress — that Iris calls the headless bride.
Melissa: It’s not all happy anticipation. One night, at an ill-fated family dinner, the girls’ mother Belinda mutters in a dreamy, frightened voice, that something terrible is going to happen if Aster gets married. And then it does.
Melissa: Aster dies shortly after her wedding — and so do the other sisters, one by one, the victims of a family curse. Iris is narrating this story, so we know the curse hasn’t gotten her. Why? The answer to that and other mysteries is slowly revealed.
Melissa: Sarai Walker is a tremendous writer. She delicately weaves female rage into a lyrical ghost story. There are literary references aplenty — both overt and subtle. One of the sisters routinely quotes Tennyson’s poem ‘The Lady of Shalott’ — which is about a princess stranded in a tower — and the title of this book Cherry Robbers is taken from a poem by DH Lawrence. The claustrophobia of the Wedding Cake house reminded me of ‘Wuthering Heights,’ the family trauma and sisters stepping in as parents is an homage to ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ by Shirley Jackson, and the girls’ mother Belinda is a 1950s version of Jane Eyre’s madwoman in the attic.
Melissa: The sentences are glorious on the page, but I recommend the audiobook. It’s narrated by January LaVoy, and oh, her voice. It sounds like the taste of honey and butter on a warm biscuit. Then, when the moment requires it, she adds a hint of dread, like a pinch of salt. I encourage you to luxuriate in this Americana Gothic. It’s ‘The Cherry Robberts’ by Sarai Walker.
David: Dave: Those are five books we love, set in a Manor House.
David: Did we miss something? A favorite book? Is there a beautiful house you want let us know about? Come tell us on Patreon. Every week, we hang out with listeners after the episode—swapping stories, trading ideas, and keeping the conversation going. It’s just $3 a month, and you’ll help us keep making the show you love. Join us.
Melissa: And right now, we have a special offer for an annual membership.
David: If you’ve been thinking about joining our Patreon, now is an excellent time to do that!
Melissa: We just started an annual membership. We’re offering it for the next month. It’s 20% off our standard monthly membership of $6 a month, so you get the whole year for 57 dollars and 60 cents.
David: Let’s just call it a little less than $58. What a nice round number! The advantage is that you get charged just once, and you become part of the really lovely community we have on Patreon for the whole year.
Melissa: Plus! We have a new perk for all Patreon members: an epic spreadsheet with every book we’ve talked about on the show, along with its genre, a brief description, the destinations it covers, a link to our full review. If you’re currently a member, you can download that now. And if you’re new, as soon as you join, you’ll get access to that and all of our previous posts.
David: So… you get the spreadsheet with every book we’ve ever talked about, you get a bunch of new bookish friends, you’ll be first to hear when we announce live events like our upcoming Manor House weekend in Wales, and you become a Patron of the Arts. You support our show, which we literally cannot make without the financial support of our patrons.
Melissa: Learn more at strongsenseofplace.com/support. If you’re not able to join Patreon right now, you can help us by telling a friend to listen to the show.
David: While you’re on our site, be sure to visit the show notes for this episode. It is PACKED with helpful links and videos about Manor Houses, whether you’re planning a trip or just want to explore from your couch.
Melissa: As always, thank you for listening to our show and for all your support.
David: Mel, where are we headed on our next episode?
Melissa: We’re celebrating Halloween.
David: Thanks for listening, and we’ll talk to you soon.
[cheerful music]
Top image courtesy of James Smith/Unsplash.
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