Differences between a Haunted and a Cursed House.

It is easy to fall into the assumption that Haunted Houses and Cursed Houses, within fiction, refer to the same phenomenon, but in reality we are talking about two completely different things.
A Haunted House, by definition, is a house inhabited by ghosts, spirits, demons, or entities from the Astral Plane. Once these undesirable beings are expelled, the house returns to normal.

The Cursed Houses, on the other hand, can also be inhabited by intangible creatures from beyond, but the most substantial difference with the Haunted Houses is that the Cursed Houses themselves form a kind of hostile entity that attacks and even feeds on of its occupants.

Perhaps the most notable example of Haunted Houses is Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House.

Every angle—and the doctor gestured towards the entrance—every angle in the house is slightly off. Hugh Crain must have hated other people with their sensible, right-angled houses, because he designed his to suit his mind. Angles that you assume to be correct and that you are used to, and that you have every right to think are rectangles, are actually off by a fraction of a degree in one direction or another. Of course, the result of all these small measurement aberrations adds up to a pretty big distortion throughout the house.
Hill House is inhabited by ghosts, of course, including that of its creator, Hugh Crain, but the house itself is a living entity —or not dead, let’s say— whose architecture allows it to absorb the energy of its inhabitants, feed on them , and thus continue to attract people with the same level of vibration; in general, people who have gone through some kind of recent trauma.

Haunted Houses, on the other hand, are houses possessed by ghosts; that is, evil does not come from the architecture, from its own constitution, but rather from external, supernatural elements that occupy them for a certain time
Now, what is the origin of a Cursed House, that is, of a house whose very nature is evil?
Apparently, it all boils down to a question of architecture.
Lovecraft, through a psychic artist, Wilcox, in The Call of Cthulhu, comments that the geometry of certain houses, due to a deliberate aberration in their angles, can absorb the energy of their inhabitants and, therefore, thereby acquire a certain spiritual consistency.

Shirley Jackson employs the same device by having her characters describe incredible alterations of perspective in Hill House, to the point that they experience the sensation of walking on walls when, in fact, they are walking straight down a corridor.
Haunted Houses, on the other hand, rarely have anything to do with the horrific events that take place within their walls. It is the ghosts, regardless of the house, who are responsible for stalking and terrorizing its occupants.

In The Dreams in the Witch House—another Lovecraft classic—Walter Gilman seems to describe a spatial confusion similar to that experienced by Theo and Eleanor in Hill House:
Gilman’s room was a good size but irregularly shaped; the north wall sloped perceptibly inward while the low ceiling sloped gently in the same direction. Other than an obvious rat’s nest hole and traces of other plugging, there was no entrance, or sign that there had been one, to the space that must have existed between the sloping wall and the straight outer wall on the north side. of the house, although from the outside one could see a window that had been boarded up in a very remote time.
In the two HPL tales we have mentioned, and also in Hill House, it is the structure of the dwelling itself that is a manifestation of his evil power, even independent of any supernatural entities that may reside there. In Haunted Houses, on the other hand, the matter simply boils down to the manifestations of their occupants from beyond.
This assumption that certain houses are essentially evil also underlies Clark Ashton Smith’s story: The Devotee of Evil, where a paranormal investigator acquires the grounds of an old mansion, the Larcom House, to perform an experiment that aims to activate a device capable of awakening the diabolical nature of the building:

I will confess that I have bought this old mansion and its grounds mainly because of its dismal history. The place is unusually responsible for the influences I have spoken of. I am now working on a device by which, when perfected, I hope to manifest in its purity the radiations of that evil force.
Clark Ashton Smith provides juicy details about the “dismal history” of House Larcom, including murders, various accidental deaths, and bouts of insanity in its occupants. Similarly, Shirley Jackson describes the deaths of five people at the Hill House before Eleanor arrives.

The motif of the Haunted Houses is, in a way, a by-product of the Haunted Houses. In fact, Shirley Jackson is the first to establish a series of resources that have become common parameters of the genre:

a- various personalities that, in some way, are propelled towards the house by destiny.

b-circumstances that come together so that the characters must spend one or several nights in the house.

c- One or several paranormal investigators who work on the case, from a supposed rationality, but whose arrogance ends up turning them into victims of the supernatural forces that surround them.
We can conclude then that, in the Cursed Houses, the ghosts are the least of it.

At Hill House, especially Eleanor, she is a direct victim of the house’s influence. She even adopts strange attitudes, confuses her own memories with those of her former occupants, recites fragments of conversations that took place in another time, or simply picks up lines of thought that are not her own, but that somehow resonate in Hill House, as if it were a psychic resonance box.

What radically differentiates the Cursed Houses from the Haunted Houses is the conceptualization of the supernatural in them. In the Cursed Houses, the matter is not limited to one or more entities that try to communicate or attack the living, but rather a place where certain patterns can be repeated, and whose strength depends on the personalities that occupy it .
In this way, the Cursed House and its inhabitants form a symbiotic relationship: the human contributes his psychic energy, feeding in a certain way that detestable architecture, and in return obtains a framework to re-experience the traumas that brought him to the house in first place.

In this sense, Hill House is the maximum expression of the Cursed Houses in fiction. Although today we may be used to these details, since they have been repeated ad nauseam, Shirley Jackson annulled in her novel all the conventions of the genre, creating something completely new: paranormal phenomena occur in broad daylight, not only at night, and involve multiple witnesses at once, rather than a single observer.

Those unlucky enough to make it to Hill House, or any Cursed House for that matter, are haunted not by a single entity, but by a repeating pattern: a sequence of troubled events and relationships in each character’s past. that somehow connects them with the house, and condemns them to a perpetual recreation.

https://dimidesan.com/creepy/

https://dimidesan.com/the-biology-of-horror-gothic-literature-and-film-analysis/