It’s that time of year again. Halloween decorations have taken over the stores—giant, blow-up things, noisemakers, the silly stuff, and the scary kind. And everywhere you turn, you see haunted houses. On TV or TikTok or in your neighbor’s yard, they all look the same: an imposing mansion that has succumbed to time. The house stands empty and neglected behind intricate, wrought-iron gates, walls overtaken by ivy, windows broken, doors boarded over. Atop its turreted roof, tall, jagged spires pierce the sky, silhouetted against an ominous full moon.
Both outside and inside, our iconic haunted house stands as a paragon of spooky Victorian style. Its architecture, decor, and, presumably, the souls cursed to haunt its crumbling walls all originate from that complex, controversial era. The second half of the 19th-century was a period of expansion, industry, and innovation, but also social repression, cultural appropriation, colonization, class strife, and gender conflicts.
In Britain, this complexity birthed a unique aesthetic that influenced everything, including social etiquette, family life, education, medicine, art, literature, design, decor, and fashion. Equally influential was the omnipresent Victorian morality. This strict code revered the family unit, “virtue,” and traditional gender roles while vilifying anything expressing sexuality or social non-conformity. Victorian sensibilities soon took a deep hold in the US and also influenced Western Europe.
Why was the Victorian era creepy?
The realities of 19th-century life led to a cultural preoccupation with death, the afterlife, and supernatural legends, especially those representing repressed desire and rage. Sometimes called the “Victorian death cult,” this dark obsession grew into a phenomenon with powerful, far-reaching influence. More than 120 years after Queen Victoria’s death, Victorian macabre still dominates our modern concept of creepiness.
How Victoriana Came To Rule The Darkness

Although modern medicine advanced throughout the 19th century, illness and death were still part of daily life. Disease and injury claimed lives every day, and in most cases, the dying remained at home rather than in a hospital. The family was, therefore, forced to go on with life while their loved one suffered, worsened, and finally passed in their presence.
Even when death wasn’t literally on the doorstep, English subjects were constantly reminded of loss and suffering by their own sovereign. Queen Victoria, crowned in 1837, spent the last 40 years of her 63-year reign mourning her beloved husband, Prince Albert. After his death in 1861, she wore black clothing every day for the rest of her life.
The Queen’s intense bereavement elevated aristocratic mourning customs to an art form. Widows wore black and refrained from attending most social events for two years. For other relatives, the mourning period ranged from four weeks (for a cousin) to a year (for a close family member). During long mourning periods with limited social contact and minimal fashion choices, the making of mourning art offered solace and distraction.


Victorian hair art, like these brooches, as well as necklaces, rings, and picture frames were painstakingly constructed from locks of the departed’s hair.
Death as entertainment

In light of the pervasive presence of death in the Victorian era, it’s hardly surprising that the morbid and macabre heavily influenced 19th-century entertainment. Tales of ghosts, vampires (Yes, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but many other brilliant writers also brought the undead to life in the 1800s), and other monstrous horrors captured the public imagination. People enjoyed “dark tourism,” including medical museum visits, morgue tours, and public mummy unwrappings. Beginning in 1935, the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London featured scenes depicting famous murderers.
Spooky Victorian style: eclectic, Gothic, and dead

Two aesthetics dominated 19th-century exterior and interior design: Victorian eclectic and high Gothic revival.
One can see why any ghost would love eclectic Victorian interiors. There were plenty of hiding places and things to shake, rattle, roll, and haunt. Eclectic homes were filled with furniture and decor from different places, featuring multiple styles and a range of patterns, textures, and colors.
Naturally, 19th-century aristocrats showcased their wealth and worldliness with these abundant displays. But the Industrial Revolution had, for the first time ever, increased the earning power of the common people—while also giving them access to affordable decorative goods. Thus, the expanding middle class could show off their rising fortunes with clocks, figurines, china, rugs, upholstered furniture, wallpaper, and window dressings—items once reserved for the wealthiest homes.

Amidst this decorative cornucopia, Victorian macabre art was everywhere: post-mortem photographs, bizarre taxidermy, animal skulls and skeletons, and grotesqueries kept behind the glass doors of curiosity cabinets.
High Gothic Revival
Beneath these decorative riches lay a Gothic-inspired landscape—a topography of dark, lavishly embellished wood, jewel-toned velvet furniture, heavy, black or forest green drapes, ornate sculptures, and lamps wrought in pewter or iron. Nineteenth-century gas lamps, wall sconces, and chandeliers cast as much shadow as they did light, adding more drama and mystery.

Victorian Gothic revival architecture embraced the arches, large windows, stained glass, and religious undertones of the European Middle Ages. Interestingly, many supernatural legends of Europe occur in these ancient Gothic castles and cathedrals. Gothic revival architecture, which reached a pinnacle in the 19th-century, is still a favorite for today’s churches. But back in the 1800s, Gothic residential houses were also a big thing. Which brings us back to the Victorian haunted house.
The Victorian mansion: eternally creepy
Residential Gothic houses, or “Victorians,” are a multi-level hodge-podge of steep roofs, decorative molding, turrets, towers, and bay windows. Unfortunately, they weren’t always constructed well, which could mean creaking stairs and groaning floors, banging wall pipes, or bats nesting in the belfry. (Yes, really!) Because the upkeep on these houses was massive, less well-off owners often struggled to fix broken steps and doors, mend threadbare drapes, or remove thriving communities of cobwebs from ceiling corners.
Queen Victoria died in 1901, and to a great extent, so did both the prudishness and excess of her era. The 20th century ushered in a fresh new aesthetic—Modernism. Gothic revival architecture had no place in a world shaped by Frank Lloyd Wright, Cubism, Art Deco, a reverence for “progress,” and a disdain for the vulgar decadence of the previous century.
Out-of-fashion, decrepit, and structurally unsound, many creepy Victorian homes were simply abandoned. Sitting empty for years, these decaying buildings became a common sight in American neighborhoods.

(Lee Coursey and Shannon O’Toole)
Spooky Victorian style meets American pop culture
As the 20th-century progressed, the Victorian style was increasingly seen as old-fashioned, uptight, and stuck in the past. And, what’s more stuck in the past than a ghost? It was cartoonist Charles Addams who brought this connection to popular culture. His 1930s New Yorker cartoon series, enjoyed by readers across the US, depicted a range of beings—supernatural, ghostly, monstrous, and just very, very strange—dwelling in an iconic Victorian mansion.

Credit: Wikipedia
But it was Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film “Psycho” that cemented the old Victorian as the penultimate horror setting. Hitchcock’s “Bates’ Mansion,” a decaying paragon of Victoriana, is home to an insane taxidermist with a real skeleton in his closet (ok, fruit cellar). A few years later, “The Addams Family,” a 1964 TV series inspired by Addams’s work, brought the spooky Victorian style into homes across America. Today, that iconography lives on in “Wednesday,” the new series about the family’s ultra-creepy daughter.
The Queen is Dead, Long Live the Queen
Halloween decorations aren’t the only way the Victorian era continues to influence contemporary decor. Eclectic styles such as moody maximalism, cluttercore, dark academia, and, of course, Goth all owe considerable debt to 19th-century design aesthetics.
I, for one, love them all. Including the eerie charm of the Victorian haunted house. What about you? Which aspects of 19th-century style fit well with your personal flair? Does Victorian macabre thrill you, give you the ickies, or just kind of bore you? Do you live for eclectic maximalism? What do you love about it? I’d love to hear all about it in the comments!