Haunted Headquarters

"If you find that your house is built upon or near a cemetery, was once a church used for black masses, had previous inhabitants who went mad or committed suicide or died in some horrible fashion or who performed necrophilia or satanic practices, move away immediately."

— Horror Movie Survival Guide

It's affordable with good access to the city, and has plenty of space. So why is the rent so cheap? And why do they seem willing to give the place away? Something's wrong with it, and no one wants to tell you why. Or maybe it's so obvious no one has to.

The Haunted Headquarters is a primary setting that leaves the characters with no other choice than to cope with the issues or depart.

Whether it's a ghost or bad location or whatever, the cast gets the idea to live or work here. They may have to help or exorcise the ghosts and fix up the place. In a happier situation, maybe they meet up with whatever problem it has, and after fixing it are offered the place to stay.

The most compromising situation is when the cast basically has to live (or literally cohabitate) with whatever issue the place has if they want to stay. They'll usually get over it, though. (Occasionally, an intelligent ghost will become part of the cast.)

The Haunted Headquarters may be a Haunted Castle or Haunted House. Expect the Haunted House Historian to exposit on its history.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Megumi's apartment in Ah! My Goddess was haunted by a spirit. Subverted: The spirit was basically good and honorable, but the location of the apartment was harming it. Once Belldandy helps it, it becomes Megumi's loyal protector.
• The haunted school in Ghost Stories, natch. They also feature a haunted abandoned condominium in one episode.
• Saitou High in Haunted Junction. Especially the Student Council Room and the Chairman's office.
• In the first episode of Sgt. Frog, Fuyuki and Natsumi learn that the reason their mom was able to get their house for such a great price was because the spare room in the basement (which in this episode becomes Sergeant Keroro's quarters) is haunted by a mysterious ghost girl. This fact doesn't bother Keroro, mainly because he doesn't know about her.
• Anna and Yoh's house in Shaman King.

Comic Books

• The Doom Patrol had a haunted headquarters at one point, and hired out many of the haunted occupants.
  • The Doom Patrol also once shared the Happy Harbor JLA HQ with the JLA. It eventually became haunted, leaving Flash, the Elongated Man and a fat Blue Beetle (no, really) to deal with the crazy.
• One of Justice League Europe's many headquarters was a haunted castle. The resident ghost helped fight invading bad things.
• Doctor Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum is a New York brownstone in Greenwich Village built on the site of various ritual sacrifices and prone to supernatural occurrences. To him, that's a plus point.
• Judge Dredd: The Grand Hall of Justice is still haunted by the ghost of former Chief Judge Silver, who was ignominiously executed for being a Dirty Coward in a time of crisis.
• Inverted in New Avengers, where it turns out that Stark Towers, the Avengers' current headquarters, actually has another superhero's base located on top of it, which no one knew about after said hero made the world forget him completely. Iron Man still states that this is why he got the real estate so cheaply.
  • Stark Tower gets a somewhat more traditional haunting in Marvel Adventures: Avengers, when after a freak blackout accidentally caused by Storm in an effort to keep the entire city from being fried, a mysterious figure begins attacking the Avengers in the dark, trying to drive them out of the tower. This turns out to actually be the Adventures version of Vision, created when one of the training robots was accidentally exposed to various experimental programs that were all being run just before the power flare and blackout.

Fan Works

• Marinette's apartment in He Can Only Blame Himself is haunted, which comes in handy when she discovers that her boyfriend Adrien brought his "other woman" there to make out. Lila gloats that Adrien should kick Marinette out so that she can move in instead; the resident ghost helps drive the duo out, then comforts Marinette afterwards by braiding her hair while she binges on ice cream.

Films — Animation

• In Yellow Submarine, The Beatles appear to live in a hotel haunted by assorted bizarre cartoon ducks.

Films — Live-Action

• The Amityville Horror and all of its sequels are based on this trope. (Demons tend to hide in the objects sold from said house.)
• Beetlejuice is a Haunted House comedy from the perspective of the ghosts.
• Darkness (2002), starring Anna Paquin, had a family moving into a Haunted House as part of an Evil Plan to complete a demonic ritual.
• The little cabin in Evil Dead contains a haunted book, so, for all intents and purposes, it is haunted.
• In Ghostbusters, the building Dana lives in was designed to be a magnet for spiritual turbulence. And not just a magnet but a gate for supernatural evil. And not just any supernatural evil but ancient, cosmic and incomprehensible supernatural evil.
  Ray: Your girlfriend lives in the corner penthouse... of Spook Central.

• Insidious has the family fleeing one of these mid-movie only to discover that the ghost are after their son rather than simply haunting the house.
• Manos: The Hands of Fate: "I tAke caRe oF tHe pLacE wHiLe tHe maSteR iS aWaY".

