History Main / MadwomanInTheAttic

* ''Series/StarTrekPicard'': Season 2 reveals that [[spoiler: Jean-Luc's mother, Yvette]] suffered from severe mental illness, what appears to have been either bi-polar or schizophrenia. This being the 24th century, actual mental health treatments are absolutely availabl3 but [[spoiler: Yvette]] consistently [[UnwantedHealing refused to pursue them]]. It got bad enough that [[spoier: her husband Maurice, fearing that she was a danger to herself and their children (indeed, she once left her son Jean-Luc trapped in the tunnels under the house for ''hours'' during one of her episodes) resorted to locking her in a room during her fits. The one time Jean-Luc let her out, she [[DrivenToSuicide hung herself]]]].

* ''Series/DeadStill'': In the second episode when the team go to photograph a dead child, it seems the boy is haunting the house. It turns out his twin brother is autistic and their parents have been keeping him locked up in the "nursery" in the top of the ho

* ''Literature/IslandBeneathTheSea'': Valmorain's first wife, Eugenia, slowly loses her mind in Saint Domingue, due to her family history of mental illness (among women; her brother is sane if quite eccentric) and the increasing paranoia about a possible SlaveRevolt.

* ''Literature/IslandBeneathTheSea'': Tolouse Valmorain's first wife, Eugenia, slowly loses her mind and is kept isolated in the plantation home on late 18th century [[UsefulNotes/Haiti Sainte Domingue]]. Her family history of mental illness among women and the increasing paranoia about a possible SlaveRevolt do not help her condition.

Not to be confused with the company involved with the first season of ''Series/{{Smash}}.'' Or the episode of ''Series/TheSarahJaneAdventures'' which also [[Recap/TheSarahJaneAdventuresS3E3E4TheMadWomanInTheAttic borrows its name from the book]] (but isn't an example). And even more so, don't confuse with the BasementDweller, who is free to come and go as he pleases (even if he may have mental issues that make living on his own difficult), and is not ([[PsychopathicManchild usually)]] a danger to himself or others.

* In ''Film/TheCaseOfThebloodyIris'', Mrs Moss is secretly keeping her deformed son David in her apartment; living in a room hidden behind a closet. David sneaks out of the apartment and [[ThePeepingTom spies on the nubile women]] living in the building.

* In the ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'' episode "Marjorine", Butters is selected to [[FakingTheDead fake his death]]. When he returns home, his parents chain him up in the basement falsely believing he is a DamagedSoul and kill a woman so he can feed. [[SnapBack He is out in the next episode.]]

* ''VideoGame/RedDeadRedemption2'': The Braithwaites, a [[SouthernGothic wealthy Southern family whose fortunes have declined after the abolition of slavery]], keep a deformed female family member locked up inside an ''outhouse'' hidden away on the family property, and she is understandably completely insane from her confinement, if she wasn't already when they locked her up. The Braithwaites are established to have, let's say, not the widest gene pool around, which may be a factor at play here.

* On ''WesternAnimation/CelebrityDeathmatch'', the fight between Creator/MaryKateAndAshleyOlsen ended with ''neither'' of them winning, because the feral "third Olsen twin" broke out of her cell and ate them both. (Became HilariousInHindsight after Creator/ElizabethOlsen far eclipsed her older sisters' fame.)

* ''Film/DungeonsAndDragonsHonorAmongThieves'': When she was born, her parents told the village their baby had died and kept her in a locked attic with straw to muffle the sound. They sent her goat milk and stale bread to keep her alive. She learned to talk by listening to them. She thought this was normal until her parents had a human baby who wasn't sent up to the attic with her.

* {{Cloudcuckoolander}} OptionalBoss Sucre/Sugar from ''VideoGame/{{OFF}}'' certainly invokes this, being found hanging out in the basement of Zone 0 surrounded by piles of sugar (which doesn't seem too bad unless you learn the AwfulTruth of where sugar comes from in this world).

