The Uncanny Pull of Staircases in Folklore and Fiction

ByAndrew WedgburyPosted on

The Uncanny Pull of Staircases in Folklore and Fiction: Have you ever hesitated at the foot of a dark staircase, feeling both drawn in and dread? Staircases hold a strange power in our imagination; they are everyday architecture yet brimming with supernatural lore and uncanny tension. Folklore from around the world acknowledges this with ghostly footsteps on empty stairs and tales of steps leading to other realms.

Often, horror fiction and games also centre pivotal scares on stairwells. By doing so, they tap into an instinctual mix of curiosity and fear. Today, I’ll explore why staircases have such an eerie allure and how architecture, folklore, and intangible heritage shape the feelings these spaces trigger in us.

On the way, I’ll think about how game designers can harness this uncanny pull to craft more immersive horror experiences for their audiences.

What You’ll Gain by Reading: We’re going to take a journey through some of the roots of haunted staircases. In addition, we’ll think about the psychology of liminal spaces and architectural eeriness.

We’ll also look at examples of staircases in horror literature, film, and game design. Finally, we’ll draw concrete conclusions and tips for using these ideas in games or storytelling.

By the end, you’ll have a better understanding of the ways a simple set of steps could become an engine of suspense. Therefore, you might even think twice the next time you ascend into a shadowy attic or descend creaking cellar stairs.

So, Let’s begin our ascent (or descent) into the lore and design of haunted staircases…

Table of Contents

Folkloric Roots: Haunted Staircases in Legend

Staircases have featured in ghost stories and folklore for centuries. In so many cultures, the staircase is more than a simple, mundane structure. It is a liminal transition where there lies the potential for uncanny encounters to occur.

In addition, folklore archives and modern ghost stories alike are filled with tales of phantom footsteps on the stairs. For example, Raahauge (2016) speaks of one Danish family who reported hearing heavy steps ascend their old wooden staircase every week, always stopping at the same step.

Of course, every time they checked, the stairway stood empty. Such tales of inexplicable stairway sounds are not rare cases; they are common in oral traditions and probably more common than we think.

However, ethnographers have noted that people often hesitate to tell these stories publicly for fear of seeming superstitious. I have had experiences myself like this in my current home, and I can affirm that such events have the potential to leave a deep impression (Raahauge, 2016).

I think it is the very ordinariness of a home staircase, when animated by unseen footsteps, that makes the event deeply unsettling. We speak about this a lot in this blog, but it is a prime case of the familiar turned strange in one’s own house (Freud, 1919).

Beyond this reported ghostly phenomena as a thing heard and experienced, folklorists also see staircases as symbolic thresholds. Anthropologically, a stair links different levels (the known ground floor and the mysterious above/below), much like a door links outside to inside. This gives stairs a between-worlds quality.

In Estonian folklore, for instance, ghosts in old houses often “occupy” liminal spots like doorways and stairwells, places that are neither fully one place nor another (Valk, 2006). The dead are said to linger on the threshold, unwilling or unable to move on. Their presence is marked by chills on the back of your neck as you climb the last few steps in an empty house.

These kinds of legends highlight an important pattern: transitional spaces often invite supernatural interpretation. A stairway’s entire purpose is transition, and in folk belief transitions are dangerous. Moreover, we can see this in many common superstitions. For example, pausing on the 13th step is considered bad luck, or you should never greet someone on the stairs. All of these beliefs position the staircase as a site of heightened spiritual risk.

Stories of “stairs to nowhere” amplify this uncanny symbolism. The infamous Winchester Mystery House in California, a sprawling Victorian mansion made world famous by the movie Winchester (2018), contains several staircases that end abruptly at the ceiling. Such architectural oddities are often cited in ghost lore as a tactic to confuse spirits.

However, historians also note that these maze-like, nonsensical stairs work to disorient visitors, making them more susceptible to perceiving supernatural phenomena (Junker, 2015). Whether or not you personally choose to believe in ghosts, a staircase that literally leads nowhere embodies the uncanny. It violates our normal expectation that stairs connect meaningful spaces, making them familiar but wrong. Therefore, folklore eagerly fills that gap in meaning with imaginative explanations (a widow’s attempt to escape vengeful ghosts by labyrinthine design in the case of the Winchester house), turning architectural quirks into enduring haunted legends.

