The House That Became Hill House Anyway: Jennings Hall (Vermont)

For generations of students at Bennington College, Jennings Hall has been the building you don't want to be inside after midnight. Phantom piano music drifts from locked practice rooms. Footsteps pace empty corridors. Doors slam without wind. And one story claims a terrified professor once fled into the Vermont snow as violent knocking traveled through the mansion toward him. But Jennings has another claim to fame: that the imposing granite estate inspired Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. It's a perfect story. It's also almost certainly wrong.

Tonight, we explore the genuine hauntings of Jennings Hall, the strange musical history embedded in its walls, and the surprising collection of psychic researchers, Manhattan architecture, California mansions, and family history that actually helped Shirley Jackson build Hill House.