[stvswn]

I agree with the idea that there's something dramatic about evil things happening in an old house where one might find a mysterious aristocrat behaving badly, but I think the theme goes back to Regency era Britain an, when the industrial revolution was upending society and old aristocrats were going broke while new industrialists were getting rich -- causing the old manor house in disrepair trope to be something you might find in England. One person who inherited such a manor house, but not the wealth to maintain it, was Lord Byron. His manor, Newstead Abbey, is out of haunted-house central casting and, as a romantic, he plays to all those tropes. He had also visited the Balkans and was aware of Vampire myths, so when it's time to participate in the famous scary-story-contest in 1816 (where Mary Shelley submitted _Frankenstein_), Byron tells a story of a vampire who seems a lot like himself. This story is ripped off by Byron's physician who published his own story (The Vampyre) where the main character is absolutely Byronic. Bram Stoker's Dracula ends up with a similarly Byronic idea of Dracula, and now we have a deeply embedded cultural heritage of creepy stuff happening in run-down manor houses -- maybe just because Lord Byron himself haunted such a setting.