I haven’t moved in yet, but the house I’ve bought is already playing tricks on me. It’s full of odd angles, awkward junctions, and a sense of space that never quite behaves as expected. I only recently discovered a cellar I hadn’t known existed—something about that moment reminded me of Crooked House, the BBC ghost story anthology first aired in December 2008.
There’s something in its atmosphere—dusty, lopsided, and steeped in things left unsaid—that struck a chord as I stood beneath my own crooked ceiling. I decided to rewatch the series before moving in. It was just as unsettling as I remembered. Maybe more so.
Influences and Inspirations
Crooked House is a three-part ghost story written and co-produced by Mark Gatiss, broadcast across three consecutive nights from 22–24 December 2008 on BBC Four. The series draws heavily on the ghost stories of M. R. James, with their lingering menace and antiquarian framing, as well as the stylised horror anthologies produced by Amicus in the 1960s and ’70s.
Its inspiration wasn’t just literary or cinematic. In a 2008 interview, Gatiss described how the idea took shape after he bought a Māori death mask in Paris. Strange events followed—lights switching off, power outages, an overwhelming sense of dread—until he eventually returned the object to the New Zealand Embassy. The experience lingered. The idea of a cursed artefact passing its ill effects across time became the root from which Crooked House grew.
“Do You Believe in Ghosts?”
That’s the question that opens Crooked House, spoken as the scene fades in by Gatiss as a softly spoken museum curator. His visitor, Ben Morris—a young teacher who found an antique door-knocker buried in his garden—has brought in the object, and with it, a story of odd disturbances in his home. The curator listens, then offers something in return: a history of the knocker, and of the house it once belonged to.
That house was Geap Manor. Long demolished, it left behind not only bricks and bones, but stories—tales of strange deaths, unexplained sounds, and restless figures in the dark. The series proceeds through three episodes, each set in a different time, each haunted in its own way, all connected by the manor and the knocker.
The Wainscoting
Set in the late 18th century, The Wainscoting follows Joseph Bloxham, a self-satisfied merchant who buys Geap Manor and begins extensive renovations. Ambitious and dismissive of superstition, Bloxham has new panelling installed throughout the house—fashioned, as it turns out, from timber once used at the gallows of Tyburn Tree. Before long, he begins hearing noises behind the walls.
The tension builds slowly. Groaning boards. Scratching. Voices. Bloxham’s rational explanations become harder to sustain. He tears down and replaces the panelling, only for the sounds to return. A friend suggests the site once held a chapel. Perhaps sacred ground has been disturbed. Or perhaps something far older is awake beneath the walls.
It’s a deeply Jamesian tale: a man of logic undone by the past he chooses to ignore. There are no jump scares, no screaming spectres. Only the steady press of unseen eyes and the cold certainty that the past is not buried—it is waiting.
Something Old
The second tale moves forward to the 1920s, where Geap Manor is now home to the aristocratic de Momery family. A grand masquerade ball is underway. Young Felix announces his engagement to Ruth, a modern, sensitive woman who feels deeply uneasy in the house. Her future mother-in-law, Lady Constance, disapproves. The atmosphere curdles beneath the surface.
Ruth begins seeing things. A pale woman in a wedding gown. Scraps of a nursery rhyme. A corridor that seems longer than it should be. As the wedding approaches, the signs multiply, drawing her into the story of another bride—a girl whose own wedding day ended not in celebration, but in disappearance and silence.
Something Old borrows from folklore—most notably The Mistletoe Bough—but adds something darker. The ghost is not simply mournful, but tethered to generational guilt and unspoken trauma. What emerges is less about love lost and more about what happens when the past refuses to stay buried. It is, in many ways, the emotional heart of the trilogy.
The Knocker
We return to the present, and to Ben—the man who brought the knocker to the museum. After unearthing it in his garden, things in his new home began to shift. The lights behave strangely. His partner suffers terrible dreams. And he begins to glimpse things he can’t explain: fragments of other people’s memories, flashes of the house as it once was.
The past presses in, blurring the edges of the present. Ben becomes trapped in a kind of haunting that is less about apparitions than dislocation. The line between memory and possession falters. His house—newly built—is overlaid with the vanished rooms of Geap Manor. Time folds in on itself, and the knocker, inert as it seems, proves to be an open door.
This final act ties the threads together, not with neat closure, but with a creeping sense of inevitability. The horror is not in the climax, but in the suggestion that the past is portable—that a demolished house can still cast shadows.
A Legacy of Unease
Crooked House was praised on release for its intelligence and restraint. It avoided special effects in favour of mood and memory, relying on performances, candlelight, and well-timed silence. Critics recognised it as a rare example of television horror that honoured the tradition of M. R. James without lapsing into cliché.
Though not widely repeated, it has endured quietly. Those who saw it often speak of it with great fondness—an atmospheric curiosity tucked into the pre-Christmas schedule. And like the manor it depicts, Crooked House seems to linger just out of view, waiting for someone to knock.
