Gothic Access

The article charts gothic fiction's spatialization of disability by examining two representative entries: Horace Walpole's foundational novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Peter Medak's film The Changeling (1980). Their different media and historical backgrounds notwithstanding, both texts feature haunted houses where ghosts and nonghosts collaborate in tearing walls, clearing passageways, tracking voices, and lighting up cellars. These accommodations, along with the antiestablishment critiques they advance, remain unanalyzed because gothic studies and disability studies have intersected mainly around paradigms of monstrosity, abjection, and repression. What do we gain, then, by de-psychologizing the gothic, assaying ghosts' material entanglements instead? This critical gesture reveals crip ghosts Joseph (Changeling) and Alfonso (Otranto) engaged in what the article conceptualizes as "gothic access": a series of hauntings that help us collapse and reimagine everyday life's unhaunted—yet inaccessible—built environments.