Intangible cultural heritage, or the shared folklore and practices of a community, works to imbue even the humblest architectural features with supernatural significance. As a result, haunted staircases in legend often reflect deeper cultural anxieties. For instance, the creaking steps in an old house might symbolize unresolved family history, or the spirit who “patrols” the stairs could be guarding a threshold that the living shouldn’t cross.

By listening to these tales, we uncover a rich narrative archaeology of architecture: every step might hold a story. In addition, for designers and storytellers, such folkloric motifs often offer more than creepiness. They offer context and meaning that can be applied to make an interactive experience feel rooted in real human fears and traditions.

Liminal Architecture: Why Stairs Feel Uncanny

So, why do staircases so often give us the creeps? Psychology and architecture theory might offer some answers. A key concept here is the ‘unheimlich’—the unhomelike, usually mistranslated as the uncanny. Famously defined by Sigmund Freud, it is the sensation of something that is strangely familiar yet off, “unhomely” in the home (Freud, 1919).

A staircase is as familiar a home feature as it gets, and that makes it prime territory for the uncanny when something is not quite right. Climbing stairs is routine; we don’t expect surprises beyond perhaps a miscounted step. So, when the unexpected happens on a stair (a strange noise, a shadow, a step that shouldn’t exist), the jolt is all the stronger.

Architectural scholar Anthony Vidler noted that the uncanny often attaches to domestic spaces that become mysterious, and the classic image is an empty house with a creaky staircase leading into darkness. It is the discomfort of home turned into “not-home.”

Architecturally, staircases are liminal spaces—the in-between zones that are neither here nor there. Liminal spaces (like stairwells, hallways, doorways) naturally evoke uncertainty and transition. Research in environmental psychology finds that such spaces can appear eerie or unsettling because they fall into an “uncanny valley” of place. They look almost like normal spaces we know, but with subtle deviations that our brains register as wrong (Diel & Lewis, 2022).

For example, an empty hotel staircase might feel eerie because it is normally a busy area. Yet in silence and vacancy it seems frozen out of time. Something is missing.

As scholar Peter Heft explains (drawing on Mark Fisher’s hauntology), when a typically lively space is unnaturally devoid of life or context, we experience a “failure of presence.” This is a hallmark of the eerie (Heft, 2021).

A vacant stairwell at midnight embodies this. We expect footsteps, voices, light—but instead, we find an unsettling quiet. That silence invites our imagination to supply what “should” be there (was that a footfall behind me?). In doing this, we are effectively haunting ourselves.

Besides emptiness, design anomalies in a staircase can amplify the uncanny. Moreover, a study on physical spaces by Diel and Lewis (2022) found that the more spatial anomalies—for example, missing sections, odd repetitions, or distortions in an environment—the more uneasy people felt.

Think of a staircase with an extra half-step that makes you trip, or stairs that twist in an impossible Escher-like way. Such deviations trigger a deep cognitive alarm that “something’s not right here.” Our brains may have evolved to sense danger in places that defy normal structure as a survival mechanism to avoid unstable ground or hidden threats. Therefore, when architecture almost makes sense but not quite, it lands in that uncanny valley where we are both intrigued and unsettled.

Haunted house attractions often exploit this. For example, a spiralling stair with a weird tilt, or a staircase that is too narrow and steep, can create subconscious anxiety before anything “scary” even happens.

Staircases also play on primal spatial fears. They involve verticality (heights above and depths below). A dark staircase down to a basement plays on fear of the underground and entrapment; a climb up a narrow attic stair invokes fear of heights and isolation at the top.

Psychologically, being on a staircase is a moment of vulnerability. You are between two places, possibly unable to see what is at the top or bottom until you get there. Horror architects (in film sets and game levels) use this blind spot cleverly. The player character climbs slowly, heart pounding, not sure if something awaits above.

The design of the stair can accentuate this tension. Tight spiral staircases where you cannot see around the bend are classic in Gothic mansions, forcing a feeling of claustrophobic suspense. Long straight staircases create a vanishing perspective: you can see a distant top, but it feels alarmingly far away. This naturally leaves plenty of time for dread to build as you climb each step.

In both cases, and in every other way, the geometry of stairs naturally regulates pace and viewpoint. In horror, this equates to controlled tension. Therefore, in architectural terms, stairs are thresholds with the added factor of duration. You don’t cross in one step; you cross in many steps, giving time for fear to grow.

