Woolf treasured the house, called Monk's House, until the end of her life, and spent some of the happiest periods of her life there among friends and family and the Downs, which she described as 'too much for one pair of eyes.' It's easy to imagine why, when writing 'A Haunted House,' she chose Monk's House as the setting that represented both couples' profound love. Another event in Woolf's own life reflected in 'A Haunted House' is her purchase of a house in the South Downs (very similar to the house described in the story, with two stories and a garden almost an acre in size) with her husband Leonard in 1919. In her novel Mrs Dalloway, in contrast, she represents ghosts as deeply horrific, and death as something at best ambiguous and at worst to be feared. 'A Haunted House' is one of her more positive depictions of death, as a continuing state of being where love and joy can still exist. Though she had not lost a spouse, the deaths of her mother, stepsister (to whom she was close), father, and older brother in rapid succession (1895, 1897, 1905, and 1906, respectively) led to a focus on the nature of death and grief in her own writing. The impact of those losses on 'A Haunted House' is apparent.

It's often argued that the reason grief and loss pervade Woolf's fiction is because of the many losses in her own life.

The demon haunted world sparknotes