• Bagul from Sinister is abnormal because he actually spreads this way, killing his victims after they move turning their house into a new haunted house.
• Invoked in Thir13en Ghosts in which an occultist builds an infernal engine in the form of a glass house, then deliberately moves ghosts into it as a power source. And it had fourteen ghosts involved anyway.

Literature

• The Discworld home base of the Guild of Fools and Clowns was formerly a monastery occupied by a masochistic death cult worshipping a Cthulu-style deity. Prior to that it was a leprosy hospital and a plague pit. The Fools kind of think the ambience is wholly appropriate.
• Gideon the Ninth: The cast are isolated in the God-Emperor's palatial Abandoned Laboratory for the Lyctoral Trials and warned that the place is "chocka with ghosts". Being Necromancers, this would not appear to be a major problem. At the climax, however, incautious soul siphoning exposes one man to possession, revealing that the Emperor's old seat of power is home to something far worse than mere ghosts.
• Hogwarts and Sirius Black's house in the Harry Potter series. The Hogwarts ghosts are mainly there to add color, while the Black family mansion is "haunted" by his mum's deranged talking portrait and several dangerous artifacts.
• In Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40,000 novel Horus Rising, the Space Marines are told a place is haunted. Having Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions, they invade a church to find their vox channels haunted with voices claiming to be Samus. Jubal discovers something in the church and, chaos-tainted, turns on his fellow Marines.
• H. P. Lovecraft:
  • In "The Shunned House", the hero of the story becomes obsessed with a mysterious house that, since it was first built, wound up either driving its occupants insane or causing them a slow wasting death. It turned out that the house was built over the final resting place of a magician who slowly drained the Life Energy from the people near him in the night.
  • The titular house in "The Dreams in the Witch House" has a reputation as a haunted house but is actually periodically visited by a living, immortal witch who used to live in the house, and still uses its sealed attic for her work.
• Hurog is this. Quite literally haunted by Oreg, a kind of ghost-person who is bound to the head of the family who lives in the estate, it is also cursed, and makes most of its inhabitants go crazy, and/or die.
• The plot of INVADERS of the ROKUJYOUMA!? kicks off with Koutarou moving into an apartment with incredibly cheap rent, only to find that it's haunted by the ghost of a young girl named Sanae, still waiting for her family to come home. Not willing to give up such a bargain, he just stocks up on Paper Talismans and exorcises her whenever she shows her face. However, they're soon forced to work together when four other strange people show up, all of them trying to claim the room themselves for various reasons. By volume 10 they've become so close that Sanae now considers Koutarou her family, causing her Haunted Fetter to shift from the room to Koutarou himself... but given the amount of power Sanae needs to maintain her form, this turns out to be a very bad thing for both parties.
• Skeeve's home in the Myth Adventures series is in Deva, a place where the natives (Deveels) are notoriously canny businessmen. Why do they give him a cheap house? It has a back door that leads to the Uberwald-like vampire dimension.
• In The Nekropolis Archives story "The Midnight Watch", Devona buys Matt a building to use as the headquarters of his detective business. When he hears what a good deal she got for what should be prime real estate, it doesn't take long for Matt to realize that their office is going to be heavily haunted.
  Matt: Wait — let me guess. It's supposed to be haunted. And not just regular haunted, with a few ghosts flitting about the rooms to lend the place some gloomy atmosphere. It's haunted with a capital H, by some kind of unknown and incredibly deadly force that will shatter our minds, mutilate our bodies, and ravage our souls, right?
• Nina Tanleven: The Ghost Wore Gray features the Quackadoodle Inn where the Tanlevens and Chris are staying, which is haunted by the ghost of a Confederate army captain.
• Hinzerhaus, in Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel Only in Death, is enough to drive many of the Ghosts up the wall, including the usually unflappable Mkoll. Although how much of this is due to Agun Soric's psychic warning messages is debatable. It's certainly a very creepy place, regardless.
  • The manse in Straight Silver also gives the Ghosts the creeps, although the "haunting" proves to be an old woman hiding in the house.
• In Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space novels, the Nostalgia For Infinity starts out with a haunted-house atmosphere thanks to out-of-control robots, rats, radiation and the general side effects of being a four-kilometre-long starship with a crew of seven. It gets worse - First, there's the Gunnery Chair, host to an ancient alien AI. Secondly, there's the guns - a cache of forty odd "Hell-class weapons" the crew found on a remote asteroid, each of which is apparently semisentient and utterly sadistic. Finally, there's the Captain, who came down with a nanotech disease that caused him to grow into the ship.
• The Overlook Hotel from The Shining.
• Jack Fleming from The Vampire Files only discovered that the old speakeasy he bought and converted to a fancy nightclub was haunted after the construction-work was already finished. Fortunately, Myrna the ghost isn't aggressive and has nothing against either the living or vampires like Jack.
• In Lee Lightner's Warhammer 40,000 Space Wolf novel Wolf's Honour, the city the Wolves are defending is full of things just seen out of the corner of the eye, and with haunting doubts of adequacy. It doesn't help that the Chaos forces have constructed a phantom world that they can strike freely from owing to riddling the world with warp gates.

