The Hotel and the Death-House

I've only begun to notice them recently. The Hotel first, and then the Death House.
The Hotel is on the corner of a street, and I don't know what first caught my attention. It's not a particularly ostentatious building, just another Brighton-Georgian building. Perhaps it was the very quietness of the bulding that first attracted me. Then glimpses in through the windows and the glass in the door of the hallway. At the end of the doorway, a stags head hanging on the wall. Glass-eyed dead stare. Another window shows some kind of lounge area. Dark walls and pictures hanging there I can never remember when I have walked on. A slight feeling of cluttered-ness -is that a word?- and age. Rumours of wooden beams and panels -I'm not sure because I've never stopped to look. Just glimpses as I pass by. There is something about the light of the room which both disquiets and fascinates me. Something lucid and bright and dark, all mixed up together. Empty chairs wait for occupants. An air of waiting, yes. A pensiveness. A kind of tension and dreaminess. The hotel seems a building without an exterior, as if only the interior survives. Something deep and calm and feverish. The Hotel is undoubtedly haunted, if such things exist of course.
I am still unsure.
The Death-House is closer. Next door but one to this house of bedsits I'm currently sat writing in.
It was Andy who first came up with the term 'Death-House' to describe a certain kind of building. Ragged and decaying, abandoned and boarded up, Death-Houses repel watchers, vanishng in their own quiet as much as the Hotel does. Death-Houses, though, are unpleasant, exuding a poisonous, toxic air, a miasma of decay and rumours of dark histories. Death-Houses feel as if someone has died in them.
Of course, most, if not all, old buildings, have had people die in them, but Death-Houses cling onto the darkest of the echoes and don't let go.
The Death-House two doors down from here is the same as this House of Bedsits, four storeys and a basement level. The black windows of the basement, past a wildly overgrowing and scraggy bush, show a floor covered in detritus. The door to the basement flat is boarded up. A blank wooden face, slightly cracked, revealing nothng, but rumouring of the floors and floors of silence inside and above, the darkened and forgotten rooms, and the stairways which must be echoing with ghosts.
Such places are built on rumours, and like the Hotel, they don't seem quite real. Cracks in the facade of our own rationality.
So easy to see where ghost-stories are born.