Terra Damnata

There is a bridge in Scotland where dogs climb the wall and fall to the rocks below. Around three hundred of them, over seventy years, mostly at the same few feet of the same parapet, mostly on clear days. A good explanation exists. The people who live along that road have heard it, and are not satisfied by it.

This book looks at eighteen places of that kind, and it looks at each of them twice.

The first pass sets down what happened: the dates, the names, the counts of the dead, the court records, the autopsy findings, the testimony of people who were there. The second asks what can be explained, and explains it, even where the explanation dissolves the mystery entirely.

A great deal of it dissolves. The most haunted forest on earth has never recorded a single death. The famous government sign at Bhangarh Fort says nothing about ghosts; it is largely about firewood. The Amityville haunting was invented by a defence lawyer over several bottles of wine, in an attempt to win his convicted client a second trial, and he admitted as much to a magazine in 1979.

Some of it does not dissolve. Those chapters end without an answer, because there is none to give.

Alongside the cases most readers will know, from Dyatlov Pass and Chernobyl to Poveglia, Point Pleasant and Skinwalker Ranch, are several that almost no English-language book has touched: a house at a Bosnian crossroads that has stood boarded shut for a hundred years, a watermill in western Serbia, and a lake in the Canadian north where the wrong disappearance became famous.

There are no séances here and no cold spots. There are documents, witnesses, science where science has something to say, and, where the accounting runs out, an honest silence.