Ghosts of Hanley House



Hank has a conundrum. He’s acquired this beautiful, sprawling home for a good deal with the intention to flip it, but no one seems willing to bite. The problem? The house in question is the old Hanley House, which has been reported to be haunted ever since the homeowners up and abandoned it two years ago. Ever since then, anyone who’s ever stayed at the house has come out of the experience absolutely terrified. Hank’s friend Dick, however, thinks the local ghost stories are a bunch of baloney. So Hank makes Dick a deal: if Dick can stay in the old Hanley House for a whole night, and thus disprove the local tall tales, Hank will give Dick his brand new Ferrari. Not wanting to turn down this spectacular offer, Dick agrees, on the condition that he can have a couple of others tag along and they can make a night of it. Hank agrees, and a couple nights later Dick, Hank, and three other locals, settle into the grand ole house to see what is (or is not) to be seen. And while everyone is pretty skeptical at first, it only takes a couple of hours for the group to realize why everyone in town is so terrified of the old Hanley House.



I figured I’d close out the month with another haunted house flick and finally settled on this, because I thought I was due for a 60s film and had never heard of it before. But it would seem that a lot of people have never heard of Ghosts of Hanley House before. Turns out the damn film is so obscure that it looks like it was never contemporarily reviewed, and neither Wikipedia or IMDB can give proper credit for over half the cast. The film’s only claim to star power is Elsie Baker, who had small roles in TV and movies for years, and Barbara Chase, who was once married to Timothy Leary. That’s it. Everyone else either only has a couple other credits to their name, or went on to work in soft-core porn (still with only a couple credits to their name.) Hell, we don’t even know where this film was made beyond a vague “somewhere in Texas”. So we essentially know nothing about this film and it’s as obscure as obscure can get. In fact, the poor thing’s background is so hazy that I’m honestly impressed someone had a viable print of it lying around someplace, let alone that it managed to make its way onto any streaming service. After saying all that I’d love to tell you that this mysterious little film, with a mostly unknown cast and a budget of what I can only assume to be around $113, is some sort of surprise hidden gem that everyone should see. But sadly it is not, and it probably shouldn’t come as any surprise that the movie isn’t all that good.


No, not even with scenes like this.

To put it quite simply, this poor movie has very little going for it. The story is your standard haunted house fare that is both painfully, boringly slow and highly predictable. A group of people go to a haunted house to see if it’s haunted, and if it is, by whom. Woo hoo. Never seen that before. It says a lot about your movie when the most exciting thing to happen in the first 30-minutes is everyone swatting at a Black Widow Spider that no one else (especially the audience) can see. And of course to make it worse, you don’t even get the benefit of any amusing characters. The closest you get is Roberta Reeves’s Gabby, who plays the standard medium of the little group, but everyone else hails to us from Snoozeville, USA. Hank and Dick are so interchangeable they may as well be the same person, Sheila seems to only be there in order to scream and look good in a nighty, and the final member of the group pretty much hangs out in the background until the end of the film. And did I mention they were all as dull as a crumbling rock? The only other thing of note regarding the characters is that there is a black maid/housekeeper seen at the beginning of the movie. And I only note this because she turns out to perhaps be the smartest person in the film, because she up and skedaddles long before any of the ghosts ever even have a chance to show up, putting her on a very short list of black actors/actresses who aren’t killed off during a horror movie.


Good for you, Isabelle.


Oh yes. What a fearsome spider. Good thing you saw it. Who knows the damage that deadly (invisible) thing could have wrought.

And as for the production values…. Good god, where to start…..The movie looks like a really cheap 50’s Sci-Fi film made a decade too late. There are pops and scratches on seemingly every other frame, and what isn’t damaged is either blurry or looks grainy as hell. Scenes meant to be night are clearly shot during the day. In fact, the lighting in general is scattershot. Some of it looks fine, and there are even a couple of nicely framed shots that look good and eerie, just like you’d expect from a haunted house flick. But a good portion of it, especially most of the nighttime scenes, wind up having crap contrast, which makes the characters, and sometimes even parts of the set, look horribly washed out.



The film is practically riddled (riddled, I say!) with far, far too many zoomed in close ups of people’s faces, which often linger too long to the point where they either become painfully awkward or hysterically funny.





The editing is choppy, sudden, and often confusing. And the sound…oh, gods, the sound…. I think the movie only had one microphone and it must have been being held by the ghost you keep seeing lingering outside the house, because it’s absolutely atrocious. You often can’t hear what’s being said. There’s almost constant static and/or feedback. Sometimes the sound just drops out entirely for a couple seconds. Or, my personal favorite, they accidentally end up repeating dialogue. There’s one scene in particular where the shot lingers on a charred door and you can just barely hear a line of dialogue in the background, and then the movie cuts to another character who then repeats that same line of dialogue. It’s…It’s just bad. And I’m not even going to go into detail about the sad looking special effects this movie has, because those are just downright pitiful. Just know that it mostly consists of lots of dry ice and this odd “glowing” effect they tried to put on the ghost outside the house that looks like a crappy Photoshop job done by a middle schooler.




And here’s a convenient GIF I made showcasing the crappy lighting, editing, awkward lingering closeups and one of the creepiest ways I can think of to ever smile at a woman, all at the same time.

Again, I am absolutely surprised that Ghosts of Hanley House survived obscurity, let alone how it even got made. The only two good things I can think to say about it: 1) the ending isn’t bad, and 2) is that the location they chose to use is absolutely spectacular. Not the shoddy town locals, or the outside portions where the characters aimlessly wander around in the dark to kill time for 5 minutes. But the inside of that house they used is positively gorgeous. It’s classy as hell and looks exactly like what you’d expect a haunted house to look like. It is just Chief’s Kiss levels of perfect. I wouldn’t be surprised if landing that house for a film shoot was the sole reason the filmmakers decided to make this movie in the first place. It’s just too bad they had neither the funds or talent to pull off a decent production. If it was a passion project for someone, then I’ll give them kudos for the attempt. But most people aren’t likely to find this worth their time, beyond being an interesting oddity.

Ghosts of Hanley House is available on a variety of streaming services.

Ghosts of Hanley House is also available on DVD.

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