* In Chapter 1 of ''{{VideoGame/Deltarune}}'', [[MonsterClown Jevil]] is locked away deep within the basement of Card Castle in an ominous area with an entirely different atmosphere to the rest of the place, and an elaborate and [[GuideDangIt trickily placed]] set of keys are spread across the land to keep a wall between him and the rest of the kingdom. Seam the shopkeeper is the only person who will speak of him (and only does so ''after'' the party find where he is) and can go on to explain that the harlequin was once their friend and the court jester, but after an encounter with a strange figure, he [[TheseAreThingsManWasNotMeantToKnow learned information that shattered his worldview]] and fell into a dark brand of nihilism, coming to treat their very world as a game [[AxCrazy and seeking to play it with violent stakes]] to cope until his old friend, now living in solitude within their store after [[TookALevelInCynic being changed by the events and his words]], had to seal him away. By the time the party encounter him, Jevil still speaks in playfully cryptic and foreboding terms and claims to be 'THE ONLY FREE ONE', and he will [[BossBattle gladly play with the party]] if they gather the keys and enter his little world.

* Kind of featured in the Woodland Mystery ''The Mystery of the Dark Old House'', but [[spoiler:the guy living in the title house is actually nice, just afraid of the outside world]].

** Jean Rhys' ''Wide Sargasso Sea'' examines this example (yes, this one -- same woman[[note]]though moved to a slightly different historical period[[/note]]) more deeply, giving a possible BackStory of (the literal) Mad Woman in the Attic. It's also a [[DeconstructedTrope deconstruction]], similar in that to "The Yellow Wallpaper", since it's quite clear in this version that her identity was stolen ("Bertha" is not even her real name) and insanity was a role that was forced upon her in an effort to control her rather than something that would have happened anyway.

* The novel ''The Cellar'' is about a woman who keeps horrific rat-men in her old house.

* ''Literature/TheHunchbackOfNotreDame'' is a sympathetic example.

* ''Literature/ThePhantomOfTheOpera'' is an early example, and also interesting because he exiled himself due to his deformity. But still counts since he lives in the catacombs of the Paris Opera House and is just insane enough to kill certain individuals who won't do as he asks. Madame Giry acts as the confidant and liaison between the phantom and the outside world.

* The ''Series/BabylonFive'' episode "Grey 17 is Missing" featured a bizarre cult that had taken over one of the decks of Babylon 5, hidden it on the blueprints and computer schematics, isolated it so no one else could enter... and then locked up themselves on that level with a ravenous alien monster which would periodically eat one of the cult members and thus make them one with the universe via a perfect death.

* {{Cloudcuckoolander}} BonusBoss Sucre/Sugar from ''VideoGame/{{OFF}}'' certainly invokes this, being found hanging out in the basement of Zone 0 surrounded by piles of sugar (which doesn't seem too bad unless you learn the AwfulTruth of where sugar comes from in this world.)

** In the form of[[spoiler:a giant, deformed child who is the brother of the killer that's been chasing you around. And he's not happy about being woken up]].

* In one of ''Series/TheOuterLimits1995'' various ScienceIsBad episodes, a couple considering [[DesignerBabies genetic enhancement]] for their unborn child learn that their neighbors' supposedly dead son is actually an AxeCrazy basement-dwelling monster as a result of genetic engineering GoneHorriblyWrong.

* ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'' has this as the twist in "Family Remains", when they discover the last owner of the house kept the twins he conceived with his daughter. The daughter committed suicide and the father was killed by the children, then a new family moved in... Which, par for the course, was played quite disturbingly.
* Played with in ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959'' episode "The Howling Man". The title character is locked in a monastery cell and spends a lot of time howling mournfully. The protagonist of the story thinks he's crazy, but after the protagonist releases him [[spoiler:he turns out to be [[LouisCypher Satan in disguise]]. [[SealedEvilInACan Oops]]]].

** "Home" deals with several backwoods-horror tropes, including this one. The local police force with Mulder and Scully's help conclude there must be a woman kidnapped and held by a family of young men who is probably responsible for the murder of a deformed baby. It turns out there is a living woman in the house -- she was just assumed to be dead by locals.
** "The Post-Modern Prometheus", which was a deliberate deconstruction and AffectionateParody of Frankenstein/deformed monster. Several people have seen him, they just didn't know who he was. He lives with an aging farmer whom he considers his adoptive father. He wanted to protect him by hiding him.