So, we can see that a staircase combines multiple uncanny triggers. It is liminal (between spaces), often empty or silent (evoking the eerie), and prone to distortions of perception (steepness, darkness, odd angles). Little wonder that in haunted house reports, stairwells are a frequent stage for unexplained sights and sounds.

Our cultural imagination has, over time, identified the staircase as a potent symbol of the boundary between the ordinary and the otherworldly. This established, let’s see how storytellers and game designers have used that symbol in practice.

Staircases in Horror Fiction and Media

From Gothic novels to modern horror films, the image of a lone figure on a shadowy staircase is an icon of suspense. Literature has long used stairways as metaphors for the descent into danger or ascent to forbidden knowledge.

In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), an unstable spiral staircase in the library becomes the site of a terrifying encounter. Its swaying, corroded form literally embodies the precarity of the characters’ sanity.

Even in earlier works, for example, in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898), a ghost is seen standing atop a staircase, silently watching. In this chilling inversion of domestic normalcy, the governess expects a living person but finds an apparition in that familiar household spot.

These classic tales understood that architecture can be a character in horror. A creaking staircase can speak, forewarn, even seem to breathe with malevolent intent.

Cinema cemented the status of stairs in the visual language of horror. Consider the unnerving “stairs” scene in The Exorcist (1973), where young Regan spider-walks backward down the family home’s stairs, a grotesque subversion of both gravity and propriety that shocked audiences.

Or the steep outdoor staircase in the same film, the stone steps where a priest meets his end. The site has become so infamous that it is now a tourist attraction for the eerie vibe.

Hitchcock, too, knew the dramatic power of stairs. Psycho (1960) features a murder on the stairs filmed from above, turning the viewer into a complicit watcher of dread unfolding on each step.

In The Shining (1980), Jack Torrance’s menace is often framed by the grand staircase of the Overlook Hotel, blurring the line between an elegant lobby and a predatory arena. These scenes work not just because of the events, but because stairs naturally draw our eyes and concentrate action.

A camera following a character up dim stairs puts the audience in that vulnerable climb with them. We feel the tightening of space, the anticipation of what is at the landing.

Importantly, stairs in fiction often serve as thresholds to the supernatural. In many ghost movies, a sceptic character only becomes a believer after hearing phantom footsteps on the empty stairs at night. This is the moment that signals the unseen is real.

The stairway leads from the safety of the living room to the mystery of the attic, or from the party upstairs to the dark solitude below. It is the path characters must traverse to confront (or flee) the horror.

Stairs themselves can be read as a horror trope in their own right. As audiences, we know that when the protagonist goes upstairs to check out that noise, trouble awaits. It resonates with us because going up or down stairs in the dark is universally relatable and scary. You are leaving the known space where others are, moving toward isolation with whatever lurks beyond your sight.

Games and interactive media inherit all these associations and add new layers. In video games, staircases are often level-design features that hide and reveal threats.

For example, a well-placed staircase can gate the player’s view, creating a mini jump-scare when an enemy suddenly comes into view at the top of the stairs. Classic survival horror games frequently set key encounters on stairwells. Think of the tension of hearing something chasing you upstairs, making the player character scramble upward with clumsy panic.

Stairs also introduce a literal elevation change that can trigger vertigo or disorientation in first-person games. Some indie horror games have played with impossible staircases inspired by M.C. Escher, creating looping or endless stairs to induce a sense of hopelessness. The player runs down flight after flight but never escapes the floor; a nightmare of inescapable architecture.

This idea echoes a piece of modern folklore: the online urban legend of “staircases in the woods.” These are mysterious lone stair structures found deep in forests, leading nowhere, around which communities on the internet have created creepy stories.

The popularity of such legends underscores how a staircase without context becomes an automatic horror prompt for our imaginations.

Intangible cultural heritage often seeps into game narratives through level design. Designers may incorporate a local legend of a haunted staircase directly into a game’s story.

Alternatively, they may more subtly use architectural details that players unconsciously recognize as “haunted.” For example, a game level based on an abandoned Victorian mansion might include a grand staircase with a broken step and a mirror at the landing. This hints at common Victorian ghost story elements (broken steps causing fatal falls, mirrors believed to hold spirits).

These details aren’t scary on their own, but they resonate with players’ genre savviness. A savvy player might think, “aha, a mirror by the stairs… something spooky might happen here,” which can work to build anticipation. In this way, folklore tropes become part of interactive environmental storytelling.

