This is about some people moving into their new "Home by the Sea" where they encounter some ghosts. The ghosts start to tell their story and in doing so they condemn the new tenants to an existence as prisoners in their own home.
A group composition, Phil Collins came up with the title, which to Tony Banks conjured up an image of a haunted house on top of a cliff. "I had the idea of this burglar going into this house and suddenly finding out it was haunted, which I thought was quite funny," he said in the Way We Walk DVD. "I took that idea further and made it one of those songs about looking back over people's lives who are trapped in the past, but there's nothing they can do about it."
This song was particularly popular in Eastern Asia, because of its use of the pentatonic scale, which contains five notes per octave and is the basic scale of Chinese music.
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