Ruins and old buildings have been the stuff of haunted-house stories and folklore for centuries. This particular trope was most popular in Gothic fiction, of which the seminal example is The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole - although the castle in this case is not a ruin, but an active household to a family in decline; the trope would probably be said to be codified in Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), and continued to be inspirational in American Gothic literature such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables and H. P. Lovecraft's stories such as The Picture in the House, The Lurking Fear (1922), and The Rats in the Walls (1924). In particular, the idea of rural degeneration is especially popular in Southern Gothic literature, such as William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929) or Fred Chappell's Dagon (1968). Cinematically, the trope is especially strong in horror fiction, perhaps starting with film adaptations of "The Fall of the House of Usher" (the earliest of which is 1928), and continuing on through films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) into recent works like the first season of True Detective (2014) and the neo-Gothic Crimson Peak (2015).