Holes, Caverns, and Hell Itself

Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves as Urban Legend

(Note: The following article was written in 2020 but may hold important insight into future ventures. In the meantime, check out my buddy Bradley’s (@bpleasies) Threadless store where he has countless incredible UFO/Fortean graphic t-shirts and sweatshirts for sale. In fact, I’m probably wearing one right now. I’m honored to say he has just released a stellar design for the “Getting Spooked Fan Club” if you want to take your enjoyment of this newsletter to the streets and spread the word. Thanks Bradley!)

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In the mid-1940s and into the 50s, a bizarre series of stories were released in the pulp SF magazine, Amazing Stories. Under the leadership of eccentric editor Ray Palmer, the publication produced a number of stories under the “Shaver Mystery” banner. These were the supposedly true tales of Richard S. Shaver, a previously institutionalized man who claimed that evil beings beneath the Earth shot rays into his head. These beams revealed to him stories of ancient, advanced, and evil civilizations in the caverns under the surface. The beings, called Detrimental Robots or Deros, subtly influenced all of mankind and lurked in the damp, dark spaces of the Earth that humans scarcely saw. They kidnapped and tortured people below and psychically controlled those above to limit their technological capabilities. It was a paranoid saga of paranormal, malevolent and unseen forces delighting in the suffering of mankind. Although Shaver’s visions were likely a product of schizophrenia, the stories were a huge success for Amazing. Palmer received what he approximates to be 50,000 letters in response to the Shaver Mystery.¹ Yet, the Shaver Mystery was not well-received by the SF fandom. Instead, it was a more general readership that saw the appeal in these sensational and supposedly true stories of hell on (or in) Earth. Shaver’s tales were perhaps the first rumblings of a specific, and spatially aware, brand of urban legend. Too-good-to-be-true horror stories of this nature continued to crop up throughout the decades but escalated sharply at the turn of the millennium. In the mid-to-late 90s and early 2000s, a number of pit or cavern related urban legends began proliferating as the internet became a more common means of communication.

In 1990, Trinity Broadcasting Network, an evangelical Christian group, began perpetuating a story about a so-called “Well to Hell” that Russian geologists drilled 14.4 kilometers deep in the Siberian wilderness. The geologists supposedly discovered temperatures were much higher in the hole than expected—over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit—and reported hearing human voices screaming in pain. Widely circulated through evangelical sermons, broadcasts, and publications, the story became a minor urban legend despite being fabricated by a Norwegian schoolteacher.²

On the radio waves from 1997 to 2002, a caller to the paranormal radio show Coast to Coast AM reported a fantastic story: He spoke of a seemingly bottomless hole located on his property. Dubbed “Mel’s Hole” after the caller used the pseudonym “Mel Waters,” Mel claimed that he used fishing line to measure the depth of the hole—80,000 feet without touching bottom. The hole purportedly had other, even stranger properties:

(Mel) said a rural resident tossed his dead dog into the hole only to see it later alive outdoors with a hunter. The dog wouldn’t come to him. (…) Others had seen a black beam coming from the hole and still others claimed portable radios held close the hole’s entrance would play programs and music from the past. Metal held close to the hole’s 9-foot diameter opening would change into other metals or substances.³

Others who perpetuated the legend of Mel’s Hole connected it to the Shaver Mystery, saying that an ancient people live down there who “want to control us (…) as slaves, as food, (and) as sex items.”⁴ Investigators in Kittitas County, Washington could find no evidence of the supposed hole nor any evidence that “Mel Waters” was a real person, pseudonym or otherwise. Mel’s Hole was another urban legend, but an urban legend that seemed to captivate and inspire audiences and artists alike. Art critic Doug Harvey curated a collection of Mel’s Hole-inspired artworks and essays, noting that “the Hole is fundamental symbol of our species, spread too wide to be mapped by its omni-absence.”⁵ Harvey writes that the story of Mel’s Hole “throws us off balance” and “unnerves us by disrupting the natural order of things and not-things,” a statement that seems to hold true for all urban legends with a similar interest in absences and voids. There is a primordial fear of the unknown and subsequently a fear of exploring dark, inaccessible places—but there is also pleasure and escapism kick attributed to this fear. There is an entertainment value to urban legends, or else they would not proliferate throughout our culture. Yet, these legends are not without existentialist dread: “If the hole is a womb,” Harvey writes of Mel’s Hole, “we are confronted with an exponentially expansive nothingness that ultimately reduces the vast but limited somethingness of the tangible world past the threshold of significance.”⁶