** ''Literature/HarryPotterAndTheGobletOfFire'' reveals that [[spoiler:Barty Crouch Sr. did this to his son]]. Downplayed in that everyone already knew that [[spoiler:Barty Jr.]] existed and was deranged, but they thought he'd died in prison.

* ''Manga/JojosBizarreAdventure'': Okuyasu's father was horribly mutated by [=DIO's=] cells into a near-mindless abomination and is now kept in the attic by his sons, who are trying to find a way to MercyKill him out of pity. Given that he [[HealingFactor regenerates from every injury]], it doesn't go well. [[spoiler:He's not as mindless as he first seems, which causes the brothers no small amount of grief when they realize how badly they've been abusing him. After avenging Keicho's death and stopping Kira, Okuyasu starts taking his father to Antonio's to try to cure his condition, which appears to have some effect but slow-going.]]
* [[spoiler:Towa]] from ''Manga/MermaidSaga''.

--> used to be [[spoiler:heroes]], and now [...] '''grotesque embarassments''' that have to be h-'''hidden away''', like a b-bunch of '''crazy aunts in the attic'''
* At one point, ''[=Dv8=]'', ''ComicBook/Gen13'''s EvilCounterpart, meets an even eviller team called Twist. One of Twist's KickTheDog moments is when one of them shows [=Dv8=]'s Evo a cellar under their base crammed full of BodyHorror[=s=] mutated by the same Phlebotinum that gave the others powers, and tries to get him to have sex with her in front of them.

* One of ComicBook/{{Sabretooth}}'s [[MultipleChoicePast possible backstories]] shows him as a child chained up in the basement with a dog dish, his father periodically coming down to yank out his claws and teeth.
* Horridus from ''ComicBook/TheSavageDragon'' and ''Freak Force'' is a reptilian-looking HalfHumanHybrid whose parents kept her chained up in the basement. But ''TSD'' being a comic book where the main hero is a green guy with a fin on his head, Horridus didn't have that much trouble integrating with society.

* In ''WesternAnimation/{{Encanto}}'', [[spoiler:Mirabel discovers her long-lost uncle Bruno has been hiding in the walls of the Madrigal house, and though he's actually a kind and thoughtful man he's also [[GoMadFromTheIsolation gone a little crazy from being cooped up all those years with no one to talk to but rats]].]]

* ''Film/{{Bethany}}'': [[spoiler:The titular character, whom Claire thought was her imaginary friend, was actually her deformed twin sister, who had a mask stitched over her face by [[AbusiveParents their mother]] and made to life in the walls of the house.]]

* ''Film/TheBoy'': [[spoiler:This is the true twist of the film, as the real Brahms, who was thought to have died in childhood shortly after he killed a playmate, has been hidden inside the walls of the family home by his parents, while they pretended to have replaced him with a porcelain doll they treated like a living child to justify why they still bought supplies for more than just themselves, making everyone in town think they were just mad with grief.]]

* ''Film/{{Housebound}}'' combines this trope with {{hikikomori}} in the form of [[spoiler:Eugene, a ''deeply'' mentally ill man who has been living inside the walls of the heroine's house her entire life -- without her knowledge. He's ultimately a MisunderstoodLonerWithAHeartOfGold, though.]]

* ''Film/Parasite2019'': The Park family's BigFancyHouse is so big that they never notice [[spoiler:the underground bunker, where the housekeeper has stowed away her mentally unstable husband for years.]]

* In ''Film/{{Psycho}}'', this seems to be the case with Norman Bates' mother, who has murderous tendencies, with Norman doing everything he can to cover up his mother's crimes, including hiding her in the root cellar. [[spoiler:It's eventually revealed that Mrs. Bates has been DeadAllAlong and that Norman is the actual killer, having developed a split personality of his mother]].

* In ''Film/HouseOfTheLongShadows'', the wealthy Grisbane family made a policy of enforcing their own justice rather than involving the police, and when the patriarch's youngest son Roderick murdered a local girl, they decided to lock him up in the attic for forty years. The movie is set on the night his sentence is finally up, and he is to be freed. It turns out that [[spoiler:he had actually escaped long ago, but sneaked back into the attic every now and then to give the impression that he was still a prisoner.]] And ''then'' it turns out that [[spoiler:it was all an elaborate ruse to win a bet, and all the Grisbanes, Roderick included, were just actors.]]

