The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer

The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red is a horror novel by the American writer Ridley Pearson, published in 2001. It is written as a diary kept by Ellen Rimbauer and annotated by a professor of paranormal activity.

The diary begins at the turn of the twentieth century, when Ellen becomes the bride of the Seattle industrialist John Rimbauer. She uses it to set down what she cannot say aloud: her anxieties about the marriage, her confusion about her own sexuality, and her sense that her life is turning into a nightmare. Alongside that private record the book follows the building of Rose Red, the Rimbauers' vast mansion.

The house is built on an old burial ground and has a reputation for being haunted, and the novel is structured around the people who vanish in and around it. Several servants disappear soon after the house is finished, and later a child of the family does too. A fictional afterword by Ellen's grandson closes the book, and the diary form is what makes the story work as a document that always knows less than the reader suspects.