The Séance Room as Laboratory You are sitting in a room that smells of beeswax candles and something older, something the wallpaper has absorbed over

The Dead Who Will Not Leave You are standing in a doorway you have crossed a thousand times when something stops you — not a

The Night You Heard Something That Was Not There You are alone in the house when you hear it — not a creak from the

The Man Behind the Codification You are sitting across a table that has just moved without being touched, and the man watching it from the

The Boy Who Wrote the Forbidden You are nineteen years old, stationed in a foreign city on your government’s business, surrounded by the diplomatic machinery

The Architecture of Fear Before Radcliffe You are standing in a corridor you cannot see the end of, and the stone walls are pressing inward,

A Man Playing at Ghosts You sit down at your desk in the winter of 1764 and you write a lie. Not a small social

The Mask and the Man You are handed a photograph of William Butler Yeats taken sometime in the 1930s, near the end of his life,

The Séance as Epistemology You are standing in a room that smells of beeswax and cedar smoke, somewhere in the labyrinthine residential streets behind Euston,

The Engineer Who Stopped Sleeping You are fifty-six years old, you have spent three decades building machines that drain mines and calculating the weight of