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The article presents information on the image of the house as a space of safety, a protection from external dangers, from storms on winter nights. However frail and vulnerable the individual might be, bricks and mortar provide them with a nest, a sanctuary, a place to retire to. The House of Doom is viewed by nighttime. It has flapping casements, impossibly pitched roofs and gables, and deep shadows behind dense shrubberies. Its floors creak and its draperies are rotten. The debris of interrupted meals litters tabletops and vermin scuttle behind the wainscoting. People visit it in fairgrounds and in horror movies. People relish its capacity to thrill. In its own way the House of Doom is an ideal home. While the show house reminds us how family life should be lived, displaying the spatiality of the required activities and social divisions in dining rooms, lounges and bathrooms, in parents' spaces and children's spaces, public rooms and private rooms the House of Doom allows us to safely rehearse our terror of demons which, like God, are all-seeing and inescapable--the ghosts of unknown previous occupants.