* ''Literature/AfterManyASummer'' by ''Creator/AldousHuxley'''. The main character is an English nobleman in the 19th Century, who's sadistically abused a housemaid, who subsequently escapes and informed the authorities. He hides out in an underground dungeon in his ancestral house; years later a group discovers he has obtained prolonged life through a scientific formula, which has caused him to grow into an ape-like stage, in line with the "human beings are fetal apes" theory, popular in the 1930s.

* The J.B. Stamper ''Literature/TalesForTheMidnightHour'' short story "The Attic Door" is about a girl going to spend a few days with her widowed aunt, and meets [[spoiler:her aunt's deformed son, a result of her late scientist uncle's experiment, locked up in the attic. Naturally, the aunt decides the girl's seen too much, so they'll just tell the girl's mother she never arrived...]]

* Creator/JosephPayneBrennan's "[[Literature/TheShapesOfMidnight The Horror at Chilton Castle]]" has this as its twist ending. [[spoiler:Lady Susan Glanville, [[AristocratsAreEvil a witch]], having made a DealWithTheDevil to live forever, is chained in a hidden room by her descendants the Chilton-Paynes in the titular castle. As revenge, she placed a curse on the family where they must [[IAmAHumanitarian feed her the corpse]] of the current Earl of Chilton when he dies, and his son must witness the cannibalistic act as a RiteOfPassage if he is to become the next Earl.]]

** In "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family", some earlier members of the Jermyn family are said to have been kept out of public sight. However, as for the key figure of the great-great-great-grandmother of Arthur, she turns out not to have been insane so much as [[spoiler:not a human being at all.]]
** In [[http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/u.aspx "The Unnamable"]], what was kept in the attic was some super-vague... [[UnssenEvil thing]]; a HumanoidAbomination MixAndMatchCritter whose [[BrownNote appearance]] caused someone to GoMadFromTheRevelation. Its relationship to the people keeping it there was also vague. Then it had died and become [[EldritchAbomination even weirder]].

** Another subversion is in "The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier", written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself. A soldier who made friends with another younger soldier in the Boer War hires Holmes when he thinks the younger soldier's parents are keeping him imprisoned on their family estate. Holmes indicates that there could be three possible explanations for his staying hidden there, one of which is that he's being held there because he's insane, and another one of which, upon which he settles, is the correct one. It turns out [[spoiler:that the younger soldier contracted what he thinks is leprosy during his time in South Africa, and the family was keeping him at home in secret to treat him without his being locked up in a hospital. The younger soldier, who's actually only suffering from treatable icthyosis, voluntarily went along with this.]]
** Played straight with [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_the_Copper_Beeches "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"]]. Miss Hunter seeks Sherlock Holmes to tell him about the weird circunstances of her job as a governess. Among other things, Mr Rucastle, her employer, demanded her to cut her hair, wear a special dress, sit near the windows of the front room and hear him telling stories to make her laugh. Thanks to a hand mirror hiding in her handkerchief, Miss Hunter notices there's a man outside watching her in these moments. It happens that Mr Rucastle had locked up Alice, his daughter, to keep her from marrying because she was about to receive an annuity of her late mother's will when she came of age. Mr. Rucastle hired Miss Hunter to impersonate Alice so her fiancee would think shewas happy and had forgotten him (when in fact she got sick with a BrainFever caused by her father's mistreatment, [[TraumaticHaircut so her hair was cut,]] [[DeliberateValuesDissonance as it was usual in the Victorian Age]]). When Holmes and Watson came to save Alice, Mr. Rucastle tried to sickend his dog up them, but the starved mastiff attacked him instead. A servant told Holmes Alice's story, explaining that she had helped the girl's fiancee to free her.

* "Literature/TheYellowWallpaper": the main character is bedridden with some illness, and locked up in a room with ugly, confusing wallpaper. She goes crazy as a result. It's primarily a critique on the medicine of the time and the then-disturbingly common practice of keeping "ill" women stuck in a small room with nothing to stimulate them (known as the [[http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/techniques/restcure.aspx "Rest Cure"]], which was actually done to the author and [[GoMadFromTheIsolation she nearly went insane as a result]]). It's also a very creepy little psychological horror story.

