>Other important literature that was published during this time was work by Watpole himself. His novel, Castle of Otranto, was reportedly inspired by a dream he had while living at Strawberry Hill. Set in a castle in the Middle Ages, the epic details a lord and his family living in a haunted mansion. “In the late 18th and 19th century, Gothic became associated with spookiness, which got wound into ideas of the exotic and sublime,” Dr. Bork says. “By the 20th century, you have movies and mass media that start using this.”

That's... not a lot of detail.

The narrative I like comes from Walt Hickey's You Are What you Watch. Basically, there was wealth in the 1870s and 1880s during the Gilded Age, and those people built homes in the Victorian/Gothic/Queen Anne style. Their kids grow up in those homes, and suddenly books are becoming movies (early successes like Dracula in 1897 as a book and eventually movies), and horror is a big hit, and the kids who grew up in those homes are writing things that take place there. Meanwhile, the stock market crashes, those homes are abandoned and unmaintained and derided. "When a boring colonial-style home deteriorates with age, it looks distinguishing. When a fantabulous, whimsical home deteriorates with age, it starts to look spooky."