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Harald Sohlberg, "Evening Glow," 1893. Nasjonalmuseet.
Saijō Yaso, "The Crow's Letter." Via stopping off place.
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Solid gold pumpkin charm, via Erie Basin.
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The inscription also includes this quotation from Samuel Butler's "Hudibras" about Dee's assistant, Kelly:
Kelly did all his feats upon© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
The Devil's Looking Glass, a stone;
Where playing with him at Bo-peep,
He solv'd all problems ne'er so deep.
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Newspaper clipping via the Schuylkill County Historical Society.
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Otto Hillig photo of a burning haunted house with ghost, ca. 1910, via John Conway.
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Photograph of a polypore fungus resembling a hag in profile, from Eldritch Oculum Catalog 10.
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Gold beaded punch-paper embroidery on silk ribbon, via criticalEYEfinds.
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It seemed to be growing, enlarging and expanding, the whole house, and I felt its emptiness oppressive, as though conspiring against me, and I realized how much of time was spent looking for someone, someone in the house, listening, waiting seeking around corners, up a stairway, along a corridor, behind a door. But no. There was nothing. I was alone. Truly; though there were others in the house, I was alone. And lonely, let me admit. I think it was then that I began to miss him, felt the lack of him, began to seek him out, to look for him, to look for him, all through the house, the barn, the fields, down by the river. But he was gone ... He was gone; I could not conjure him up, as he had me. He was gone, and, sadly, I missed him. I was alone then, in the house, and I have been alone ever since.
Thomas Tryon, The Other.
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In 1991 Jeffrey Stambovsky sued the previous owners of his house in the village of Nyack, New York for failing to disclose that it was haunted. Stambovsky, an out-of-towner, argued that locals had known for years about the ghosts living in 1 La Veta Place: a couple dressed in 18th-century clothing, a naval lieutenant from the Revolutionary era and a poltergeist who would rattle beds in the early morning. The house’s owners were George and Helen Akley. Helen had written accounts of the hauntings for Reader’s Digest and for a local newspaper (she reported that the family lived happily with the ghosts: the poltergeist didn’t shake the beds at the weekend, so they could sleep in). Stambovsky argued that since the Akleys and their estate agent hadn’t told him about the hauntings before the sale (they claimed otherwise), he should be allowed to break the contract without penalty. The New York Supreme Court agreed. ‘As a matter of law,’ its judgment concluded, ‘the house is haunted.’
Jon Day, "Gloomth." London Review of Books, Vol. 47 No. 20, 11/6/2025.
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Over the years the Wisconsin REALTORS® Association Legal Hotline has received a handful of calls from members asking if a property reputed to be haunted required disclosure. Wisconsin’s real estate license law requires brokers to disclose a haunting only if it has an effect on the physical condition of the property. In one case, a broker was told that the walls of the listed house “bled.” Given the physical effect on the house, that particular haunting was required to be disclosed. Most haunting questions deal with various apparitions and chain rattling—brokers are not required to disclose this form of haunting.
From an article on the website of the Wisconsin
Realtors Association, excerpted in Harper's, October 2008.
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When Peggy Kellner bought this bungalow in 1964, she had no idea that the house was already occupied by the spirit of a former owner, Victoria Magee. The ghost communicates her decorating tastes by smashing statues and turning pictures she does not like to the wall. She bangs cabinet doors and throws objects across the room if a man stays overnight or if guests play Monopoly. Her apparition once appeared to a visiting accountant who was idly strumming an antique harp while waiting to see Peggy. The ghost said to her, "Don't do that, just go sit down!" The accountant left so quickly that she left her purse behind.
From The National Directory of Haunted Places by Dennis William Hauck, excerpted in Harper's, October 1994.
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In Japan, homes where murders or suicides have occurred are classified as "jiko bukken" or "misfortunate properties" that may provoke psychological distress for new owners or tenants. So are homes with "socially isolated" deaths—the most common type of misfortunate property where bodies are not found for some time and sufficient decay has set in to warrant special cleaning services or even the replacement of floors and wallpaper. Modern thinking around misfortunate properties has been shaped by Japan's ancient Shinto religion which holds that when a person dies with regrets, their spirit lingers on earth, often at the site of their death, bearing grudges or overwhelmed by grief. "Finding renters used to be virtually impossible," said Kodama, who founded his company, Kachimode, three years ago to offer what he calls ghost investigation services for prospective buyers and tenants. "But with rising real estate prices, people have begun considering misfortunate properties as an option."
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Stone tape theory, "a pseudoscientific claim that ghosts and hauntings occur when traumatic events are imprinted on certain stones or other materials and are subsequently replayed, similar to a magnetic tape recording."
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"The stars," she whispers, "blindly run;
A web is wov'n across the sky;
From out waste places comes a cry,
And murmurs from the dying sun:
"And all the phantom, Nature, stands—
With all the music in her tone,
A hollow echo of my own,—
A hollow form with empty hands."
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What we can see and hear and touch in this world is very limited. And so perhaps it's true we don't know much about the world at all. We like to say there's nothing new under the sun, but we don't have the slightest inkling of how many things there are, indeed, under the sun.
Bora Chung, Midnight Timetable.
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