Production details
The production number was 140-502, and the voice cast recorded the episode on April 4, 1990.32 Storyboards were handled by Kazumi Fukushima, Will Meugniot, Steve Moore, Brad Rader, Vince Waller, and Stan Phillips, with revised boards dated March 22, 1990 and the final version dated March 30, 1990.4
Regular voice cast included Dave Coulier, Frank Welker, Maurice LaMarche, Buster Jones, and Kath Soucie. Guest voices were Marilyn Lightstone, John Stephenson, and Josh Keaton.
Straczynski described the episode as a tribute to horror writers Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson, both of whom he name-checked in his own writing guide years later.5 The title and premise riff on Jackson's 1959 novel "The Haunting of Hill House" and Richard Matheson's 1971 novel "Hell House."
Plot
A fifth-grade class tours the Firehouse and runs wild. Only Peter Venkman and Slimer are around to greet them, as the other Ghostbusters are giving a lecture and Janine Melnitz has the day off. Two boys poke through the clutter on Peter's desk and find a snow globe. Peter tells them it is a souvenir from one of the team's most dangerous cases, and the story flashes back.
One Thursday night, a man named Jeffers Marston visits the Firehouse with an offer: Heck House. Ray Stantz and Egon Spengler recognize the name immediately and try to leave. For fifty years no one had stayed the night there and survived, and Ray recalls one of his paranormal-studies professors from Columbia University who stayed half the night and was left a drooling wreck. Jeffers explains the terms: one million dollars to anyone who can last from dusk to dawn without a Proton Pack. The offer comes from the will of the late E. Henry Merriweather, a wealthy former adventurer in the supernatural who left the money to the Ghostbusters as a final challenge.
Peter talks the team into going, and each starts dreaming of what to buy: Winston Zeddemore a quantum chain for Ecto-1, Peter a Porsche, Ray an osmotic processor. Egon still refuses but comes along. The moment they enter, Jeffers asks how long ago sundown was, learns it was two minutes earlier, and bolts for his car.
Inside, the house turns on them. A chandelier nearly drops on the group in the foyer. Ray dodges a haunted light switch and a bed that tries to eat him. Winston's room is arranged upside down. In the library, Peter teases Egon about their first case at the New York Public Library, where books flew off the shelves, then leaves him alone; a book starts to slide out at Egon, who warns it not to even try, and it slips back into place.
Slimer is dragged through a hidden passage and chased by dancing skeletons, a demonic horseman, a giant black cat, and a pack of spectral dogs before clawing his way back. Reunited over sandwiches, Egon announces that Heck House holds 2,436 ghosts, far more than the most haunted house on record, the Crowley House in London, with 25. Ray points out that only about a dozen people ever lived there, so the count makes no sense. The team returns to the foyer to find every exit bricked up; a brick Peter knocks loose simply slides back into the wall.
The lights cut out and Ray and Winston vanish. Slimer is pinned by a living chair. Winston is invited to join a hunt by several Dark Knights, declines, and steals one of their horses. Ray lands among Sheet Ghosts, tricks them into a dryer, and gets wrapped up by a towel dispenser. In the library Egon finally works out the truth. Peter knocks a knight from his horse, catches up to Winston, and the two ride at a landscape painting and bail at the last second; the pursuing knights leap into the painting and vanish.
Egon reveals the answer: Merriweather, the man behind the house, wanted to build the most haunted house in the world, so he filled the library with 2,436 books and cast a spell that brought every story to life. The ghosts are the books. Egon's plan is to rewire the house into one giant Ghost Trap. As ghosts march on the library, Ray and Egon finish the device, throw the switch, and the team escapes through a weakened wall as Heck House collapses.
Their celebration is cut short when Jeffers declares they violated the terms by leaving five minutes before dawn, so they get nothing. Peter takes a souvenir anyway, having the rubble of Heck House made into a paperweight, the snow globe from the framing scene. Back in the present, the two skeptical boys are spooked by the shadow of a dragon ghost and run out of the office.
Trivia and references
Egon mentions Gozer and other past cases while refusing to go. When Peter reminds Egon of the first library case, he hopes the Heck House spirits never saw "the movie made about all that," a recurring nod to the idea that the original Ghostbusters film exists within The Real Ghostbusters continuity, a joke first floated in "Take Two."
The episode is dense with horror references. Egon rattles off authors whose works fill the library: Poe, Jackson, Matheson, Howard, Machen, Le Fanu, Lovecraft, and Bloch (Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, Richard Matheson, Robert E. Howard, Arthur Machen, Sheridan Le Fanu, H.P. Lovecraft, and Robert Bloch). The rival haunted houses Egon cites also carry nods: the Whateley House in Arkham points to Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror," the Crowley House to occultist Aleister Crowley, and the Vincent Mansion likely to horror actor Vincent Price. The house's original owner is named Jonas Heck, possibly an inside reference to the DC Comics character Jonah Hex.
Peter's line, "I'm here to kick ectoplasm and chew bubble gum, and I'm fresh out of bubble gum," is a family-friendly take on a line from the 1988 film "They Live." The episode also nods to the 1940 film "The Ghost Breakers," including the opening lightning and the framing of a house no one can survive a night in.
In the episode order, "Heck House" follows "Ghostworld" by air date (and "Russian About" in DVD order) and precedes "Mean Green Teen Machine."
