It was a finalist for the National Book Award and has been made into two feature films (The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise, and its remake), a play, and is the basis of a Netflix series.

"– Paula Guran[3]As part of her process, Jackson sketched floor plans of the downstairs and upstairs of Hill House and a rendering of the exterior.

Later in their stay, the doctor's wife, the haughty Mrs. Montague, and her companion Arthur Parker, the headmaster of a boys' school, arrive to spend a weekend at Hill House and help investigate it.

Later, as Theodora and Eleanor walk outside Hill House at night, they see a ghostly family picnic that seems to be taking place in daylight.

In a New York Times review in 1959, Edmund Fuller wrote, "With her 'conceit' of Hill House, whether pretty be the name for it or not, Shirley Jackson proves again that she is the finest master currently practicing in the genre of the cryptic, haunted tale.

[11] In his review column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Damon Knight selected the novel as one of the 10 best genre books of 1959, declaring it "in a class by itself.

"[12] Reappraising the book in The Guardian in 2010, Sophie Missing wrote, "Jackson treats her material – which could be reduced to penny dreadful stuff in less deft hands – with great skill and subtlety.

[…] The horror inherent in the novel does not lie in Hill House (monstrous though it is) or the events that take place within it, but in the unexplored recesses of its characters' – and its readers' – minds.

[13] In 2016, in The Guardian, author Joanne Harris described the book as: "...not only the best haunted-house story ever written, but also a quiet subversion of the ingénue trope in horror fiction, with a nod to Sartre’s Huis Clos with its toxic menage a trois.

"[14] In 2018, The New York Times polled 13 writers to choose the scariest book of fiction they have ever read, and Carmen Maria Machado and Neil Gaiman both chose The Haunting of Hill House.

The book's particular brand of surreality felt, to me, like that experience of walking home from a party a little bit drunk, when the world somehow seems sharper and clearer and weirder.

The 1999 version, considerably different from the novel and widely panned by critics, is an overt fantasy horror in which all the main characters are terrorized and two are killed by explicitly supernatural deaths.

It changed many elements from the novel, keeping mainly its Hill House setting, Mr and Mrs Dudley, and a few character names, but shifted the focus to members of a singular haunted "Crain family."