Amongst the fervor of all these turn-of-the-millennium urban legends, a similar narrative appears in Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel House of Leaves. The tri-layered narrative follows a mentally unstable protagonist, Johnny Truant, who has discovered a manuscript of film scholarship left by a blind poet, Zampanó, after his death. The film, entitled “The Navidson Record,” documents a family’s struggles with a house that changes its physical dimensions: Hallways expand and contract and the house becomes a labyrinth with endlessly stretching stairways and corridors. Zampanó offers film analyses and additional information about the family and the house. “The Navidson Record” begins with a discussion of the manuscript’s “authenticity” and “validity,” with Zampanó suggesting that only readers who believe “tabloid-UFO sightings” and other conspiracies will trust “The Navidson Record” to be true.⁷ This exploration takes an interest in this facet of Danielewski’s novel: How the book functions as a discursive experiment with a faux-urban legend form or emulates the style of “strange but true” literature. Further, House of Leaves seems to exemplify the trend of cavern/void/hole-related urban legends that were contemporary to its cultural moment. While urban legends, (even the specific variant analyzed here,) have existed throughout human history, House of Leaves and the other 1990s to 2000s urban legends seem tightly associated with their moment in time. These urban legends proliferated at a rate not seen previously because of the advent of internet accessibility. Further, the subject matter of expansive, terrifying treks into the black void may also be referential to the internet itself. The internet was a new vehicle for “legend-tripping online,” as anthropology/folklore/religion scholar Michael Kinsella writes, an unprecedented and ultra-accessible mode of participation in supernatural folklore.⁸ Danielewski’s House of Leaves does not appropriate urban legends directly, as the book’s length and expansive narrative prevent it from being the short and concise narrative usual attributed to urban legends.⁹ Rather, Danielewski appropriates themes and aesthetics from spooky urban legends, such as those covered previously, and inserts them into a vaster, crafted breed of pseudo-folklore.

With Zampanó’s initial clarification that the book requires a suspension of disbelief for those who are not already susceptible to belief in urban legends and tales of the paranormal, Danielewski sets up the necessary components for an expansive faux urban legend early on. The nature of “The Navidson Record” itself is comparable to other filmic urban legends, notably The Blair Witch Project. With a media campaign that stressed the authenticity of the film and included stunts such as passing out missing posters for the actors at festivals, the film’s validity was ambiguous at early stages to many viewers. In addition, the film also tried to expand the scope of its urban legend, releasing two fictional documentaries, The Curse of the Blair Witch and Shadow of the Blair Witch, to continue to perpetuate the idea that the film series truly was “found footage.” “The Navidson Record” undergoes a similar faux-verification process. In an unconventional format of increasing severity, Zampanó explores the possibility of digital manipulation to hoax the tape in Chapter IX.¹⁰ However much the formatting obscures this discussion, Zampanó concludes that “The Navidson Record” was almost impossible to hoax. Like The Blair Witch Project, “The Navidson Record” is also a “found footage” or cinema verité horror film, with amateur documentarians exploring an area with complex paranormal activity. House of Leaves also expands its mythological universe by inserting the urban legend into past historical events. Zampanó’s documentation includes fabricated excerpts from the writings of Jamestown colonists whose disappearance is implied to be the result of the same phenomena inside the Navidsons’ house: The colonists get lost in a snowstorm and their last diary entry exclaims that they have found a set of stairs in the middle of the wilderness—a particularly Blair Witch-esque moment.¹¹

The narrative framing of House of Leaves also results in urban legend uncertainty: Even with four layers of narrative, no level is completely reliable. Zampanó’s haphazard and incomplete manuscript is a mire for Johnny Truant to organize—many of the pages are blank, have unconventional formatting, or contain outright falsehoods, suggesting that Zampanó is mad. Truant quickly devolves into isolation and madness from prolonged exposure to Zampanó’s manuscript. The unnamed editors who correct or amend Truant’s footnotes are never identified. Even “The Navidson Record” cannot be verified by Truant. While House of Leaves is not in itself an oral or internet urban legend, Danielewski emulates the urban legend mode through this narrative framing. Much as urban legends are usually based on friend-of-a-friend hearsay, the “The Navidson Record” is completely subject to rumors, speculation, and fabricated sources. Michael Hemmingson likens the competing voices in the footnotes “to hypertext and hyperlinks on the Internet that can stymie the Web surfer’s initial subject search.”¹² There are so many voices in the novel, (Truant, Zampanó, the editors, the principal characters of “The Navidson Record,” the fabricated quotes, etc.,) that the book could masquerade as an active scholarly internet forum.