The staircase in a level isn’t just a way to get to the next floor; it is foreshadowing and mood-setting.

Unlike a film where you watch someone else climb, crucially, games allow the embodied experience of staircases. In a game, YOU are the one creeping up step by step, controlling the pace, or perhaps losing control as the game manipulates camera angles to induce fear.

A well-crafted game staircase can make you feel the weight of each step through sound design like echoing footsteps, or, perhaps, controller vibration simulating a creaky step. Horror games often leverage this: the sound of your steps may suddenly change (from solid to squelch), hinting at something odd.

Or perhaps the sound could stop altogether, or a second set of footsteps could be heard. Suddenly, your character is no longer alone on the stairs.

This interactive nature means designers can orchestrate dynamic scares. For example, a door at the top could slam shut once the player is halfway up, trapping them in the middle. This creates a classic liminal crisis!

In short, staircases in games are not just static backdrops; they can be active participants in the horror, shaped by and shaping the player’s actions

Design Implications for Games & Interactive Fear

Designing horror is about orchestrating uncertainty and emotion. Staircases offer a ready-made toolset for this if used thoughtfully.

Here are a few suggestions that game designers (and writers) can use to leverage the uncanny magnetism of staircases:

Leverage Liminality: Treat staircases as in-between zones where normal rules slightly break down. For instance, you could make the stairwell a safe zone in gameplay mechanics yet play with the player’s expectation of danger through audio/visual cues. The uncertainty of “will something happen here or not?” heightens tension. Because folklore frames stairs as boundary spaces, even a momentary pause on the landing can feel ominous. Use that pause. Maybe the music fades out as the player ascends, amplifying their awareness of each creak.

Use Environmental Storytelling: Infuse the architecture with hints of story. For example, a portrait at the turn of the stairs could depict an ancestor who died falling from those very steps. Once the player notices the cracked step and the dates on the portrait, they piece together the ghost story themselves. This technique, inspired by folklore, gives the environment a memory and rewards observant players.

Exploit the “Uncanny Valley” of Place: As research suggests, slight deviations from normal architecture raise our hackles. Therefore, intentionally introduce a spatial anomaly in your level’s staircase. It could be a visual skew (the staircase is subtly tilted, or the steps are not all the same height), which players may only notice subconsciously as disquiet.

Sound and Silence: Auditory design is paramount on staircases. In folklore, the sound of unseen footsteps is often the first sign of a haunting. Take advantage of that. Perhaps the player ascends in total silence, then halfway up hears an extra footstep right behind them. In a less direct approach, consider dynamic audio where the sound of the player’s own steps sometimes lags or doubles, hinting at an echo that shouldn’t be there.

Force Perspective and Vulnerability: In third-person games, a camera at a fixed high angle (Hitchcock-style) when the character is on a stairway can make the player feel small and exposed, as if something is watching from above. First-person games can use lighting to similar effect: plunging the bottom of the stairs in darkness once you’re halfway up, cutting off retreat and focusing the player forward.

Narrative Payoffs: If you set up a staircase as a charged location (through lore or earlier scares), make sure to pay it off. Maybe early in the game the protagonist hears the legend of the “Lady in White” who appears on the seventh step. Later, in a moment of player complacency, that legend comes alive with a full apparition encounter on step seven.

Use the anticipation folklore provides. Players often metagame horror: “I know something will happen on the way back down these stairs.” So, occasionally subvert it. The expected stair scare might not happen …or it might.

Don’t apply these ideas just to shock, but to create a memorable mood. The very best horror uses architectural tricks to implant a long-lasting unease.

Things a player might not consciously note—like the stair dimensions being slightly off—will often leave them feeling unsettled. That feeling can linger even after they turn off the game.

When a staircase encounter is done well, players may later find themselves in their dark real-life hallway, recalling the game moment and feeling that tingle of fear all over again. That is the uncanny pull at work.

Key Takeaways: Designing with the Uncanny Staircase

OK, let’s summarize the actionable insights and distinctive ideas we’ve discussed. Whether you’re a game designer, writer, or just a horror enthusiKey Takeaways: Designing with the Uncanny Staircase

Staircases are inherently liminal. They represent transitions (between floors, realms, states of being). Use this liminality to your advantage; it’s a built-in metaphor for crossing into the unknown. In stories and games, a stairway is the perfect stage for a threshold moment or a revelation of horror.

