Hell House

Hell House is a horror novel by the American writer Richard Matheson, published in 1971. It concerns four people hired to investigate a house that is supposed to be haunted and to settle whether anything survives death, and it is set at the Belasco House in Maine, a place shut up since 1949 after years of drink, drugs and worse.

The four are the physicist Dr Lionel Barrett, who has an interest in parapsychology, and his wife Edith; Florence Tanner, a spiritualist medium; and Benjamin Franklin Fischer, a physical medium who had been to the house thirty years before. A dying millionaire, William Reinhardt Deutsch, hires Barrett, Tanner and Fischer to spend a week investigating whether anything survives death.

One of the mediums has been inside the house before, and the house turns out to work on each of the four according to what they want and what they are hiding. The novel is known for the intensity of its haunting and for the way the house uses the visitors' own histories against them. Matheson keeps the perspective moving between the members of the group.

The novel is a standalone story, and it is one of the better-known American haunted-house novels of its decade, written by an author who also worked extensively in film and television.