Selected Haunted-House Readings, and the Shelf That Would Catch Us Out

The load-bearing eight

Read these eight and the other forty-three stop being surprising: almost everything on the register is downstream of one of them or a reaction to it. The oldest is carried in from the ghost register, because a list that began in 1764 would misstate where this file starts.

1. The Cock Lane investigation A committee including Samuel Johnson · 1762

   The founding audit, on my reading of it. A haunted house in London, a committee, and a finding of fraud. Everything the register's second tradition does afterwards is that sequence repeated with better equipment. Plated by the ghost register and carried here for the premises.

2. The Castle of Otranto Horace Walpole · 1764

   The first Gothic novel, and the first property dispute in the file: a usurped title, and a building that objects. Concede that a house can be an interested party to the transaction it is the subject of, and the whole register follows.

3. The Mysteries of Udolpho Ann Radcliffe · 1794

   The audit tradition's founding fiction. Every haunting is explained on inspection, at length, and readers have been complaining about it ever since, which I regard as a complaint about being told the truth.

4. Northanger Abbey Jane Austen · 1817

   An occupant who formed a theory about the premises and then went and inspected them. She opened the cabinet and found the washing bills. The paper has been trying to write the resulting article ever since it was founded.

5. The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain Edward Bulwer-Lytton · 1859

   The register's first paid inspection. The narrator rents the house specifically in order to investigate it, which makes the rent the cost of the experiment and this the bridge between the committee of 1762 and every commissioned survey since.

6. The Haunting of Hill House Shirley Jackson · 1959

   The dossier. Four tenants under a research contract, a house in which every angle is slightly wrong, and the first occasion on this page where a competent inspection goes into a building and comes back with nothing usable.

7. The Shining Stephen King · 1977

   The caretaking contract, and the register's clearest statement that the premises want maintenance labour rather than occupants. The house needs staff, and it says so in the terms of the engagement.

8. House of Leaves Mark Z. Danielewski · 2000

   The survey filing. The haunting is a measurement: the inside is a quarter of an inch longer than the outside.

The shelf

The books about particular real houses and real households are withheld from this shelf, as they are from the register. What is left is the history, the formula and the audit tradition's own journal: the works that would let a reader check this page, and correct it where it needs correcting.

• The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts Owen Davies · 2007

  The shelf's spine for the documents. Scholarly, and sourced throughout.

• A Natural History of Ghosts Roger Clarke · 2012

  A popular history of haunted premises, and a good way into the Cock Lane inquiry this register opens on.

  Popular. Excellent for finding the cases; check a claim elsewhere before relying on it.

• Cock Lane and Common-Sense Andrew Lang · 1894

  Victorian, primary-adjacent, and the reason the 1762 inquiry stayed in the public record long enough for this register to open on it.

  Lang was sympathetic to psychical research. Read him for what was believed and argued, not for a verdict.

• American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction Dale Bailey · 1999

  The formula this register has spent two and a half centuries grading, set out as a formula. The book to read if the discount finding seems too tidy to be true.

• Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life Ruth Franklin · 2016

  Biography, and the source for where the register's central document came from. Good on Jackson's own reading about houses, and better on what she thought she was writing.

• Ghost Hunters Deborah Blum · 2006

  How the Society for Psychical Research came to exist, and why serious people spent their careers taking notes in other people's houses.

  Popular narrative history. Use it for the institution and its people, and the Proceedings below for what was actually filed.

• Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research Society for Psychical Research · 1882 onward

  The audit tradition's own journal, and the only place on this shelf where a reader can watch inspections of real premises being written up in the form I keep demanding: method first, finding second, and the failures printed.