The Big Horror House

"Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?"

Paul McCartney


I love a character like Dickens' Miss Havisham: crazy, wealthy spinsters living alone in utter squalor in their big mansions. But hearing about people who are just like that in real life is no fun at all.

I was reading this interesting review (as usual) in Cinema de Merde, about a documentary called Grey Gardens (you can also read the wiki page HERE).

It's the very real story of a mother and daughter that were close relatives of the famous Jackie O, and used to be wealthy and well connected. Then they both went insane and apparently for this reason they became isolated from the rest of society. They lived together in a 28 room mansion that hadn't been cleaned or repaired in decades. So what must once have been a swell house was now run down and absolutely filthy, infested by rats, raccoons, cats and fleas, with both water and electricity cut off.

How crazy were the mother and daughter? According to Cinema de Merde:

The mother in this movie is the aunt of Jackie Kennedy, later Jackie O. She is 78 lives with her daughter, 56, in a classic large house out in the Hamptons. They both grew up in wealth, but at some point the husband left. The daughter was very beautiful and looked to be a very promising debutante, and moved to NYC, but at some point her mother called her back to their house in the Hamptons, and she returned. The movie is also unclear on exactly what happened to the daughter in New York and the circumstances of her coming back.

What IS clear is that the woman, now 56, is plumb bonkers. She is always wearing these flat-out bizarre outfits that she incessantly refers to as her “costumes.” The only constant is that her head is always covered and she is always wearing the same brooch. But you’ll be looking at her like: “Is that a tablecloth she’s wearing? Does she have a SWEATER on her head?” And yeah, I think they are. She also continually dresses in an inappropriately sexual manner… fishnets, exposed breasts… it’s just shocking.

She vacillates between her regular everyday worries and fury and bitter remorse that her life is going to waste while she takes care of her mother in their house. She is utterly oblivious that it seems for the most part that her life is already long gone.

Reading this made me realize why there is a recurring theme in horror stories, of old mansions that start out rich and prosperous, and in time become neglected and empty. Just looking at their sheer size and number of rooms, at their expensive, lavish decorations, you ask yourself: who was this built for? They must have had a large family in mind, hoping generations of kids would grow up here, and lots of visitors would come over to stay all the time. And now look at it, desolate and alone. No one lives there anymore, or perhaps only one or two people. The plan for a large family obviously didn't work out. You have to ask yourself, what went wrong? Is it the old saying that hell is other people, and we weren't really meant to be living together for extended periods of time? Or did something specific happen that separated them? The marriage dissolved, the kids were never born, or they died, or they chose to leave, and no one came over for a visit. The big house is a visible monument to a dream that failed, and testifies to the truth of the old saying that money doesn't buy happiness.