An example of the unique formatting style within Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. (Image source)

Indeed, House of Leaves was released contemporary to the first stirrings of internet creepypastas—the successor to oral or print urban legends. One of the earliest viral creepypasta stories, “Ted the Caver,” began circulating around the time of House of Leaves publication. Again, the reader is presented with a fictional story that asserts its authenticity and deals with dark spaces and caverns: Two spelunkers attempt to break into a new cave system and encounter subtle horrors as they do so. Horror studies scholar Thomas M. Stuart notes that “Ted’s discoveries of barely contextualized horrors within the space serve as a fitting allegory for the search at that time for digital horror in the vast network of the web.”¹³ Danielewski’s novel, too, was initially published online but was only downloadable one page at a time. This unconventional release method, according to a former writer at the website that hosted House of Leaves, “caused a good media stir and some unsettling buzz in the publishing world.” The writer further claimed that “a book reviewer for Seattle’s alt weekly The Stranger read the whole book online and complained of blood on her keyboard.”¹⁴ House of Leaves undoubtedly gives the impression of a faux-scholarly book-length creepypasta—the digital variant of folklore horror stories. As Hemmingson suggests, even in print format, traversing House of Leaves is reminiscent of a series of hyperlinks and webpages. The constantly changing format, the different fonts, even the tendency for the word “house” to repeatedly appear in hyperlink blue—all these factors give the impression of traversing the unknown waters of the Web as opposed to linear reading.

But Danielewski does not completely abandon all notions of oral folklore or scary campfire yarns. In fact, Danielewski would write a variation on the campfire ghost story immediately after House of Leaves with The Fifty-Year Sword in 2005. Hints of this interest are present in the former, primarily through the spooky subject matter, but less obviously through the formatting. Just as a spoken campfire story will have pauses and exclamations to elicit suspense or terror from the audience, Danielewski’s one-word-per-page or one-sentence-per-page sections of the novel (see pages 213-245) often foreshadow horror and build tension. These moments attempt (successfully, I would argue) to imitate the features of spoken language that alter the mood or engross the listener in a textual format. Even if House of Leaves is a horror story that possesses “a convincing sense of our age’s exponential increase in sensory input,” it still utilizes older folkloric traditions in novel ways.¹⁵

Johnny Truant’s frenzied desire to piece together a complete manuscript and solve the logical puzzle Zampanó has left him leads to nothing but madness and repeated dead ends. Upon trying to verify the story, his research indicates that no one has heard of Zampanó, the Navidsons, or the house. Not even Ash Tree Lane, the street where the house was supposedly located, exists in Virginia.¹⁶ This echoes researchers’ explorations into whether Mel’s Hole was true story: Reporter Mike Johnston, like Truant, found no evidence to verify the identity of Mel, the location of the hole, or other facets of the story.¹⁷ The search for the truth in House of Leaves only leaves a cavernous void of unanswered questions, much like the house itself. Like the urban legends that inform its aesthetic, House of Leaves also confronts the reader with an absence of clarity. Just as a vast black nothingness sweeps up the novel’s characters into the throes of madness, it situates itself in the realm of urban legends and cursed objects and offers a similar invitation to the reader. House of Leaves also establishes itself as a form of legend-trip, “a journey to a specific location and/or the performance of certain prescribed actions that, according to local legend, have the potential to elicit a supernatural experience.”¹⁸ Like Mel’s Hole, the Well to Hell, or even Ted the Caver, there is no verified physical location to legend-trip to. House of Leaves is both the invitation and the destination—the experience of reading and the text itself emphasize the threat of madness on the reader. Yet, the story also entices the reader with this legend-trip: Just as Will Navidson and others ventured into the cavernous house, the reader is invited along for the ride.