Live-Action TV

• This happened to Cordelia on the Angel episode "RmWAVu". After exorcising the evil ghost haunting her new apartment, however, another not-so-evil ghost who'd helped defeat it became her roommate. Also, there was the Hyperion Hotel, which was infested with a paranoia demon before they managed to remove it.
• Bedlam Heights, a former asylum being converted to an apartment complex in Bedlam.
• Hillhurst Mansion from Beetleborgs, home to a phantasm, a mummy, a vampire, a Frankenstein's monster and more besides.
• In Being Human, George and Mitchell are able to rent a city centre house on the cheap because it's haunted by a girl called Annie. George, being a werewolf, and Mitchell, being a vampire, don't have a problem with this.
• The haunted, gothic Collinwood Mansion is featured in Dark Shadows.
• The Ghost and Mrs. Muir: Being a comedy, the ghost isn't really evil. They has to placate the ghost to stay, regardless.
• Ryukendo's SHOT HQ is a mostly ordinary Elaborate Underground Base. Except for the ghost, Komachi, that haunts the police station it's based out of.

Music

• The Gorillaz home base, Kong Studios, was remarkably haunted. (Before Murdoc burned it down, of course.) Apparently the hill was once a ritual ground for druids, then a mass graveyard during the days of the black plague and finally the sight of many deaths as a fire killed the bikers who'd been crashing there. It's also located next to a massive landfill.

Tabletop Games

• Ars Magica:
  • The home base of the Criamon Mystery Cult is the Cave of Twisting Shadows, a powerfully magical place where, among its many unusual properties, ghosts remain lucid and intelligent. Many Criamon arrange to die there so they can stay on as Spirit Advisors.
  • Magi can attain a form of immortality by transfiguring themselves into an intelligent "Living Ghost" and eternally binding themselves to one location — presumably including their Wizard Workshop, but they can designate a larger site with a more powerful ritual. If they leave their Haunt without the protection of a mortal host, the magic is broken and they become a normal, mindless ghost forever.
• Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition: Early in the module Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, the player characters can be rewarded with a disused inn and tavern that turns out to host the poltergeist of its original owner. He's hostile at first but becomes a Friendly Ghost if they reopen the business and run it well.
• Geist: The Sin-Eaters has these in the form of Haunts, in addition to the usual buildings that just have ghosts in them. A Haunt represents a place close to the pulse of the Underworld, and is defined by its Fluidity (how easily one can cross over to the Underworld within it), Residue (how much Plasm accumulates within it and can be safely reaped), and Utility (representing how easily one can actually live there and make regular use of it).
• Mage: The Awakening: Necromancers often like to have ghosts in their Sanctums, since they can be very helpful when controlled or enhanced with Death magic. Some even collect Haunted Fetters to cultivate their spiritual population. By investing in the Merit "Guardian Ghost", any Player Party can develop a powerful, versatile Sanctum ghost that attacks intruders on its masters' behalf.
• The Ordo Dracul in Vampire: The Requiem seeks out all manner of Places of Power to use as bases in hopes that their strange energies will be of some use to the Order's metaphysical studies; haunted locations are the easiest variety to find (or make). Ghosts tend to be more trouble than they're worth, although a gateway to The Underworld makes an exceptionally rare and useful find.

Video Games

• In City of Heroes, Paragon City has an entire haunted neighborhood called Dark Astoria that is walled off and restricted to all but players above level 20. The fog makes visibility very poor, zombies and dark shamans lurk the streets, and shadows of pedestrians can be seen walking in the fog but vanish when the player gets too close.
  • Dark Astoria is no longer haunted by ghosts. Those were all eaten when the Eldritch Abomination awoke and leveled the cemetery when the zone was revamped to serve as a new level 50 hub. Still fits this trope, however.
  • First Ward toys with this trope. A ruined city in a Mirror Universe that has been ravaged by giant monsters, the souls of the dead are definitely present. First Ward even has a reflection in the land of the dead called Night Ward where the souls of those slain in the Hamidon Wars still linger, unable to pass on. However, the Apparitions that plague you throughout your journey through First Ward aren't actually ghosts at all. They're the psychic cast offs from Praetor Tilman's Seer Program, ripped from the minds of conscripted psychics in order to make it easier to induct them into the Seer Network.
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has a quest which involves buying a Haunted House and then discovering you need to clear it of ghosts. A summary of the quest can be found here.
• The Roivas family manor, Eternal Darkness' very creepy Hub Level. Even disregarding the effects of a low Sanity Meter, there's at least three ghosts, a secret passage, and a sealed-up room on the second floor, but that's nothing compared to what's in the basement...
• Harbour Cottage, where Nigel stays in The Lost Crown, is haunted by the ghosts of an immigrant couple who died in the 1950s. Granted, practically every other location in or around Saxton is haunted too, but more ghostly encounters happen in Harbour Cottage than any other game locale.
• Luigi's Mansion is basically the story of Mario's hapless younger brother getting a free house... which he then has to clear of ghosts. Apparently, the whole thing was a ghostly creation, and it disappears when he's done. For some reason, the money in it wasn't, so he buys a new one. Which is presumably not haunted.
• The titular flat of Silent Hill 4: The Room starts out being creepy and haunted. Then it extends to the rest of the apartment block in general.

