Lamb House offers this register one of its more genuinely literary hauntings, a house whose reported presence was specifically described, by a witness who was herself a professional novelist, in terms drawn directly from a ghost story written by one of the house's own former literary residents. Rumer Godden's account, published in her own 1989 memoir of life at Lamb House, describes feeling haunted on two distinct levels, first by the simple weight of Henry James's own towering literary reputation attached to the house, and second by something she experienced as an actual sensed presence, which she found herself comparing specifically to the uncanny, ambiguous child ghosts of James's The Turn of the Screw, a novella whose entire power rests on the reader's inability to determine whether its ghosts are real or a governess's delusion, a fittingly self-aware comparison for a writer describing her own uncertain experience in the very house where James once lived and worked.
Godden's account goes further than a literary-minded sense of presence, however, describing what she took to be a genuine poltergeist actively disrupting the house's physical systems, newly installed pipes and a boiler bursting, saucepans thrown from shelves, and the electrics repeatedly fusing, a cluster of mechanical and physical disruption consistent with the more classically poltergeist-type activity recorded at numerous other sites throughout this wider register. E.F. Benson's own earlier residence at the house, overlapping neither with James's nor Godden's own tenancy, adds a further layer of literary history to the building without, in the sources consulted for this entry, being connected to any specific reported haunting of his own.
Lamb House stands out within this register for the unusual credibility lent to its haunting by the specific professional background of its most detailed witness, a published novelist consciously drawing the comparison to her own literary predecessor's most famous ghost story while describing what she took to be a genuinely disruptive, physically destructive presence in her own home.
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