Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

In the middle of Philadelphia, surrounded by rowhouses and coffee shops and people walking their dogs, there is a fortress. Thirty-foot walls, battlements, arrow slits — a full medieval castle, built in 1829, in a country that had never had a castle and had just finished throwing off the kind of people who built them. Inside the walls there is no keep. There is a hub, and radiating out from it, like the spokes of a wheel, eleven long stone corridors lined with cells. Walk down one of them today and the roof is mostly gone; there are trees growing out of the cellblocks and the light comes down in shafts through the collapsed vaulting, and it is one of the most beautiful ruins in America, and every square inch of it was designed with love, by good people, to do something unspeakable. Eastern State Penitentiary is where solitary confinement was invented. Not discovered, not stumbled into — invented , deliberately, as a reform, by Quakers, out of tenderness. The Gentlest Idea Anyone Ev...

In San Jose, California, hemmed in now by a shopping center and a freeway, there is a sprawling Victorian mansion that makes no sense. It has one hundred and sixty rooms. It has forty bedrooms, two ballrooms, forty-seven fireplaces, and forty staircases. It also has a staircase that climbs seven steps and stops at the ceiling. It has doors on upper floors that open onto a two-story drop. It has a cabinet that opens into half an inch of space, and another that opens into thirty rooms. It has chimneys that rise four floors and stop short of the roof, and windows set into interior floors, and a room with no way in but a window from another room. Sarah Winchester built it, and she never stopped building it for thirty-eight years, and the story everyone tells about why is one of the great American ghost stories. It is also, almost certainly, wrong. And the truth — which took a librarian and a few stubborn historians a very long time to dig out — is stranger and sadder than the legend, an...

Every American child knows the rhyme, and almost none of them know they are reciting a libel. Lizzie Borden took an axe / and gave her mother forty whacks. / When she saw what she had done / she gave her father forty-one. It is not true in a single particular. It was not forty whacks; it was nineteen. It was not forty-one; it was ten or eleven. Abby Borden was not her mother but her stepmother. And Lizzie Borden was tried for those murders in 1893 and acquitted by a jury of twelve men in a little over an hour, and never charged again, and lived in Fall River for another thirty-four years as a free woman. The rhyme was made up by schoolchildren while the trial was still going on. It is one of the most successful pieces of character assassination in American history, and it worked so completely that the verdict of the court has never once, in a hundred and thirty years, been the verdict of the public. The house where it happened stands at 230 Second Street in Fall River, Massachuset...

In the small Gloucestershire town of Wotton-under-Edge, at the bottom of a lane called Potters Pond, there is a building that looks like it is being held up by habit. It leans. The timbers are black and warped and no two windows agree with each other. The roof sags along its ridge like an old horse. It was built in 1145, which makes it one of the oldest standing houses in England, and it has been a priest's house, an inn, a pub, and finally the private home of a man named John Humphries, who bought it in 1968 and lived in it, alone, for forty-nine years, until he died in 2017 at the age of eighty-five. He had, by his own frequently repeated account, an extremely difficult first night. He said that something took hold of him in the dark and dragged him bodily across the room. He said that after that he knew what he had bought. And for the next half-century he stayed, in a house he insisted was full of things he could not name, and he let people in to see for themselves — paranorm...

In the Loire valley, in the department of Maine-et-Loire, there is a castle that the French call the Giant. It has seven stories, which no other château in France has, and two hundred and four rooms, and it rises out of its park with a peculiar lopsided grandeur, because it is in fact two buildings that never quite became one: a fifteenth-century fortress with round medieval towers, and a seventeenth-century palace that was supposed to replace it and never got finished. The old castle is still standing there beside the new one, half-swallowed, like a snake that stopped mid-meal. The Château de Brissac has belonged to the same family since 1502. The Cossé-Brissac line has held it for more than five hundred years and thirteen generations, and the current duke lives there now. You can go and see it. You can, if you like, stay the night — the family lets rooms, and they will serve you the estate's own wine at dinner. And if you ask them about the Green Lady, they will not deny her. ...