Visual Novels

• As it turns out, Akira's apartment in Spirit Hunter: NG has a power to it that attracts spiritual beings, which is why they have a habit of leaving their haunting grounds and following Akira home. When Rosé suggests that he move out, Akira refuses since it's too much hassle, and he isn't afraid of the spirits anyway.

Webcomics

• The Adventures Of Dr Mcninja: The forest surrounding Doctor McNinja's office are haunted. As a result he no longer likes Ghostbusters II, worse still he has to sing the theme song to fight them off.
• Schlock Mercenary has what initially appears to be a haunted Spaceship Headquarters in the Sword of Inevitable Justice/Post-Dated Check Loan. (Since the mercenaries tend to go through ships rather quickly, the PDCL is now just a memory and a debris cloud.) However: it wasn't really haunted. Just air in the pipes, coupled with a case of improbability so extreme that it drove the ship's AI insane trying to calculate it.
• The Kesandru / Brie Meighsaton House in Sluggy Freelance.
• Stupidity in Magic has this. Twice, actually. Both times, the main cast is only called in to see why the house is haunted - they never get the house itself (they have their own place already, anyways). The first time, the ghosts were stuck in the house because of a curse, and most of them were happy to leave once the problem was fixed. The second time, the ghosts were haunting a house being rented out by a college - the rent was very reasonable, due to the haunting, and the college students only called for help because the ghosts had started possessing the occupants and were getting a bit violent; once things were fixed so that they wouldn't be in danger of getting hurt any more and they realized why the rent was so low, they were quite willing to let the ghosts stay — they preferred slightly-haunted accommodations that were within walking distance of the college to anything else they could afford.
• The house rented by main character Oscar in Wilde Life has gone through a number of tenants in a rather short amount of time, and the last people who lived there were in such a hurry to leave that they left all their stuff behind. It turns out that there's only one ghost, and her name is Sylvia. She's friendly enough with Oscar, who ends up thinking of her more as a roommate than anything.

Web Videos

• Bedtime Stories (YouTube Channel) has at least two cases. The first is Stocksbridge Bypass, the most haunted road in all of Britain. The second is a literal example, in the Celle Neues Rathaus, a town hall allegedly used by the SS to conduct experiments in the occult.
• Unwanted Houseguest: Aberfoyle Manor is both his home, and the starting point of every story arc to date.

Western Animation

• Many ghost stories.
• The trio of heroes from Filmation's Ghostbusters (No relation) set up shop in what resembled a run-down Haunted House—Ghost Command—that featured haunted appliances such as (most memorably) the wisecracking Ansabone. Similarly, the Big Bad Prime Evil had Hauntquarters, a cathedral-like building located in the Fifth Dimension.
• In The Real Ghostbusters, the firehouse is "haunted" by the team's mascot, a "class five free roaming vapor" named Slimer. As portrayed in the movie and a later flashback episode, he originally haunted a ritzy hotel, and appeared at the firehouse after his capture and the original containment unit's destruction in the film left him with nowhere else to go. Despite Peter's protests, Slimer's encouraged to stay by Egon and Ray since he's the only ghost on friendly enough terms with them to let them run tests.
  • The firehouse is probably one of the most haunted places in the world, considering that it has the Containment Unit there with thousands of ghosts. Several episodes deal with how the energy from the ghosts imprisoned there leaks from the Unit and affects the firehouse.
• The Simpsons:
  • In the very first Treehouse of Horror segment, the Simpsons move into a Haunted House, which does its best to make them leave... but they refuse, because it's pretty much their dream house. The segment ends with the house destroying itself rather than live with the Simpsons.
    Lisa: You can't help but feel a little rejected.
    Homer: (abusing the real estate agent over the phone) You didn't tell me it was built on an Indian Burial Ground! ... No, you didn't! Well, that's not my recollection... Yeah, well. Alright, goodbye. (hangs up the phone) He says he mentioned it five or six times.
  • Marge Simpson also sells one of these to the Flanders family during her stint as a real estate agent. The house is actually fine and they don't mind living there, but since Status Quo Is God, the house is destroyed by the episode's end.

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