Dark House : for lovers of crime... and Grand Designs

Would you live in a haunted house? What about a house that was the scene of a horrific murder? Podcast Dark House explores beautiful homes consumed by their pasts.

The podcast Dark House explores beautiful homes consumed by their pasts and features interviews with set designers, writers, psychic mediums and paranormal investigators. Picture: iStock

Would you live in a haunted house? What about a house that was the scene of a horrific murder?

The podcast Dark House explores beautiful homes consumed by their pasts and features interviews with set designers, writers, psychic mediums and paranormal investigators.

Listeners are taken to 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills where the Manson Family killed five people, including Sharon Tate, the wife of director Roman Polanski.

The podcast also goes into the history of the first legally haunted house in the US, the Ackley House, in Nyack, New York.

The episodes are largely told through conversation between hosts Hadley Mendelsohn and Alyssa Fiorentino, editors of interior decorating magazine House Beautiful.

The style isn’t as engaging as narrative storytelling, but to be fair most of the potential interview subjects are dead. Production is sparse and music minimal.

The latest episode gets into Grey Gardens and lends itself to the question: Can a personality be bigger than a house? Grey Gardens was famously the home of mother and daughter duo Big and Little Edie Beale – the first cousin of Jackie Onassis – in East Hampton, the preferred weekend getaway spot for New York’s elite.

The Edies were once part of the upper crust and the tale of their demise is entwined in the dereliction of Grey Gardens. Big Edie escaped the confines of her marriage – her husband didn’t like her bohemianism – so she increasingly took refuge in Grey Gardens.

After her husband divorced her by telegram in the 1950s she was given no alimony but was able to keep Grey Gardens, a mansion built with the assumption its owners could pay for its upkeep. Little Edie gives up acting aspirations when her mother can no longer support her.

They were kind of the original reality stars. The Edies lived solely to be admired and without an audience withered away inside a once stately home littered with cat faeces and under attack from raccoons.

Review recommends for lovers of crime and Grand Designs.

You can listen to Dark House on your favourite podcast app.