Ghosts

There is a spot, about a twenty-minute drive from the New England town in which I grew up, where the devil is said to appear to hikers. It isn't known why he does this or if he's ever decent enough to bring a six-pack with him. But the legend is such that a high school friend of mine once refused to go there, presumably out of fear that she'd come back with a hex. That's New England for you, where growing up you assume that every town has its eerie old house and every county its howling boarded-up insane asylum. That diabolical trail is just one of countless spooky yarns native to the region, catalogued in collections of ghost stories you can buy in bookstores and airports.

There are fashions in the paranormal as in everything else. Since the famous Enfield hauntings of the late 1970s, poltergeists seem to have gone quiet, or at least unreported; but before then they were everywhere. In 1938, poltergeists kicked off in Thornton Heath, Surrey, and a Jewish Hungarian journalist and psychic investigator, Nandor Fodor, was alerted to strange happenings in the home of a 34-year-old housewife there. The list of happenings is familiar in all poltergeist stories. Furniture moves, light fittings shatter, crockery, money, knick-knacks, even small pictures are thrown through the air, sometimes seemingly aimed directly at individuals.