Folklore gives staircases narrative depth. Tap into ghost lore (phantom footsteps, haunted steps, stairways to nowhere) to add authenticity and richness. Real legends (like those documented by Raahauge (2016) in Denmark or Valk (2006) in Estonia) show people genuinely get spooked by stairs. Therefore, incorporating similar anecdotes or rituals (counting steps, avoiding certain stairs) can make your horror feel grounded and relatable.

The uncanny effect often arises from subtle wrongness. As Diel and Lewis (2022) found, a few spatial anomalies can push a space into the “eerie” zone. Please don’t overdo jump scares. Sometimes just making a staircase slightly out of true, or playing an unexplained sound, is enough to set nerves on edge. The audience might not consciously notice it, but they will sense it.

Stairs dictate pacing—exploit that. Every step is an opportunity to build tension. Unlike a flat hallway that one might sprint down, stairs usually force a steady pace. Design encounters (in games) that unfold over several steps. For example, a slow chase where the monster ascends step by step behind the player, matching their pace. In prose or film, describe each footfall deliberately to stretch out the suspense.

Use verticality for psychological effect. High = exposure (being watched from below). Low = entrapment (something lurking above blocking escape). Horror design can flip these expectations too. The terror may come from below unexpectedly. Vertical movement is dramatic; you can embrace this to give your audience literal ups and downs in emotion.

Endings and beginnings matter on stairs. The top of a staircase can be a climactic reveal (what’s the source of that flickering light in the attic?), while the bottom can feel like descent into hell (the basement of nightmares). Plan key story beats at these junctures.

Also, consider leaving things unresolved. Perhaps an encounter on the stair ends with the ghost vanishing at the landing, implying it stays on the stairs. Every future climb of that stair keeps the player on edge.

By integrating these approaches, you ensure that your use of a staircase isn’t just incidental architecture. It becomes thematic. It resonates with primal feelings and cultural memories, giving players or readers an experience that’s as intellectual as it is visceral. A staircase can symbolize ambition, dread, progress, or peril—sometimes all at once. For horror, that multi-layered significance is gold.

Conclusion: Stepping Into the Unknown

Staircases may seem like simple domestic features, but as we’ve discovered, they carry uncanny weight in supernatural horror and game design. The next time you find yourself on a quiet stairway, pause for a moment. Feel the atmosphere: the way sound behaves, the convergence of walls, the pull of whatever lies at the next level.

There’s a reason we are tempted to glance over our shoulder on the stairs when we’re alone. Some old part of us perhaps remembers all those tales of spirits following behind or awaiting above.

In folklore and fiction, stairs are where the veil between worlds thins: the known and unknown separated by a mere flight of steps. In games, they are where player curiosity and fear meet: “Do I dare go up there?” This often yields the most memorable frights.

The unheimlich pull of a staircase is ultimately a pull toward liminality: a chance to stand in two places at once, to peer over the edge of normalcy into mystery. As designer or participant, that is an exciting space to explore.

If you’re creating a horror experience yourself, consider this a gentle nudge to look again at those steps in your level or story draft. There’s untapped magic (and terror) in them.

As you take your next steps—whether literally up the attic stairs, or figuratively in crafting a scary story—remember the uncanny pull that drew you here. Embrace it, and don’t be afraid to lead us somewhere new and frightening.

References

Diel, A., & Lewis, M. (2022). Structural deviations drive an uncanny valley of physical places. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 82, 101844. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2022.101844

Freud, S. (1919/1955). The “Uncanny.” Imago, 5(5), 297–324. (Reprinted in J. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 17, pp. 217–256). London: Hogarth Press.)

Heft, P. (2021). Betwixt and Between: Zones as Liminal and Deterritorialized Spaces. Pulse: The Journal of Science and Culture, 8, 1–20.

Junker, C. R. (2015). Unruly Women and Their Crazy Houses: Sarah Winchester’s Unconventional Domesticity. Home Cultures, 12(3), 329–346. https://doi.org/10.1080/17406315.2015.1084763

Raahauge, K. M. (2016). Ghosts, troubles, difficulties, and challenges: Narratives about unexplainable phenomena in contemporary Denmark. Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, 65, 89–110. https://doi.org/10.7592/FEJF2016.65.raahauge

Valk, Ü. (2006). Ghostly possession and real estate: The dead in contemporary Estonian folklore. Journal of Folklore Research, 43(1), 31–51.