Under the vast, velvet canopy of the West Texas sky, where the high desert plateau stretches toward jagged mountain silhouettes, an ancient and elusive wonder unfolds in the silence of the night. Here, across the arid expanse of Mitchell Flat near the quiet town of Marfa, phantom spheres of light awaken without cause, floating through the desert air like displaced stars. They flicker, hover, divide, race across the horizon, and dissolve into nothingness, leaving onlookers spellbound and science grasping for explanations.

In 1963 a young couple named Reg and Olive Ryan drove out from Junee, in the wheat country of New South Wales, to look at a derelict mansion on a hill. It had stood empty for the better part of fifteen years. The windows were broken, the roof was going, and the power had been disconnected so long ago that the wiring was a museum piece.

Most haunted houses are accidents. Someone builds a home, and then something terrible happens inside it, and the terrible thing stays. The sequence matters: first the house, then the horror. The family is a victim of its own address.

Of all the things human hands make, only one is baptized.

There is a particular kind of building that comes into the world already carrying a debt. Not a mortgage — something older than money. A debt of the sort that gets paid in decades rather than dollars, and never quite gets paid in full.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the northern part of Tennessee, in Robertson County, there is a stretch of farmland and a limestone cave beside a river, and there is a story attached to that ground that Americans have been telling each other for two hundred years. It is not a story that behaves like the others. Most hauntings are private griefs — a family, a house, a shape on a landing. This one was a public event. Neighbors came for miles to sit in the parlor and listen. Preachers came to argue with it. It was written about while it was still happening. And when John Bell died in December of 1820, the community around Adams, Tennessee, did not say he had died of a stroke or a palsy or the will of God. They said the witch had killed him, and to this day it is repeated that his is the only death in American history officially attributed to a spirit.