Danielewski’s House of Leaves is not an established urban legend—no one perpetuates the notion that it is a true story or based on true events—but the book does utilize urban legend tropes and aesthetics. Creepy unverifiable footage or records, conflicting reports from multiple sources, a mysterious location with paranormal properties—all of these facets exist in early urban legends like the stories of Richard Shaver but are more prevalent in the noticeable uptick of tales at the turn of the millennium. The reliance on the urban legend aesthetic might be a byproduct of House of Leaves’ status as a novel of the internet age, one that inundates the reader with a barrage of information, quotations, characters, and stylistic choices. Critics note that Danielewski’s novel is a difficult, but a manageable read for “people who have grown used to parallel processing huge amounts of information from magazines, television, databases, cellphones, radios, and CD players, not to mention word processors.”¹⁹ Perhaps the house itself does not represent the vast expanse of the internet or a notion of “the cloud,” but instead is part of a timely trend in internet literature to mold a story that resembles an urban legend, or some combination of the two. Regardless, House of Leaves presents itself as a novel literate in internet folklore, bearing similarities to some of the dark tales of caverns, holes, and hell that proliferated throughout internet culture in the same historical era.

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1. Toronto, Richard. War over Lemuria: Richard Shaver, Ray Palmer and the Strangest Chapter of 1940s Science Fiction. Jefferson: McFarland, 2013. Page 118.

2. Brunvand, Jan Harold. Too Good to be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends. New York/London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999. Page 242-243.

3. Johnston, Mike. “Getting to the Bottom of Mel’s Hole.” The Kittitas County Daily Record. 31 March 2012. https://www.dailyrecordnews.com/news/getting-to-the-bottom-of-mel-s-hole/article_d72b6a68-7ac2-11e1-b3ce-001a4bcf887a.html.

4. Tucker, Brian. “An Awfully Deep Hole.” Aspects of Mel’s Hole: Artists Respond to a Paranormal Land Event Occurring in Radiospace. Ed. Doug Harvey. Santa Ana: Grand Central Press, 2008. Page 92-93.

5. Harvey, Doug. “Hole Story.” Aspects of Mel’s Hole: Artists Respond to a Paranormal Land Event Occurring in Radiospace. Ed. Doug Harvey. Santa Ana: Grand Central Press, 2008. Page 7.

6. Ibid., page 8.

7. Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000. Page 3.

8. Kinsella, Michael. Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. (Kinsella’s book finds its focal point in the urban legend of Ong’s Hat, a location in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey said to be the home of renegade physicists who discovered the key to dimensional travel. Like many of the urban legends examined in this piece, mentions of it began to circulate in the late 1990s and were perpetuated through the internet. Furthermore, the notion of location with mysterious properties is resonant with Danielewski’s fictional house that changes dimensions—albeit in another sense of the word.)

9. Brunvand, Jan Harold. Too Good to be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends. New York/London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999. Page 19.

10. Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000. Page 134-151.

11. Ibid., page 413-414.

12. Hemmingson, Michael. “What’s beneath the Floorboards: Three Competing Metavoices in the Footnotes of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 52, no. 3 (2011): Page 273. https://mhemmingson.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/house-leaves-essay.pdf.

13. Stuart, Thomas M. “The Vast and Omnivorous Cloud.” Horror Studies 9, no. 2 (2018): Page 158.

14. Foley, Dylan. “The Rumpus Interview with Mark Z. Danielewski.” The Rumpus, 20 May 2015, https://therumpus.net/2015/05/the-rumpus-interview-with-mark-danielewski/.

15. McCaffery, Larry and Sinda Gregory. “Haunted House—An Interview with Mark Z. Danielewski.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 44, no. 2 (2003): Page 103. http://spinelessbooks.com/mccaffery/originals/critique.pdf.

16. Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000. Page 499.

17. Johnston, Mike. “Getting to the Bottom of Mel’s Hole.” The Kittitas County Daily Record. 31 March 2012. https://www.dailyrecordnews.com/news/getting-to-the-bottom-of-mel-s-hole/article_d72b6a68-7ac2-11e1-b3ce-001a4bcf887a.html.

18. Kinsella, Michael. Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. Page 28.

19. McCaffery, Larry and Sinda Gregory. “Haunted House—An Interview with Mark Z. Danielewski.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 44, no. 2 (2003): Page 100. http://spinelessbooks.com/mccaffery/originals/critique.pdf.