The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall

The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall is a young adult horror novel by Katie Alender, published in 2015. The house at the centre of it has a history that its new owners would very much rather not know about.

Delia and her family inherit a large house that they intend to turn into a home, and the building has other ideas about its purpose. It began life as the Piven Institute for the Care and Correction of Troubled Females, an asylum that the surrounding district called Hysteria Hall, and the institution's records are the key to everything that happens afterwards. Many of the young women confined there were not insane at all; they were defiant, strong willed and inconvenient to the people responsible for them, which is exactly what Delia is. The novel moves between the house's rooms and its past, and the girls who died there are not inclined to leave the new arrival alone.

Alender writes a haunted-house story about institutions and the uses they are put to, so the frights are tied to a documented history rather than to an empty building with a reputation.