Haunted mansions are seen less and less in Horror as it increasingly leaves its European roots in the Gothic and adapts to American media.

Ghosts and Spirits in the magical realist novels of Allende and Garcia Marquez often represent the shadows cast be centuries of history on those who live in the present. Similarly the haunted castle in the Gothic exemplified by Walpole in The Castle of Otranto represent the linking between the supernatural terrors and the pre-enlightenment history.

The American gothic too prefers to link the haunted house to the pre-enlightenment colonial period, particularly New England and its witch trials. But most of America's expansion prevents Americans from feeling centuries of tradition within their suburban tract houses. Their nation was born in the enlightenment. And so the haunting increasingly becomes more about what the dead want, and less about what the location brings.

Although a few American writers have tapped into the power of a malevolent place. Shirley Jackson in The Haunting of Hill House may be the first to create the notion that the place itself may be bad. And that the cumulative weight of human sins committed within a set of walls end up being transmitted by osmosis. Certainly the Overlook Hotel in The Shining is explicit ( despite Kubrik's misinterpretation ) that no human spirits remain; only a wicked location echoing the events of the past. And perhaps Mark Danielewski in House of Leaves takes this to the ultimate extreme; no past, no departed souls, just a strange place reshaping itself to destroy its inhabitants by reflecting something of them back at them. Like the ocean/planet Solaris in Stanislaw Lem's "haunted space-station" novel; the truly alien reveals nothing of itself and is purely a distorted mirror allowing us to be horrified by our reflections.

Dante