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.

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.

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.

There is a photograph, taken in a council house in north London in 1977, that has been argued over for half a century. It shows a girl of eleven in mid-air above her bed, arms flung out, hair lifted, caught by a motor-drive camera in the instant before she came down. Look at it long enough and you see a girl levitating. Look at it a little longer and you see a girl jumping. The whole of the Enfield case lives in that gap, and no amount of staring has ever closed it.

There are houses that are merely old, and there are houses that seem to have been built as a wound in the world. Borley Rectory, a graceless red-brick pile squatting in a quiet corner of Essex, was the second kind. It stood for only seventy-four years, from 1863 until the flames took it in 1939, and in that short span it gathered around itself such a weight of terror that a whole century later people still make the pilgrimage down that narrow lane at night, hoping to see something move among the trees. The rectory itself is gone. Not one brick stands upon another. And still they come, because some places do not need a building to remain haunted.

Vista aérea de Rosenheim, en Baviera (Alemania). Dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons. Vicente Fuentes, de Ufopolis, expone uno de los casos de poltergeist más documentados de la historia: el que sacudió, en 1967, un bufete de abogados de Rosenheim, en Alemania. Lámparas que se balancean, tubos fluorescentes que explotan, teléfonos que suenan todos a la vez, cuadros que giran sobre su gancho. Y, en el centro de todo, una joven de dieciocho años.