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The chilling true story of two young girls that inspired The Haunting of Hill House.

 

The Haunting of Hill House is the latest Netflix series that has us absolutely petrified, just in time for Halloween.

The 10-episode show is equal parts ghost story and psychological thriller, following five siblings as they return to their childhood home of Hill House after a tragedy. Now adults, the Crains are still traumatised by what happened at Hill House as they’re forced to confront their past.

While the show has widely been described as terrifying, it becomes even more chilling when you read about the real-life occurrences that inspired Shirley Jackson’s 1959 book – which the series is based on.

Watch the very spooky trailer for The Haunting of Hill House.

Video by MMC

According to The Sun, Jackson collected stories of real-life haunted houses, one of them being An Adventure by Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont – pseudonyms for two women named Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain.

In 1901 the two girls were visiting the Palace of Versailles in Paris when they got lost trying to locate the Petit Trianon – a small chateau located in the palace grounds.

Moberly and Jourdain then recall encountering ghostly figures like “a woman shaking a white cloth out of a window” and a man wearing a cloak and large hat and covered in smallpox scars with a “most repulsive” appearance.

According to the authors, they thought some of the ghosts they encountered bore similarities to real-life historical characters like Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France before she was beheaded during the French Revolution.

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The Petit Trianon'
The girls got lost on the Palace grounds when they went off track in their search for The Petit Trianon. Image: Getty.

Similar to the characters in the Netflix series, the two women started to feel unexplainably "oppressed and dreary" and were under the impression that they had travelled back in time.

"Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees seemed to become flat and lifeless, like wood worked in tapestry," wrote Moberly.

Although the majority of critics dismissed An Adventure at its time of publishing, and even explained the incident as the girls "stumbling into a spontaneous fancy dress party held by a decadent poet who lived nearby," it's a chilling story, with elements that still resonate on screen a century later.

Have you watched The Haunting of Hill House? What did you think of it? Tell us in a comment below.