Peace at Last

Grappling with Ghosts and the Family Structure in The Sixth Sense and The Haunting of Hill House

Abstract

The uncanny combines these interpretations as an unwilling revelation of what is private and hidden, despite our desire to keep that revelation hidden. The Haunting of Hill House and The Sixth Sense both exhibit many aspects of the uncanny, but their main characters end up embracing this uncanniness, at least temporarily, defying haunting narrative norms by accepting, in different ways, the ghosts that plague them, and do so by adhering to (in the case of The Sixth Sense) or diverging from (in the case of The Haunting of Hill House) the nuclear family structure.