* In ''Series/{{Gotham}}'', Police Commissioner Loeb sent his insane daughter to live on a remote farmhouse after she murdered her mother in order to hush up the matter and keep her from being sent to Arkham.

* Some versions of the JerseyDevil's BackStory would qualify, depending on how soon after its birth the creature escapes into the woods.

* In ''VideoGame/CallOfCthulhuDarkCornersOfTheEarth'', a woman in the [[spoiler:Waite's home]] is kept in the attic as she falls to TheCorruption. The husband is just trying to keep his family safe, though. If you know about Lovecraft's story the game is based on, it's clear that the "woman" [[spoiler:had never been a human being. The Third Oath of Dagon demands a follower to marry a pureblooded Deep One, and conceive a child with it. Since Deep Ones are immortal, the females instinctively try to kill their young, forcing the males to isolate them so their civilization can grow.]]

* In ''VideoGame/Fallout4'', Lorenzo Cabot has been imprisoned in the basement of the Parsons State Insane Asylum since 1898 due to obtaining an ArtifactOfDoom that granted him {{immortality}} and superhuman powers, but [[WithGreatPowerComesGreatInsanity at the cost of his sanity]]. [[AlternateCharacterInterpretation Or so his son insists.]]

* One of the ''VideoGame/SoulSeries'' most iconic characters is Voldo; an Italian man who, after spending decades in his master's underground vault of all his worldly possessions, has become an insane blind man who can't speak. His mode of dress is something uncomfortably between RummageSaleReject and {{Dominatrix}} while his fighting style is a massive amount of ConfusionFu caused by his ability to contort his body in every which way while DualWielding a pair of katars. However, he is not to be underestimated as his reason for becoming such a freak of nature is that he was ordered by the owner of the vault to slaughter anyone who would so enter, including the people who helped build it, something he has done with ruthless effciency.

* In Chapter 1 of ''{{VideoGame/Deltarune}}'', [[MonsterClown Jevil]] is locked away deep within the basement of Card Castle in an ominous area with an entirely different atmosphere to the rest of the place, and an elaborate and [[GuideDangIt trickily placed]] set of keys are spread across the land to keep a wall between him and the rest of the kingdom. Seam the shopkeeper is the only person who will speak of him (and only does so ''after'' the party find where he is) and can go on to explain that the harlequin was once their friend and the court jester, but after an encounter with a strange figure, he [[TheseAreThingsManWasNotMeantToKnow learned information that shattered his worldview]] and fell into a dark brand of nihilism, coming to treat their very world as a game [[AxCrazy and seeking to play it with violent stakes]] to cope until his old friend, now living in solitude within their store after [[TookALevelInCynicism being changed by the events and his words]], had to seal him away. By the time the party encounter him, Jevil still speaks in playfully cryptic and foreboding terms and claims to be 'THE ONLY FREE ONE', and he will [[BossBattle gladly play with the party]] if they gather the keys and enter his little world.

* The CreepyPasta ''I Caught My Grandfather Talking to an Air Vent'' involves this. The narrator's grandfather had a secret twin sister who was locked away in the attic, and they learned that they could talk through the vents. When [[ScareQuotes ""great""]] grandfather found out, he murdered her and buried her in the back yard.

* The Warners from ''WesternAnimation/{{Animaniacs}}'' are a parody example that got loose. The studio tries to lock them in the old watertower repeatedly, but they just keep escaping using [[ToonPhysics Cartoon Physics]] and travelling the world causing mischief and being {{Karmic Trickster}}s.

* In ''If Walls Could Talk'' Episode 17.13, the new owner of a 19th century house tried to determine the purpose of a second-story room with iron bars on the windows, a metal floor with welded metal loops, and a door that locked from the outside. An old woman at the library told him that "You have a ''[[UnusualEuphemism Disappointments Room]],''" where children with developmental disorders were kept by families that didn't know what else to do, and didn't want their secret known. The homeowner accepted this claim after learning that the former owner's daughter had died young, but never been mentioned in newspaper articles about the prominent family. The claim that the room had been designed to imprison her, however, or that such rooms were a common practice, [[http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/disappointments-room.33518/ is pure speculation with no supporting evidence]].