Greyfriars Kirkyard sits in the middle of Edinburgh, a walled burial ground on a slope below the castle, ringed by tenements and the back of the old university. Tourists go there for two reasons. The first is a small dog: Greyfriars Bobby, the terrier who supposedly lay on his master's grave for fourteen years, whose statue at the gate has had its nose rubbed gold. The second is the graveyard itself, which is one of the loveliest and most photographed in Britain, full of skulls and hourglasses and winged souls carved in blackened stone, and which lent J.K. Rowling a name or two she found on the stones. And then, at the far end, past Bobby and past the tourists, there is a locked gate. Beyond it is a strip of ground called the Covenanters' Prison, and in it stands the mausoleum of Sir George Mackenzie. The gate is padlocked by the City of Edinburgh Council. You may not go in without a guide licensed to take you. And in the twenty-odd years since a homeless man broke into that...

There is a sign at the entrance to Bhangarh Fort in Rajasthan, and it is not the work of a tour operator trying to raise a shiver. It was put there by the Archaeological Survey of India, which is a department of the government, staffed by archaeologists, in the business of preserving monuments and issuing tickets. The sign, in English and Hindi, states that entering the boundaries of Bhangarh before sunrise and after sunset is strictly prohibited, and that legal action will be taken against anyone who does. Read that again, because it is the single most remarkable fact in the entire literature of haunted places. Every other site in this genre closes at night because of liability, or vandalism, or because the caretaker wants to go home. This is a national government, in an official notice, at a protected archaeological monument, forbidding human beings to be inside a ruined city after dark. The Survey has never officially said why, and when pressed, its people give the sensible answe...

In the middle of Ireland, in County Offaly, on a rise of ground that commands the old pass between the Slieve Bloom Mountains and the plain, there is a gray tower house that has been standing there in one form or another since the fifteenth century. It is not large as castles go. It is not beautiful. It sits at the end of a lane with fields around it, and there is no moat and no fairy-tale turret, and if you drove past it without knowing you would take it for what it mostly is: an old Irish keep, half-ruined, patched, lived in. It is also, by a fairly wide margin, the most frightening building in Ireland, and the reason has nothing to do with atmosphere. It has to do with what was found under the floor. The Pass and the Family Leap Castle was built by the O'Bannons, and then it came to the O'Carrolls, and it is the O'Carrolls who matter. The castle sits on a strategic pass, and whoever held it held the road. The O'Carroll clan held it through the bloodiest centurie...

In the winter of 1949 a Jesuit priest in St. Louis sat down every night and wrote in a diary. He was recording what happened in a hospital room where he and several other priests were performing the Roman Rite of exorcism on a boy of thirteen from Maryland. He wrote it plainly, without literary flourish, the way a man keeps a log. That diary exists. It sits in an archive, and for most of the last seventy-five years the Society of Jesus has declined to let anyone see it. A student at Georgetown named William Peter Blatty heard about the case in 1949 from a newspaper story and never forgot it. Twenty-two years later he published a novel about it. The film made from that novel sent people out of theaters into the street to be sick on the pavement, and it remains, by common consent, the most frightening thing ever committed to celluloid. But underneath the novel and the film and the industry there is a real boy, who was thirteen, and who is now an old man, and who has never spoken publi...

Drive north out of Baton Rouge along the river road, past the cane and the live oaks with their beards of Spanish moss, and you come eventually to St. Francisville, and just outside it there is a long low white house with a wrought-iron veranda running the whole length of its front. It is genuinely lovely. It was built in 1796. It is also, according to roughly every list ever compiled on the subject, one of the most haunted houses in America, and unlike most contenders for that title, it will rent you a room. You can sleep there tonight. You can have breakfast in the morning in the room where a man is supposed to have been shot. The house makes its living this way, and has for decades, and that fact is not incidental to the story — it is the story. Because the Myrtles is the perfect specimen of a particular kind of American haunting: a place where something is genuinely wrong, and where a century of commerce has buried whatever it was under so much invented gothic that the truth can ...

It stands on the corner of Royal and Governor Nicholls in the French Quarter of New Orleans, three stories of gray stucco with iron balconies and tall shuttered windows, and it is beautiful in the way that only that city's old houses are beautiful. Tour groups stop in front of it every night of the year. The guides drop their voices. Nobody goes in — it is a private residence, and it has been bought and sold and stood empty and been bought again, and it does not keep its owners long. What happened at 1140 Royal Street in April of 1834 is not a legend, not a folk tale, not a story that grew in the telling from nothing. It was reported in the newspapers of the city within forty-eight hours, while the ashes were still warm and while a mob was pulling the house apart with its hands. That is the thing that separates this from every other haunted house in America. The horror is not alleged. It is documented, in print, by people who walked into that attic and then went outside and were ...