A haunted house…with a twist. The Winchesters investigate, but they are not the only ones hunting ghosts.
Pre-show notes
This one is fun. We’ve had some really heavy episodes: coming face to face with their dead mother in Home, seeing the road not taken in Nightmare, facing scary psycho rednecks The Benders and then barely escaping a demonic trap in Shadow.
It’s good to have a lighter episode.
Episode notes
(Two months ago…) It’s dark and four kids are approaching an abandoned house in the woods. The doors are not locked, and they find weird symbols scrawled around the place. But the boy is leading the others to someplace specific. Oh, they’re going into the cellar. They’re kidding around, pretending nothing scares them. But there’s something in the shadows…a girl, hanging from a beam, apparently dead.
(Now…) Dean is driving while Sam sleeps. Dean eases a plastic spook into Sam’s mouth and snaps a photo with his phone, then cranks the music up which of course wakes Sam. Sam takes the prank fairly well, but is insistent he doesn’t want to “start this up again” so we know that prank wars have happened before. Dean is having too much fun.
Sam fills us in on the case. After discovering the girl’s body the kids called the cops. By the time the cops reached the house, there was no body to be found. The cops assumed it was a prank. The house is the subject of a local legend which says it’s haunted. The ghost “takes girls” and hangs them from the rafters (rafters means roof beams, doesn’t it? That body was in the cellar). Sam thinks the kids’ stories sound sincere, but he found them on a local paranormal website, so Dean thinks it’s probably a lot of crap.
Nevertheless, they go find the local teen hangout and we get a montage of the kids’ stories. They don’t agree on any of the details, except one – Craig was the one who led them there. So the brothers head off to find Craig, pretending to be reporters. Craig tells the story of Mordecai Murdoch the murderer of his daughters and it’s obviously embellished. Maybe there is a local legend but he’s adding details he can’t possibly know. But he tells the same story about the hanging girl and swears it was real.
When someone says “I swear” or otherwise over-sells a story, there’s a pretty good chance they’re lying.
Dean and Sam head into the woods – in daylight – to check out this “Hell House”. Dean’s EMF meter isn’t helpful because there are power lines right next to the house. Inside, they find the walls covered with symbols. Sam thinks they are anachronistic and the blood on the walls is just paint. They are about to agree there’s nothing in this when they hear a sound.
The sound is a pair of paranormal investigators: they are the guys behind the website where Sam found the story in the first place. The brothers play along to pump then for information. They are so sincere about being ghost hunters when by the Winchesters’ standards, they know absolutely nothing. As the brothers leave, one of the ghost hunters says something about having smoked pot. So I guess they’re not all that serious about it.
After a little more digging the brothers decide there’s nothing to the story. No record of a Mordecai Murdoch and no missing person who could be the dead girl in the basement.
But a new group of kids are approaching the house by night for a dare. One girl goes in. She hears strange noises but nonetheless heads into the cellar. She grabs a jar, completing her dare, but drops it as the ghost appears behind her. She screams as the spirit wraps a rope around her neck and lifts her into the ceiling.
In the morning we see the house surrounded by cops. Sam and Dean are there and one of the locals tells them it looks like a suicide. They figure they’ve missed something and head back after dark, but the house is being watched now, by the police. The other investigators show up and Dean uses them as a distraction to he and Sam can get inside. This time they’re prepared for a hunt. Mordecai duly appears and their rock-salt guns have very little effect.
Back at their motel room Dean is still stressing over the symbol from the wall. He can’t remember where he’s seen it before. Sam figures out that the spirit is changing as the local legend changes. Dean remembers the symbol from a record album. They go back to talk to Craig who confesses he set up the original prank with the help of his cousin – who was the dead girl in the cellar, and isn’t really dead. Craig feels guilty because what he thought was a joke has now resulted in a girl dying.
But if it was all a prank, what attacked the brothers in that house?
Sam has a theory. One of the symbols on the wall was Tibetan and he thinks it could have been used to create a Tulpa, a thought-form that takes on a life of its own. Everyone reading the website is contributing their imagination or belief to the Tulpa, keeping it going. And as the story on the website evolves, so does it.
Meanwhile the ghost hunters behind the website are having a great time. This story is their 15 minutes of fame and they’re thrilled. So when the brothers show up and ask them to shut the website down, the response is predictable. It doesn’t help that Dean’s actions the night before got them arrested. But the brothers are playing them, trying to build a way to kill the ghost into the story. All they have to do is wait for the story to appear on the website.
After the story is posted the brothers return to Mordecai’s house, confident their iron bullets will kill the ghost. Unfortunately the server crashed just after it was posted so the legend hasn’t changed. Mordecai attacks the ghost hunters. Sam distract him and is attacked himself. Dean reasons that since they know Mordecai can’t leave the house the solution is to destroy the house.
“Of all the things we’ve hunted, how many existed just because people believed in them.”
Sam
The prank war
Dean is driving while Sam sleeps. He eases a spoon into Sam’s mouth and snaps a picture with his phone before basting the music up loud so Sam wakes up.
Sam retaliates by setting the Impala’s radio to a station which I think is Latin music (?), turning the volume way up so Dean gets a blast when he turns the ignition.
Dean‘S next move is putting itching powder in Sam’s clothing while he’s in the shower.
Sam paints Dean’s beer bottle with superglue. I didn’t see how he managed that.
Both of them prank the ghost hunters. Sam calls them pretending to be a Hollywood producer interested in their story. Dean puts a fish in the back seat of their car. (I would have used stinky cheese, personally.) They agree to cease the prank war after this.
Associations
Ghostbusters is the obvious reference here. I mean, the ghost hunters are called Zeddmore and Spengler – both characters in the original Ghostbusters movie. And Dean yells “Who you gonna call!” to attract the cops’ attention to the hapless ghost hunters.
Their motto is “What would Buffy do?” – a reference to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
And there’s a hilarious reference to The Exorcist when the ghost hunters repeatedly chant ‘The power of Christ compels you!” In an attempt to escape the Tulpa.
Final thoughts
Supernatural always did comedy really well. Horror as a genre is often comedic. The comedy writing isn’t always good; occasionally it’s very bad, but the actors have great comic chops and the comedic episodes are some of the best. But Hell House relies on the incompetent ghost hunters for its comedic plot moments, allowing Sam and Dean to be funny only in their prank war – and you can take the prank war out of the episode and lose nothing of the plot. So while it’s good, Hell House isn’t actually all that funny.
Still, it’s a lighter episode and gives us a further insight into the brothers’ childhood. And we will meet Zeddmore and Spengler again as season 3’s Ghostfacers.
